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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on why that is misleading? You say it yourself, that entire industry runs 100 % on fossil fuels.

Sure, I found this misleading because whether the entire industry is running on fossil fuels or on green electricity is orthogonal to the bailouts. The bailouts where concerned (at least according to the proponents) about job loss in the aviation industry. So these bailouts are neutral in terms of fossil fuels. They do not encourage or discourage the use of fossil fuels.

Getting into the article, I expected something more direct, like for example if they passed car gas subsidies.

Then subsidies to prop up markets like agricultural don't affect supply and demand?

Let me first check if I understand your argument correctly: You are saying that my argument is wrong because subsidies to something like agriculture while also not directly encouraging fossil fuel usage, can potentially increase the CO2 output overall. Because subsidies are changing (lowering) prices, so they influence the behaviour of customers.

I partially agree. If your subsidies are helping parts of the agriculture that are more polluting than the industry average, then you are increasing the environmental pollution.

But this does not apply to my argument for 2 reasons: 1. I am talking about bailouts. They rather don't influence the long-term prices of flights. They are one time thing, intended to help some companies not die. 2. Even the agriculture subsidies you mention I would not call "fossil fuel commitments", which is misleading. Better name for them is something like "subsidies that encourage pollution" or "subsidies that encourage increase CO2 emissions".

First of all I appreciate the time you've taken to answer my question but I still have to disagree with you that bailing out the air transportation industry doesn't have long lasting effect on our Co to emissions and it is not compatible with a sustainable development. The bailouts are used in the same way as in the agricultural sector. They're used to protect domestic capabilities the environment be damned.

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