You wouldn't produce any carbon, because you'd likely never make the trip!
I guess thank god for 9/11 boosting security theater. Don't like all the other patriot act garbage, but the degree to which air travel is so awful really helps here.
It doesn’t seem that all of the unpleasant security theater is enough to significantly deter people from flying.
That's already a thorny subject given that most governments also subsidize food sources that are vastly inefficient and resource-intensive even in cases where reasonable alternatives exist. Meat/dairy producers are still the primary recipients of subsidies in the US and many other countries, at least in Europe.
This number distinguishes between fruit/vegetables and other products, although the article apparently suggests that the use of corn/soy in meat production makes this figure more relevant:
> According to recent studies, the U.S. government spends up to $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, with less than one percent of that sum allocated to aiding the production of fruits and vegetables.
https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
Is your preferred solution to let people die in droves to a mass extinction ?
Climate change is not the only, nor the major cause in the current extinction, but it contributes. In a way, this is unfortunate: it would be easier to have only one problem.
The relevant body for scientific information is not the IPCC, but the IPBES [2]. Like the IPCC, it releases reports summarizing the situation and its causes [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Science-Poli...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Bi...
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@21.1715988,-86.8077681,1041m/da...
People judge these things in terms of how much co2 is emitted by industry, companies, individuals etc. The particular mechanism of emissions is not that relevant. Air ambulance flights are treated differently to private jets carrying bankers.
Wow. I read that one plane trip can increase your carbon footprint by a greater magnitude than all your typical actions to reduce it.
Does anyone know where to find some data?
EDIT: Here's some data https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566
https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-automobile...
Also, planes have other problems:
* cars can be powered by carbon-free energy. There's not much current prospect for planes.
* planes also do great harm from non-CO2 emissions: "The climate effect of non-CO2 emissions from aviation is much greater than the equivalent from other modes of transport, as these non-CO2 greenhouse gases formed at higher altitudes persist for longer than at the surface and also have a stronger warming potential"
I never said cars. Cars are terrible. I would not complained if passenger-only cars were banned everywhere.
> Similar for your suggestion that we should take ships over the ocean, because cruise ships are much more polluting per passenger mile than modern airliners.
There are alternatives like wind power + giant batteries. The fact that weight doesn't matter for ships so much (container ships are more efficient than rail, scaling up is equivalent to shrinking the viscosity of water) opens a lot of doors.
Track and right-of-way is a scarce resource with large amounts of embedded energy. The sky, not so much.
The problem most people ignore is that train marginal-increases max-out at some number of trains per day, before you need an additional set of tracks.
And that happens at a much lower number than most people assume, especially if you're planning on sharing that track with other routes. And even worse if you have to use or cross a freight track.
So not only does efficiency have a min bounds, but also a local-max bounds, where you need a large enough marginal increase to justify the additional rails.
Whereas the airline equivalent is whether to schedule an additional flight. Which is easier to commit to than whether a new track is justified.
Except many world's biggest airports, like Heathrow, are operating at peak capacity and building another runway at heathrow is expensive, controvertial, involves relocating people's homes and is still a political football
So it's more appropriate to compare it to part of the station cost, along the lines of another boarding area & track, increasing arrivals and departures.
Multi-track railways are common near major cities. They are not that expensive, because adding another set of tracks increases the width of the corridor only marginally.
The airline equivalent of a new set of tracks is building a new runway. Because that's often impossible, landing slots at busy airports have become very valuable. For example, airlines have paid tens of millions for a daily landing slot at Heathrow.
About a quarter of all railway passengers in Czechia take the suburban trains around Prague.
We sorely need extra sets of tracks from all directions, because the current tracks are overloaded. Especially the faster trains from other regions do not mix well with the regional trains that stop every 2 km or so.
But it is almost impossible to build those extra sets of tracks in a densely populated major city like Prague. Lots of NIMBYs, the needed land would be very expensive, many buildings would have to be torn down, plus the centre is a protected zone (historical buildings) and the protecting authorities fight tooth and nail against anything that changes the look and feel of the inner city.
As a result, we are stuck with old infrastructure even if new one is sorely needed. There might be a way, namely, to build all the new tracks underground - but that would be very, very expensive.
edit: By that I mean something like illustrated here https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%ADnia_9_del_metro_de_Barc...
Make them 15 to 16 meters in diameter to be usable by any train, or use 2 of them side by side. Problem mostly solved.
Our subway system was rather expensive to build and maintain, doing this with trains would probably be too expensive even for a fairly rich city like Prague.
There are some rudimentary plans for railway tunnels under the very center of the city, but the expected cost is eye-watering.
We're in a phase of low interest rates, resulting in easy money politics. Burn some billions before others do ;->
FTR: Years go by between everytime I travel by plane so I don't feel I have anything to defend, I just think it is good to keep the big picture in mind.
But climate-shaming specifically air travel while at the same time driving a non-electric car or using air conditioning without having solar panels is very hypocritical because both of those and many other things are a far bigger part of the total emissions.
> Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another
Turboprops also fly lower, meaning they’re much more affected by en route weather that turbojets can often climb over. (Low and mid twenties [thousands of feet] is where much of the uncomfortable weather is. Storms that rise into the mid-30s are diverted around by most airplanes.)
Turboprops have their place, but so do jets in air carrier ops.