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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

While I agree it's better to travel by train, the way to implement this should have been with carbon taxing.

Most people wouldn't fly if the ticket price was like 2x compared to the train.

The negative externalities of a plane ticket absolutely do not double the cost of a plane ticket. They are not significant - certainly smaller than the taxes already levied on flights.

What this tells you is that flights, as they exist, are a net positive even including negative carbon externalities. Neither banning these flights nor making them absurdly expensive is a net benefit for society.

When we consider the marginal negative environmental externality compared to rail travel, it is even smaller or perhaps negative.

> The negative externalities of a plane ticket absolutely do not double the cost of a plane ticket

I'm sure you will reconsider in a couple of years once the effects of emissions are more obvious.

I doubt very much that the marginal external costs of plane travel is lower than train travel! It's possible that the net value is still worth it (depending on how much people value convenience), but objectively the marginal cost of one more person riding a plane is [externality of flight]/[capacity of flight]. One train trip over the same route has 10x the denominator, and considering that the power comes from the grid not much worse of a numerator, if indeed it is not lower. Does a train really consume that much power?

Oops is out of their mind. A train running on 70% nuclear energy from the grid with 90+% efficiency cannot possibly have similar externalities to a plan running on highly transformed fossil fuels. The only way this is even close is if you count the track the train runs on to be dedicated exclusively to that train.

Holy crap 70% nuclear. Lets go France! There's no shot trains are even close to being as bad as planes.

There are negative externalities beyond the cost of electricity. Installing and maintaining rail, land disruption, wasted human life-hours, etc. all impose internalized and externalized costs.

Installing and maintaining rail is already priced in, just like the actual market cost of the fuel is for planes. Once all costs are internalized (including land disruption, though the tracks are less negotiable for freight shipping so passenger trips get a free lunch there) wasted life-hours are presumably how people would make the call. But its pretty clear that the marginal, per-person external cost of flying is higher than the marginal per-person external cost of trains.

It's not even close. Each air passenger on a fuel-powered plane generates the equivalent environmental externalities of an entire electric train...or more.

Market pricing is not an indicator of the cost of externalities; it is an indicator of the cost of internalities. They're called "externalities" precisely because they're not represented in the price curve.

The electrical consumption of the train is most likely not its largest externality-source. The largest cost might be wasted human life-hours, which used to be more or less correctly internalized but now (due to these flight bans) is not.

Your second paragraph is already known to me and consistent with my comment - not sure what you're aiming to communicate.

Source for magnitude of negative externalities?

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