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Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, when people say "flying has a high carbon footprint", they're not kidding. It's really quite massive.

I don't fly any more.

Want to bake your noodle?

Because the market responds to your behavior by slightly lowering the cost of flying to fill those seats, demand increases to match from slightly lower income people. Because they then organize their lives slightly more around cheap flights, it gets even harder to lower the impact of flying.

Paradoxically, rich people like us (you're a tech worker too...) flying more, because we're less sensitive to price, leave more room for pricing in carbon reduction strategies in the tickets/taxes. If you have more seats from the lower end of the market... you don't have as much flexibility in solutions.

Which is a strong argument for a carbon tax on (fossil) fuels. Indexed to consumption over greenhouse gas emissions targets.

Taxes are one way to make markets internalise externalities.

Hi, I'm the choir you're preaching to

Sing louder, damnit!!!

;-)

That might be true within a certain band, but if enough people stop flying, there's only so much elasticity there. Eventually they stop flying as many planes.

(Of course, subsidies probably throw a wrench in all of this.)

> leave more room for pricing in carbon reduction strategies in the tickets/taxes

that is politically driven and has nothing to do with whether rich or poor bums are on seats.

What makes you say that?

Clearly you have thought a lot about carbon reduction, so I have a question for you.

Is a plug in hybrid or EV less polluting if you don’t have rooftop solar?

edit: I think I know the general answer, but I’m splitting hairs comparing a replacement car for an ICE vehicle that I have.

You don't need your own rooftop solar. You can time your charges for when power is cheap (i.e. renewables are highly represented in the grid mix). In many locations you can get an electricity tariff that changes by time of day, either fixed times of day or nearly real-time to track the current wholesale price.

Here in Scotland, we have an EV electricity tariff that give us low rates between 00:30 - 05:30 while the wind turbines spin and demand is low, and our plug-in hybrid is programmed to charge during those hours. (We also run the dishwasher, washing machine, and tumble dryer on time delay during those hours as much as possible)

With nearly all of our car trips being local, the ~25 mile electric range the plug-in hybrid is rarely exceeded. We fill the petrol tank maybe once every 3 or 4 months, or when we're on a road trip.

Pure EVs are harder to justify in the UK currently unless you do basically all of your charging at home, because with 20% VAT added to the price of electricity from public chargers, and too-low fuel taxes, the per-mile cost is similar to—or sometimes more expensive than—driving on petrol. It's shockingly bad public policy.

Octopus Energy in the UK. Sometimes you can get paid to take power off the grid. Unfortunately batteries are too expensive to make really good use of it.

The EV is by far the least polluting option. In a year or two of normal driving, even on a dirty grid, you generate less pollution than if you were burning fuel in the car.

Grids are getting lower carbon intensity every year, so it just gets better after that.

It's also not clear that rooftop solar is better than anything else, the carbon involved in getting it to you, installing it, the business that does the installation… It's not very efficient.

Don't look up the carbon footprint of driving then. That is even higher in comparison to most passenger flights.

The data on https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint disagrees, do you have a source?

It doesn't though. The vast majority of flights are short-haul or long-haul flights and not domestic. This data uses the UK flight data so let's look that up.

Non-Domestic flight passengers: 14,124,617 [1] Domestic flight passengers: 1,455,330 [2]

So you can see that over 90% of all passengers do not fly domestically within the UK. So only the domestic flights emit more CO2 than combustion engine cars, but they are the minority. If you were to look at the US, flights that short probably play even less of a role due to longer distances between cities in the US (in comparison to the UK).

In conclusion the data you provided very much proves my point so thank you for providing the source for my statement yourself.

[1] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813... [2] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813...

Well, I don't drive either, except for a longer distance trip once or twice a year...

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