Air travel is good and we should want more of it

However, counterpoints:

1. The carbon footprint of flying is expected to triple by 2050. It will still not be the worst sector, but it is getting worse quickly, and it makes sense to avoid that.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043803529/google-flights-car...

2. Flying less is one of the easiest ways for an individual to reduce their carbon footprint. Just taking one less flight a year makes a dent in your total footprint. There aren't many other actions an individual can take that, if all individuals took them, would make an impact.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio...

We should fly less.

A lot of activists see the (often) unnecessary flights taken by business travelers or celebrities, in addition to the entire private jet market. They, (probably) rightfully so, attack this behavior. People who travel maybe once a year or less, say for vacation or to visit their families, feel now attacked as well and fight back. This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.

As is regularly the case this develops into a flame-war and in the end more and more extreme viewpoints are taken, and the nuance gets lost.

In any case, in a world with free and non-greenhouse-emitting energy it won't be particularly hard to decarbonize air travel. You can manufacture hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air and energy if you have enough of it.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

This is why sustainability needs to be better understood and we need to come to an agreement as a species that movement into unsustainable territory does not count as progress. The electric car does close to nothing for sustainability and should be considered stagnation, not progress.

I personally believe we need to make rather large sacrifices before we can begin real progress. This requires top-down enforcement where everyone shares their part of the sacrifice. People rarely volunteer for personal sacrifice and they are even less likely to when they observe their neighbours making no sacrifice at all.

1. Air travel constitutes only 1.9% of greenhouse gas emissions

2. Air travel won't cease to exist so we might as well not try (or do more of it?)

3. Author had serious reasons for air travel and "smug bloke" rubbed him the wrong way.

I don't agree with the substance of point 2. It can logically be applied to all sorts of things that we can all agree that we should try to limit.

On point 1, some commenters have noted that this figure may not be entirely accurate. But more importantly, a relatively small aggregate notwithstanding, skipping a flight is possibly the easiest way for an end-consumer to directly shrink their carbon contributions (source: Joro Carbon offset app [1])

[1] https://www.joro.app/

Sweet dirtiness tax on literally everything is the only way. A flight to the other side of the world vs 100kg of beef vs driving a car daily... Your choice.

As the author points out, high speed rail is superior for regional travel in many ways and we should want more of THAT.

Fossil Fuel resources are a limited resource, and we've pretty much burned up all the easy pickings. So, aside from the obvious carbon problems, we've effectively squandered most of this resource on transport and burning for heating.

These resources should be conserved for exactly these uses — like flying — where a very high mass-energy density is essential.

We need to stop burning it for anything stationary, and most things that roll or float. Direct electric at lower power densities are at this point in history fairly straightforward to swap in (acknowledging that this still is a lot of work), requiring few true breakthroughs.

When fossil fuel use is just down to the few true high mass-energy density applications, CO2 generation won't be a problem.

So, overall this "what's your carbon footprint" thing is just successful deflection by the oil companies to shift blame from the producing side (who CAN do something about it) to the consuming side, who can only choose among available alternatives.

Is this ironic? Facebook and Twitter, etc. have amply shown that "connecting people together" isn't very good.

But we can all be a little reasonable and recognize no one should shame anyone for seeing their distant family every blue moon.

Air travel isn't 'good', it is good in the same sense that driving electric is good, it isn't as bad as some of the alternatives but it is better to do without by moving to something even better. In my case: to simply stop traveling.

The Nazis made heavy use of synthetic fuels. They weren't zero carbon but it's basically the same process.

IMO, it's closer to viable than zero-carbon concrete. We need to do both.

Every time I want to buy a ticket, I get carbon emission metrics in all the sites I visit. Sometimes, the ticket itself comes with these. I have never taken a train, or a bus, or a ship, where these are showed so prominently. Cars are rarely advertised as "less contaminant", and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care that much about emissions, as they do about efficiency or simply the "cool factor".

I also feel that most of the criticism is directed to those traveling for pleasure, but decreasing air travel and/or increasing rates would penalise those who live far away from their families, and they are many.