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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Plans like this are based on envy and not reality. Private jets contribute a minimal amount of carbon emissions. Yes they are outsized compared to the emissions per-passenger on a commercial jet. Yes the people who use them to fly to lunch should probably reflect on their choices. But they are not the low hanging fruit. Private jets also provide good jobs for pilots, mechanics, airport staff, as well as jobs for the people who build them, the people who build and program the avionics, the engines, etc.

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I hate the jobs argument. It's like saying, "we should keep the concentration camps open, what are all the guards going to do". Any antisocial/harmful activity will employ people to do it, that doesn't mean we should condone it.

Even more -- our civilization has a certain amount of productive capacity. I'm not saying we can or should have a central state planner to determine how to allocate it, though tax policy is often aimed at steering it. But I do wish that those skilled mechanics and engineers who work on private jets or yachts or cruise ships (and the raw resources used in their construction) would go instead to, like, more housing and offshore wind and nuclear reactors etc...

You hate the jobs argument but made a nazi reference in the same paragraph?

What is your counter argument here?

good job pretending to care about rigor.

That roping nazis into every discussion is a super cheap and intellectually lazy rhetorics.

I hate the jobs argument.

Man, I hate to digress this much, but I've recently seen the absurd end result of this thinking. Local Redmond, WA city council incumbent candidate running this year said they would work to support local business that have been hard-hit by COVID, et al. This councilperson's solution: advocate for return-to-work policies. The implied outcome being that the returned-to-office workers will suddenly visit those businesses now that they're back in the office. (One can read my almost-a-direct quote on Carson's campaign website.) Well, at least we know who David Carson works for, and it ain't you.

I am not local to redmond. But isn’t that town just dominated by Microsoft? And aren’t they going back to office regardless of what some town council member says one way or the other?

But isn’t that town just dominated by Microsoft?

Used to be, not so much now I don't think. Of my neighbors within a few houses of me: one Google (used to be MSFT), one Facebook, one game studio (who's games you might have heard of), Microsoft neighbors one house over, my Microsoft spouse, and me working at a small hardware company. But that's just anecdotal, and even if it's accurate, it's still a town that largely thinks of itself as a "Microsoft town" AFAICT. (Aside: good $DEITY, maybe my neighbors don't all work at Microsoft, but do any of them not work in software?)

But you're on the right track, as I thought perhaps it was just an easy nod to the largest employer in town, and maybe it is. But the statement was so logically asinine that I'm not exactly sure what his intent was.

> Well, at least we know who David Carson works for, and it ain't you.

It's pretty rare to have a government that works only for you. Probably the only people to experience that are absolute monarchs and the like.

David Carson has constituents, and some of them have interests different than yours. Welcome to democracy.

As an aside: one of the irksome things about software engineers and other tech people is they frequently embrace the idea of "creative destruction," but I think that's mainly because they imagine themselves as the ones who will always be doing the destroying and reaping the benefits, instead of as the ones who will be destroyed.

I generally agree, but I fear we do this every time with every topic. Everything isn't low hanging fruit, it's always something else somewhere else that should be changed. It's not the plastic bags it's the cow industry, it's not the cow industry it's the oil drills, it's not the oil drills it's the cars we drive, it's not the cars we drive it's the private jets celebs use, etc.

At some point, we're all going to have to realize this is an insane way to solve issues and that we can't solve certain issues without making inconvenient adjustments.

Private jets are irrelevant. There aren’t enough to even matter.

A hundred years of burning coal. Now that will cause some real global warming.

Hard to believe we burn more coal now than ever.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/coal-consumption-hit-an-all-...

Someone should do the math. If we had to guess, is 1 year of coal equivalent to 100 years of all of aviation?

Guess who owns the companies that bought the governments that subsidize coal production for the last century and a half? These hand wavy arguments about scale ignore the fact that the superrich and their ability to capture governance and policy are the whole problem. Put a real carbon tax on their consumption and they will not "reflect on their choices" but could become more supportive of energy policies that don't doom their customers and themselves.

My view is that the role of government helps regulate maximizing value for society as a hole (wherein externalities are not reflected in private market transactions), which requires coordinating some form of collective action.

The guiding principle of these decisions should be to redirect the value from a disproportionate harm to society toward ameliorating those harms. So infact the contribution to climate change from a private jet far outweighs that of a commercial jet. That is because few people are inducing great harm, rather than that carbon being more efficiently used across more people. So in exchange for inducing [x] amount of carbon, society gains nearly nothing from a private jet flight where as commercial moves vastly more people.

Indeed there are also ethical considerations of using a private jet when there is a more efficient alternative (commercial), that could be taxed as a 'vice'.

Lastly one day there may be a point where we need to ban these type of emissions wholesale rather than look at an efficiency basis.(Example: no amount of heroin is useful to society), but for carbon that conversation has not yet entered mainstream political discussions. (A hard cap on emissions would make flying only available to the very rich). Therefore it is both practical and just to tax private jet carbon.

An observation: from interning at a firm adjacent to private aviation I noticed that there appears no upper bound the demand for private aviation. Even in the scenario where a tax does not change demand for private jet miles, it will at the very least provide funding for ameliorating the harms to society from the marginal production of carbon emissions.

They should pay for their externalities just like everything else.

I don't think it's jealousy, I think most people just have no sense of relative scale, or they too easily accept their first instinct, and don't understand how hard it is to get a sense of relative scale.

That's not the right argument. The right argument is if there is a problem with something not reflected in the price of the product a reasonable approach is to tax the product to cover the externality and thnm STFU. The externality in this case is emissions so tax the emissions and STFU. There is no good argument for government to treat one emission differently than another, it matters not whether said emission comes from a kardashian private jet or public transit carrying nurses and doctors to provide charity healthcare. Tax the emission and STFU. The STFU part is very important because free markets are self regulating, which lets people making good capital allocations prosper and limits bad allocators and most of you are bad allocators, especially most of you government types and authoritarian types. Let the market run and be pleasantly surprised by the unforseen benefits that accrue to you. (Government should still aggressively break up monopoly and oligopoly but that is a different discussion of a corner case rather than this discussion of the core tenet of how the system functions so well.)

All the rich folk who fly about on private jets should stop talking about climate change. If you can assure me that, then they can continue to fly.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-private-jets-car...

> All the rich folk who fly about on private jets should stop talking about climate change. If you can assure me that, then they can continue to fly.

A EU politican came by plane (first thought to be a private jet but turns out it was a commercial plane IIUC) to a climate change conference, then two streets before the place where the meeting was happening she hopped on a bicycle "because green"... Bicycle escorted by two SUVs.

Ridiculous.

Seen that one too. The show must go on! Happened many times before, also, with different politicians in different countries. Anyways, the SUVs are for security. Have to be always at hand. Can you imagine being without them, in the public?

What?

Are you referring to Theresa Ribiera(Spainish Minister) incident? Stop getting your news from tabloids. Records showed she was driven to the event. While being on a bike and followed by 2 SUV full of bodyguard seems ridiculous, there are sometime protocol to follow. She used a bike sharing service for the journey between her hotel and the conference venue. She and was also seen on a bike at another occasion on the same trip. If we can stop acting like offenced Virgin and spend time finding real solutions, that would be nice.

Sounds like she puts more carbon into the atmosphere than the people she is scolding.

This is also my problem. I have no issue with private jets, but I have huge issue with people who are flying on them and then start virtue signaling about climate change. Like could you clean up your house first, before you will start lecturing other people how they should clean their houses?

If a cigarette smoker, on oxygen due to lung cancer but still smoking, tells you smoking is bad for your health - is that virtue signaling?

Being rich is a helluva drug. They need help getting off their addiction. Tax 'em all, heavily.

Yes that's obvious hypocritical virtue signaling. Especially when he is puffing the smoke right into somebody's face.

I described an anti-smoking public service advertisement from when I was a teenager.

What virtue do you see in that?

Then it was hypocritical anti-smoking public service. Like somebody taking a massive dump on my porch while telling me that it is bad. I mean, then why are you doing it?

Because some smokers are addicted to nicotine, and can't stop even though they know it's what's killing them, and even knowing that an open flame near an oxygen line is a fire danger that will kill them quicker.

Just because the Marlboro Man looks cool smoking when he's young doesn't mean it's worth having lung cancer later on, as the Marlboro Man lies in a hospital bed with tubes in him.

I don't know any dump-takers with an addition like you describe, so think you have failed to understand my point.

Other addicts are similar. If a homeless alcoholic tells you his life was ruined by his addition to alcohol and that you shouldn't take his path, then takes another swig out of his beer, is that really hypocritical virtue signaling? Or is it truthful advice?

If a heroine addict, in a drainage culvert preparing another dose, looks up at you when you walk by and says "stay off heroin, kid, it will fuck up up" - is that really hypocritical virtue signaling? Or are you going to join him?

If you think all of that is 'virtue signaling', then we have a fundamentally different understanding of what that term means.

Super-rich people are addicted to wealth. They love it. Even when they know their lifestyle is bad, they don't want to give up, even though they could.

Look at them - even their charity work mostly serves [1] to glorify their power and prestige, and whitewash their moral crimes [2].

Every time you think of Bill Gates, of Elon Musk, of Al Gore, remember that they are addicts to wealth, unwilling to give up their addition. And to be clear, I'm not saying I could either, had I their money.

Tax them all, heavily, until they are merely rich - say, $10 million. Provide social workers to help them live a normal life. Get them off their addiction [3].

[1] The two counter-examples I am considering are Dolly Parton and MacKenzie Scott. Scott's philanthropy in particular highlights how the super-wealthy really are more interested in control than giving.

[2] Carnegie, to start a very long list.

[3] The cleverer of them say they need the influence which comes with their wealth to change things for the better, like Warren Buffett and the "Buffett Rule", so can't give up their wealth unilaterally. Let's help those poor sods by taxing them.

Yes smoker telling me that smoking is bad is hypocritical virtue signaling. Rich people telling me to walk so they can hop on their private jet and fly away is hypocritical virtue signaling.

No amount of mental gymnastics you are trying to present here will change it.

"then we have a fundamentally different understanding of what that term means."

That's probably the wrong argument.

The right one is that private jets are a net productivity gain. Getting a person to a place more quickly then commercial is going to make all of us more wealthy. If we're all wealthier we can afford to do any number of different things.

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