It's not clear - does this apply to private planes as well? To cargo flights?
They are better ways for the ultra rich to blow their cash.
Just to name a few: Aerial photography (including checking for insulation leaks of heat/power co-generation pipelines), calibration flights for aviation infrastructure (ILS, localizers etc), training flights (or would you be fine with a commercial airline pilot to have their first training flight with you in the back?)...
It's not as though legislatures are powerless to distinguish between these. If they haven't, it's because they've chosen not to.
Or because they've chosen to spend their limited resources on other, higher-impact policy changes first.
Private jets account for something like 1% of carbon emissions of aviation. That's not nothing, but making it a top agenda item seems like populism more than anything.
You mean their limited supply of ink and office paper? Or their... limited political capital to make laws which inconvenience the rich?
Should we also ban recreational boating? What about recreationally driving a car?
GA pilots generally aren't flying Airbus A320s with like 120 seats, they're flying Cessnas and Pipers with like maybe half a dozen seats. They're maybe flying every couple of days instead of back and forth a few times a day, every day of the week.
Its a pretty major difference.
I am against banning any aviation use btw, this is too unfair to a particular group of people and is not based on any objective standard. Any aviation restriction that doesn't start with not letting the rich have private flights is unfair.
Can you really not see the difference between these two different usages?
I would also class flying in a completely different category to boats and cars, as emissions at altitude are significantly worse.
Chances are that boat pulling some water skiers all day is dumping more emissions in an afternoon than a Cessna flying for a few hours.
What have you personally done to remedy the situation?
All I'm trying to do is share knowledge. I imagine many people on this forum would have thought a Cessna would have used more gas than a speed boat. Chill out.
It's flying for fun, to sightsee. Or learning how to fly in order to get a pilot's license!
If you want to ban them for wasting fuel, you might as well ban people from taking leisurely Sunday afternoon sightseeing drives.
Btw., that kind of approach is one of the components of why climate change policies don't sell so well.
This is all one big slippery slope towards tyrants regulating every aspect of an individual's life in the name of carbon emissions. You don't get to decide what flights are a waste of fuel. You also don't get to evaluate and decide how someone else should spend their hard-earned money.
If there were no more flights at all, of any kind, that would represent 4% of emissions. That's for the entire planet's worth of flights. This change here won't make any difference at all to emissions, but they'll definitely empower bureacrats who are salivating at every prospect of making themselves more powerful at everyone else's expense.
you can split the 100% of total emissions into 25 pieces, apply your impeccable "logic" for freedom of choice to spend hard-earned money (somehow its never ill-gotten money) on all of them and burn the planet to your ideological satisfaction.
the only slippery slope here is the normalization of the "do-nothing because it inconveniences me" mentality.
your freedom of action ends where it conflicts with the collective survival and that is i) not a new thing and ii) is not negotiable.
the details of what to change and how are up for discussion and critique, but talk of "tyrants" and "salivating bureaucrats" indicates you will not be the one contributing anything meaningful to the discussion
Deaths from climate-related disasters have been falling in absolute numbers even as the world population grows. In fact, in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019, humanity more than doubled in number while climate-related deaths decreased threefold. This is due to the increasing ability of people in developing countries to better harness and control their natural environment enabled by industrialization driven by fossil fuels.
All of human progress has been about higher per capita energy expenditure. To stop that now is to condemn the global poor to remain in poverty. We'll know for sure in another fifty to a hundred years, but my bet is that the bigger threat to humanity's collective survival will be from the increasing centralization of power at the hands of the few that things like "fighting climate change" require.
measuring the impact of the fossil-fuel induced climate change as some direct death count is incredibly short-sighted if not amoral. large parts of the world already show significant impact from desertification. people in severely stressed areas will move, peacefully or forcefully. the result will be (civil) wars and mass migration and we already see this in the middle east. the entire modern political system of countries and borders is predicated on stable climate conditions.
> centralization of power at the hands of the few
that's a red herring if there ever was one. why should the sustainability transition be performed via centralized tyranny? If people stop spreading misinformation at the behest of vested interests and we develop reliable measures of environmental impacts a democratic society is perfectly capable to make the rational choices
You don't get to decide what is discretionary consumption. No hall monitor will ever be elevated to such a role over this planet.
Do you actually want workable less-polluting solutions? Then be against this ban and for electric airplanes which will solve this problem very soon.
> large parts of the world already show significant impact from desertification.
If you got rid of all flights globally, this would not be changing as a result. There are also massive reforestation projects undergoing worldwide and those will continue to gain traction as more land frees up for reclamation by nature and park preserves.
> why should the sustainability transition be performed via centralized tyranny? If people stop spreading misinformation at the behest of vested interests and we develop reliable measures of environmental impacts a democratic society is perfectly capable to make the rational choices
They exaggerate the extent of climate woes in order to cement their own power and luxury. That's most of what it is. The real efforts against climate corruption are in renewables and clean transport. Progress is already at breakneck speed and still climbing on these fronts.
It's the same group of people who were insisting that we need to lockdown and drastically change every aspect of society because of the pandemic. Now mountains of evidence are emerging that not only were the lockdowns mostly unnecessary, they may have been actively harmful more than good.
A democratic society making these changes on its own without over-centralization is as simple a matter as people adhering to the United States Constitution and working together at the community level to build more solar, clean up roads, install EV charging stations, etc. That's already happening. So why is it necessary for France to top-down ban short-haul flights in the name of emissions when that action will hurt quality of life without moving the needle? It's because their motives are impure. Some of them are tyrants-in-waiting.
Why should someone be allowed to have emissions just because they are flying a plane?
Unlike cars, the lifespan of an airplane is usually measured in decades. Not saying it's impossible, but you can't demand we redesign airplanes overnight to add a bunch of weight and complexity for a fleet that was mostly built in the 1950s-1970s. I would also note, I am a shade tree mechanic and work on a lot of cars, the #1 source of failures in modern cars is almost always complicated emissions control systems, so it's a harder problem than it looks like.
What does removing emissions devices on your personal vehicles have to do with whether or not someone wants to fly? Advocate for better devices and less invasive devices that do not add costs. That's a separate concern and subject from whether or not someone can fly.
All your argument would do is just justify The Next Ban with flimsy justifications.
* Farmers flying to review and maintain their fields/livestock
* Pilots practicing by taking off, flying around, touch-and-gos on the runway, etc
* Tour flights showing people around an area
* Skydiving
* Flights for shows or other entertainment
There are other means, such as diplomacy, to solve conflicts, btw.
> Corporate jets to escape EU’s ‘green’ aviation fuel tax
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/transport-and-tourism/co...