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Comment by Eumenes | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for making travel more expensive. Mostly to remove the trashy and rude people from the equation. I don't care about C02 but I do enjoy seeing megalomaniacs like John Kerry and Taylor Swift lecture us plebs on climate/social justice, but fly private jets everywhere.

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Now I'm trying to imagine Taylor Swift hanging out at gate B22 waiting for a flight. Pandemonium.

More expensive isn't fair because travel would become a rich person's hobby.

A better approach would be rationing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing

You're absolutely right, but the problem is the intersection set of rich people and powerful people is quite large (they're almost, but not quite, the same set) and why would they ration themselves?

If air travel rationing would ever be implemented, instead of travel becoming a rich person's hobby (which it already is, for a very loose definition of rich, a definition loose enough that it also counts people with in-house bathrooms with running water and waste disposal systems as rich) it would become a powerful person's hobby.

Not that different IMHO.

But, just to be clear, I'm totally with you. It's just that I'm terribly pessimistic.

What kind of gives me little moments of joy is thinking of what the 3000 version of "Fall of civilizations" podcast will have to say about what is happening now.

Its already a rich persons hobby. So rationing would suggest subsidizing travel domestically by the rich, for the less rich, but still globally, very well off.

> It is estimated that around 95% of the world’s population has never experienced air travel firsthand.

https://www.ncesc.com/has-only-5-of-the-worlds-population-ev...

It got a magnitude more expensive since covid. Private jets are the problem, not Kate from the UK flying to Tenerife once a year via ryan air.

You think private jet flights outnumber commercial ones?

That's not the argument? The per person CO2 is way higher. Do I really have to explain basic things like that?

A magnitude is very exaggerated. Also consider Covid won’t change the obvious trend since the 50’s: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/32068/average-price-of-ai...

Regarding jets vs mass transport, I think it is misleading to oppose them. Remove all the jets on the planet and we’ll have exactly the same sustainability trouble.

My old dad points the fault of rich people taking jets to go everywhere, and also the fault of "billion of Chineses starting to take more and more flight". His bi-monthly usage of plane for Holliday isn't worth considering through because he "has no choice, people have right to takes Holliday and we-the-world-middle-class are not the problem"

I'm not arguing that. I was arguing against "RyanAir is the problem". When jets are contributing way more to climate change than mass transport, why argue against the most efficient of all air transport and not the biggest CO2 producers? Doesn't make any sense to me.

I agree with you on a philosophical view to maximise equality while minimizing climate change, which is very noble. I still think Kate’s RyanAir is a very important problem to address in parallel than worse problem like jets.

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