41% of French pop in favour of limiting everyone to 4 flights for entire life | Hacker News Reader

41% of French pop in favour of limiting everyone to 4 flights for entire life

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33 pointsamilios82 comments

Having to trust Google translate on this one, but it seems like people were specifically asked if they support it as a "medium-term" solution for climate change - not lifetime.

And also, small sample size online survey conducted by under-grads. Grain of salt and all that.

Correct, the poster on X is misrepresenting.

Should have asked undergrads on restricting music concerts as they are big water wasters and polluters. The results would have been interesting

I don't know where you get this was conducted by under-grads. That's not what appears on https://csa.eu/news/etude-here-les-francais-et-la-propositio...

I similarly get frustrated with such studies, and wonder if it's more lazy reporting or 'ragebait' reporting.

I just read a 'study' last week (that I can't find now) about what percentage of young adults are forced to live at home longer. The survey way 200 or so people in one specific area, so...useless.

Asking 18-24 year olds to make lifetime statements is not the same as asking a 40-50 year old person. One group has no concept yet and the other is starting to regret wasting it.

But around 2.5% of emissions come from aviation (or maybe 3% of actual warming emissions). I think that puts it in the range of 10% of transportation emissions. Apparently personal vehicles are responsible for ~58% of transportation emissions.

You're likely much more effective giving up your car than giving up flights.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58861

Yeah, remote work should really be required for jobs that can do it. That's a lot more reasonable of an immediate achievable climate action.

Yea but airlines are government subsidized and a terrible way to shelter money, whereas commercial real estate was a great way to shelter money until the plebs decided they wanted more autonomy over their lives. I hope you understand why we have chosen to prioritize things this way.

Hmm, I don't think 'remote work' is a climate action.

Many of the people I know who work remotely live in areas where they are highly dependent on personal vehicles. Some of them moved to more remote areas where they could get bigger houses which require more heating and cooling. Given a person who lives in a smaller, well-insulated apartment in the city and has a short commute by public transit, bike or on foot, vs a person in a 2000 sqft mcmansion in the exurbs who works in their home but needs the car to go to the supermarket, who has the smaller footprint?

> Apparently personal vehicles are responsible for ~58% of transportation emissions.

That's because most people in the world don't fly. If you're flying coast to coast and back once (approx 1t CO2eq), that's already a significant percentage of a typical car's yearly emissions, like 20%. Add an international flight and you're getting close to an even split.

> You're likely much more effective giving up your car than giving up flights.

I mean, obviously ideally you'd do both. Probably easier to significantly curtail both instead of giving it up entirely. But telling most people to give up their car is like telling them to give up a kidney or both.

Suffice to say I think this would only work in places like Europe where everything is relatively densely connected by rail. For me personally I live in North American and I visit my family in Europe once a year. Cutting me off from them would suck and effectively force me back to Europe :) this seems like it's coming from a place of "privilege" per se of everything being nearby.

Isn't that how all of these style regulations go? People think up some stuff that doesn't really impact their life and propose it.

Who needs to maintain diplomatic relationships with North America anyway?

Ironically, the survey respondents overwhelmingly said North America was the destination they would most likely use their flights for.

4 trips to the US might be soft power going from us to them, but it's zero diplomacy going the other direction.

if you can contemplate how many flights you consider sufficient in a life, you have likely already solved (or had solved for you) far more significant problems.

the privilege is more than proximity.

Don’t you feel it’s a privilege to be able to live all across the world? Most people in Europe can’t easily move out of Europe if they want to maintain a standard of living.

this is hacker news we dont do introspection here

I thought Europeans believed freedom of movement was a human right?

Actually scratch that, it's a human right but not if a virus exists, you have the wrong politics, or movement requires the emission of CO2.

Hey,

This doesn't ban ships.

Just saying.

Not saying I agree or disagree, but you're acting like limiting air travel would stop travel.

Fossil fuel powered ships are worse, because the carbon emissions of running a hotel at sea are high and ships use very low grade fuel with all sorts of nasty byproducts. And electric or renewable long distance ships run into the exact same problems as electric or renewable planes, namely the poor energy density.

Transatlantic cruises don’t have to be luxurious. If you’re comparing air freight to shipping by sea, it’s very clear ships are far more efficient. We just need to become better at containerising people :)

You vill live in ze pod!

I mean at minimum you need to run an actual kitchen to feed people for days or weeks at sea.

You mean? Yes. Yes, you'll need to have a crew and you'll need to need to ship the necessities, which eats into the efficiency of this mode of transport. However, a plane will create 40 times more CO2 for the same amount of cargo transported than a ship. I'd say we can figure out how to fit a larger crew and more supplies in that margin.

I’m not against people moving or travelling, just pointing out that the vast majority of people won’t move out of their country, whereas HN audience is more likely to have lived in different countries. I have, will probably move again in my lifetime. But I still don’t believe it’s a human right to move countries at will, nor do I think we should be flying as much as we are, draconian lifetime budgets notwithstanding.

But leave it to HN to read deep enough into a comment to make a straw man.

I am in a similar situation and have asked myself this. On the other hand, I think from an international peace and cultural exchange perspective, being able to live and integrate into other countries and cultures is very important. So many world-changing discoveries have been enabled by migrants and people who were able to spend time with people in the same field from other places. Imagine what we would lose if this was no longer possible!

I don't know, the rail connections here in Iceland are quite poor.

You can take a ship. An inconvenience but not impossible.

Ships have worse carbon emissions per passenger mile. https://amp.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/

Partially this is because a ship needs to be outfitted as a hotel due to how long the journey is compared to planes.

Didn’t say it was better, just posed it as the alternative.

I mean the context is that this is a proposal to cap carbon emissions, and it's pretty much cutting off the nose to spite the face.

No, this is a proposal to make people feel good. Most transportation emissions are from cars, not planes. It is fairly pointless to limit air travel if you actually want to achieve something. It doesn’t matter if you do something worse, like travel by boat. As long as people see less planes in the sky, they’re happy. And their happiness is all that matters for those who want to maintain the status quo.

> Suffice to say I think this would only work in places like Europe where everything is relatively densely connected by rail.

It's not even true. I don't think I can hop on a train for a quick trip to Paris from Romania, Bulgaria or Croatia.

> For me personally I live in North American and I visit my family in Europe once a year.

Talking about privilege.

This is to me like when people argue about banning airbnb.

"The other day I had arrived in a city and there were no hostels, all the hotels were $300/night or full. If there were no airbnb, what would I have done?"

And the answer is you would have changed your behaviour. Booking something further in advance, changing your travel plans, finding a different city to stay in.

The whole point of this idea is reducing the number of flights. That probably also means it's harder for people like you (and me) to live anywhere we want. But that is a privilege we have, not a given. If the cost is too great, we change our behaviour.

If airbnb has destroyed the rental market in a city, it's better for them to ban it and lose some travellers.

Similar argument to the "any-benefit" approach to technology, which Cal Newport writes about with relation to digital minimalism. We think we're justified in using a tool if we can identify any possible benefit to its use.

You have just entered the 15 minute city. Please remain where you are.

This is an example of what is called a 'push poll' which is a poll designed to be used to popularize a point of view to the public. There are so many ways to bias a poll like this.

Indeed, they are moving the narrative ahead slowly.

It's especially notable that it's from France -- a country with sizeable investment and expertise in high-speed rail, who stand to benefit from less flying and broader rail investment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of high-speed rail investment and rail journeys replacing flights. I had a long weekend in Amsterdam last month, and chose to take the train from London instead of flying, partly for sustainability reasons, partly for comfort. I wish my home country (the USA) invested more in high-speed rail, too.

But what about all that CO2 compensation stuff, that's really not expensive, in fact it seems like it can't work. What would be real cost to undo all damage I do to the world with a flight? I don't mind paying more. But how much more are we talking about? That is the real question imho.

Edit, a recent example, as calculated using https://co2.myclimate.org/

Your flight:

From: Amsterdam (NL), AMS to: Pogdorica (CS), TGD via: VIE, Vienna International, Austria, AT, Roundtrip, Economy Class, ca. 3,300 km, 1 traveller CO2 amount: 0.746 t

Take responsibility for your CO2-emissions by supporting climate protection projects in developing and emerging countries. EUR 21.00

To compensate it asks me to pay 21 eur. That's nothing. Just add it to all flights. Actually, it doesn't say that this will undo my emitted CO2. So what does this do? Stimulated eco friendly projects. Of course it would be better to stimulate them AND avoid the flight... I wonder what it would cost to really really just remove that CO2 from the atmosphere.

There’s some good evidence that many carbon offsetting programmes don’t work. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660256

And there’s probably an argument that taking flights increases general demand for them and that most of that demand comes from people who don’t offset their CO2

That's an extremely optimistic calculation. More realistic is $1-200/tonne.

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

You might have been scammed by propaganda.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/carbon-...

Carbon offsetting schemes are ‘fraud’, says major airline CEO

I made a calculation for one of the projects posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36093771 and (after fixing an error pointed out by jlund-molfese ) I got:

> For comparison, 1 gallon of gasoline release 9kg of CO2, so it's $12.15 USD more per gallon to be carbon neutral.

Let's be optimistic and assume that other projects are better and the cost is a half, i.e. $6 USD

A gallon of gasoline cost $4 USD (Planes don't use gasoline, but whatever.)

From a random link I got from Google, the 40% of the cost of a plane trip is fuel https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-does-fuel-cost-take-ou...

So the price goes from 60%+40%=100% to 60%+(6+4)/4*40%=160%. To simplify, just assume you will have to pay a 50% more per trip.

[This assume there is another project that can capture carbon for half of the cost of the linked project. For the full price you get 60%+(12+4)/4*40%=160%, i.e. a +120% increase. And this is very optimistic, because preliminary calculation are usually too optimistic.]

I understand the poll is misrepresented but I find the proposition to be extremely anti-human in the first place — climate change is a real threat, but any directives need to take in to consideration the death and misery caused by restricting the opportunity to travel freely.

The focus should be on reducing the average emissions for each mile travelled — reducing private flights, improving electrified road and rail networks and improving the economy of commercial flights.

I would also wager that the political and high business class would also not face this restriction should something like it ever come to exist.

France is a wonderful holiday destination. It has mountains, snow in winter (for now...), hiking in the summer, hot seaside, cool seaside, Arcadian countryside, lakes, rivers. Museums, castles, palaces, Roman ruins, Eiffel Tower...

If you live in France, there are so many holidays you can take by driving for 3-4 hrs. But so many places (many of them lovely) where you can never do most of these. If you live in Iceland, for example, I don't think hot beat holidays are for you without a flight.

Not a terrible idea. Four seems low, and I have no idea how they arrived at that exact number, but in principle plane travel is one of the most inexpensive and time-efficient ways an average person can release tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I mean, we ban drinking straws and fret about the environmental cost of electric cars, but really the biggest impact on the environment an average person could have would be to fly less.

Banning drinking straws was also a bad idea.

It’s just a preview of some of the tough choices we may have to make as climate change gets worse.

Maybe we get a certain amount of carbon credits and we get to decide how to use them. Sure, if a parent is sick, take a flight to be with them but it may mean you take public transportation for a couple of weeks when you get back instead of driving to work. Or work from home for a while if that’s an option.

If only we could stick a numeric value on limited resources and allow people to optimize their life according to their own priorities...

Money. We have money. Tax environmental damage at every step and make the costs of things reflect their actual costs. If wealth inequality is a problem, balance it out with redistribution. Some will say this is extreme, but this thread is about forbiding travel, so extreme is where we're at in this context. Id rather see soft behavior shaping through tax policies than by straight up banning things.

They are in favor of eliminating all business travel, essentially. Good luck participating in the modern economy.

The modern economy isn't going to exist in a few decades. Investing in the collapse, or at least planning for it, may be a good idea.

Evidence?

This will never apply to everyone.

There is decidedly a difference in political strategy between those who try to control others behavior and those who try to balance the incentives of a system so that the behavior of its participants considers all of the relevant information.

While the CO2 emissions caused by personal air travel aren’t that significant compared to many other things, hopefully we will have renewable jet fuel soon and people can fly as much as they like without being guilt tripped

I wonder what the proportion of Parisians who would support this policy would be.

It would not surprise me if 41% of the French population has taken fewer than 5 flights in their life, and that the proportion of Americans would be similar.

The problem with these types of policies (restrictions or even just taxes on meat consumption, light bulb usage, or overall carbon output) is not just that they become unpopular when actually implemented, it leads to "solution aversion". The solitons to a problem become so detrimental that some people then convince themselves that the problem does not even exist.

Either The Onion strikes again or the French expect everyone to walk across continents and swim across oceans while holding their breath and farts.

If only we had a source of energy that didn't rely on fossil fuels and didn't contribute to climate change.

UAP motors? Those seem like the ticket to solve all our problems.

This is correct.

I wish that such a rule could be applied just to the people in favor of it.

Well, I've done two in the last 48, together totaling about 12hour airborne (government biz). I guess I'm the devil. How many tanks of glass should we be limited to? How many internet searches? How many of those undergrads own Bitcoin?

Well, if you're averaging a flight every 24 years, you won't be the devil until you're well past 100.

Can’t go rush to see dying family then.

Perhaps you'd have to actually live around loved ones.

That’s wildly impractical, you cant force everyone not to move away to random places

Suppose you have 2 kids. One lives in Virginia, the other in California. Now what? Pick the one you like best and cut the other off? Drive across the country?

I think if you read the OP literally you’d avoid that situation. No value judgement on that but your hypothetical is the opposite of what they suggest so the answer is pretty obvious in context.

That's easy. China solved these problems a long time ago.

First of all, you wouldn't be allowed to have two kids, because having more than one child would violate the climate laws of the future.

The other reason this would never be a problem: Your kids can only live in a government-designated city. This would be enforced by a strict, all-knowing central government that will allocate people to living spaces based on what is best for the environment.

Government policy: ‘Everyone should die!!!!’

If I had children I'd be incredibly depressed at how humans are treating the planet. I mean, I already am incredibly depressed about it, but at least I won't have to decide to try and lie to them about the future or tell them the truth. That said, I would be willing to drive to visit them, particularly in an electric vehicle powered by renewable energy.

Sorry to bring down the room, but it's hard to look at the trendlines and see any hope. I'm going to try doing a bunch of pushups until I don't feel so sad.

ah yes, the “love is only love if it meets my standards” argument.

quite valid, really. incredibly important for relationships.

but not so much for the relationships of others, no?

This is a great point if you only love 1 person...

If you extend your love to all who live on earth then you'd take care not to contribute to the climate breakdown which ruins their lives.

Nearly all first world countries rely on immigrants at every skill level with parents who live thousands of miles away in other countries, from PHds to farm hands.

Yes, rush by train. Climate catastrophe makes families die.

LOL

The cure is worse than the disease.

One practical way you could attempt to do this would be to massively tax airline tickets, ideally by distance flown, and then allow people to claim 4 untaxed tickets.

You could also maybe allow people to sell their tickets if they never intend to use them, which would create a new financial incentive for people to never get on a plane.

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