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Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

This is the reality of air travel, 90% of the flights (thus the CO2 emissions) are made by a handful of frequent travellers. Moreover those are very unlikely to be willing to cut on air travel for CO2 emission reasons.

So you shouldn't feel bad for your occasional air travel.

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> So you shouldn't feel bad for your occasional air travel.

I don't understand the implied ethical rule behind this mentality. CO2 emissions are always a problem and to be avoided. What am I missing?

> CO2 emissions are always a problem and to be avoided.

Not possible without everyone simply deciding to not have kids.

We were talking about flights?

I thought you said CO2 was always a problem? Not just for flights.

CO2 emissions are going to happen, we need to reduce them in a meaningful way. We do that by looking at the breakdown of emissions.

The biggest sector is enery use in the industry (24%), next is buildings, mostly heating (17.5), then transport (16%). Most of the transport emissions is road transport (cars and trucks) and air travel is only 2% of the overall emissions.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

And again, air travel is mostly frequent travelers who have no intention to change their habit. That means that as an occasional air traveler, if it makes you happy to visit a faraway country every few years, you should definitely not feel bad about it. Because even if all occasional travelers were to stop flying, it wouldn't make any significant difference.

The biggest change we can make to reduce air emissions is replacing short flights with high-speed rail. There are 400 flights a day between DC and NYC. It should be zero.

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