One Man’s Lonely, Lonely Fight to Ban Private Jets
vice.com
vice.com
I think an average US person's carbon emissions for a year are about 15 tons.
> Huber contrasts the relative anonymity of the “ban private jets” movement—such as it is—with the widespread press coverage of flight shaming, which seeks to make people feel bad for flying and the resultant emissions, as “blind on the social side of the issues.” The common approaches to curtailing commercial flying, such as taxing flights more, will hurt the people who rarely more than the wealthy who can already afford to fly often. It’s an issue sensitive to him personally, since his mother is Colombian but lives in Europe. The only way she can realistically see her family is to fly. He doesn’t understand why people like her are being nudged to fly less or not at all while the most polluting people in the world aren’t even being urged to travel commercially.
I don't think banning private jets solves the problem - there's much bigger fish to fry, orders of magnitude (container shipping). This is like trying to move an ocean with a bucket.
Anyways, I think the idea of private jets being replaced by luxury airliners is good, I just don't think this sort of rule ("ban private jets") is going to work well and result in a better world.
For example, it's notoriously hard to separate business and personal jet usage - the common scheme is having an Air Operator company manage your jet (provide maintenance, airport operations, crew, supply, etc) and provide it to other clients of the Air Operator when you're not using it. You're the nominal owner of the jet, but it's leased to the Air Operator and you have a contract that specifies how much usage of your jet is free. Thus every flight is a business flight - because the Air Operator is using it for the business of transporting people, sometimes the owner.
Regulators have given up and just treat business and personal usage the same (from owner perspective, there are differences in pilot licensing and crew/ops requirements).
Just because someone wants to ban the private ownership of machine guns doesn't mean they want to ban all gun ownership. Someone wanting to have a minimum drinking age might not want to ban all drinking.
> only it's much more inefficient and noisy (it also flies lower and slower).
https://www.evojets.com/aircraft-sales/turboprops/piaggio-av... says the Piaggio Avanti burns 130 gal/hr. The linked-to Vice article says "A common model of a private plane burns 226 gallons of jet fuel an hour on average."
Doesn't "lower and slower" (and with less range) mean that more people are likely to fly first class rather than biz jet?
> This is like trying to move an ocean with a bucket.
Addressed in the article. "Huber says the impracticality of it happening misses the point. To him, arguing for the banishment of private jets is a powerful symbolic issue, something the political Right has already figured out."
> Regulators have given up
Personally, global wealth tax and extremely high tax on high yearly earnings would solve much of those issues. It would decrease the opportunity and pay for regulatory oversight.
But your question was "What's your limit?", and I think that's well answered in the linked-to article.
I see one mistake in my calculation. That Piaggio Avanti has a cruising speed of 360kts vs. 0.85 mach = 547kts for the cruising speed of Gates' G650ER.
(360 nautical miles / hour) / (130 gal / hour) = 2.76 gal / nautical mile
(547 nautical miles / hour) / (226 gal / hour) = 2.4 gal / nautical mile
He claims he's offsetting his carbon emissions "by buying clean aviation fuel and funding carbon capture and funding low cost housing projects to use electricity instead of natural gas and so I have been able to eliminate it and it was amazing to me how expensive that was, that cost to be green".
I assume by "clean aviation fuel" he means sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which is biofuel made from recycled cooking oil and other waste materials.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/bill-gates-defends-using-private-je...
World: "But you do."
Gates: "I'm responsible about it."
That'll go over well.
Yes, it appears "clean aviation fuel" refers only to the feed stock, not the energy used to produce the fuel, nor "its total climate impact, including non-CO2 gasses and the fact they are emitted directly into the atmosphere." (quoting Vice).