8 ms·

What if everyone had an air-mile allowance?

18 points by Freak_NL 6y ago

gilstroem 6y ago
Alternatively, put much higher taxes on flights, and fund train/coach travel to make it more afforable, so more people can take lower impact, near home trips. I’ve lived in north western Europe my entire life, and enjoy travelling by train/ferry and explore neighbouring countries - there is more than enough to see for a life time. It is astonishing to me how many people find it neccessary to fly to the other side of the globe to feel like they are on vacation (or more likely.. for vanity.)
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Higher taxation is probably the most realistic we can get. I do wonder if it would succeed in actually limiting the amount of flying done. The cost of an all-inclusive trip to the Turkish coast by plane should become high enough for tourists to consider the alternatives. The taxation level should be somewhat dynamic and simply rise or fall to discourage flying as much as is needed to remain below a predetermined yearly ceiling of Revenue Passenger Miles (RPM). On the bright side: in recent years train travel in Europe has been getting better, with a renewed interest in sleeper trains. I just hope this whole Covid-mess doesn't stop these developments completely.
- 3327 6y ago
  Much better solution. These marketplace schemes never work in reality. except for creating a bunch of marketplace middleman saas that makes money.
  - 0xfaded 6y ago
    The problem is that the tax would need to be super-linear. There are two effects going on. First, with a fixed quota, the value of a credit is bid up by people wanting to fly, not dissimilar to the Norwegian butter crisis where a stick of butter cost upward of €40. Second, with a credit transfer system, people selling their credits receive a "negative" tax, while people buying credits pay a positive tax. This system ensures everyone still has access to a basic level of air travel at today's prices, but is also super-linearly incentivize to travel less. A linear (fixed) tax on travel will just price out the lowest class, and a linear tax means nothing to those on top of a power-law wealth distribution.
- middaymoon 6y ago
  Before I have a chance to study abroad, I never saw snow at all. Flying to the other side of the globe is more than a vacation for me. It was like a trip to gain the experience, the perspective of many interesting cultures.I do agree though that train in Europe and some country is so good that you can avoid the flight. Maybe, because I was born and lived here in SouthEast Asia. Almost no one in my circle or news outlet here talk about avoiding travelling by air. Every national holiday here, you can expect to see people crowded at the airport. I do understand that traveling by air has higher cabon emission, but I think the experiece and perspective you gain from travelling make you understand the world better. I do hope we can come up with sustainable alternative of air traveling soon.
computerphage 6y ago
So, cap and trade but only for one type of consumption?
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Basically. Although I wonder if the trade-part can be kept fair and accessible for people willing to part with their air-miles (the majority of people on Earth I think).
mattinsydney 6y ago
How about a plastics allowance?
LatteLazy 6y ago
We've decided as a species to do nothing about climate change. So what is the point of discussing various proposals for climate change action? This is like me telling you about all the different diets and all their upsides\downsides while continuing to eat 3000 calories a day of junk food.
- Tepix 6y ago
  > We've decided as a species to do nothing about climate change. I see a lot of changes happening. They are overdue, but indeed things are changing. We will suffer from climate change for at least a century or so (depending on whether we will master massive scale carbon sequestration or not), but it's not like humankind isn't trying to reduce CO2 emissions at all.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    We're not trying at all. Co2E globally continues to rise. None of this is rocket science. And to be clear, it needs to have basically stopped ALREADY. Right now, all we've done is make non binding "commitments" and then missed them...
epanchin 6y ago
I love taking the train but it’s so expensive. I’ve booked on the day flights to Edinburgh from London cheaper than an on the day train. Flying is usually cheaper than taking a full car full of people through the Channel tunnel. Last time I flew to Vancouver I returned to London from New York and flew from there rather than flying direct because it was cheaper. That’s what needs to be fixed. Cheaper trains and more direct flights that are cheaper than flying indirect. To allow airlines to fly less people and remain solvent, ticket prices need to rise. This solution doesn’t address that at all. A minimum cost per mile could work, but needs global implementation.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  To allow airlines to fly less people and remain solvent, ticket prices need to rise. We can't really solve climate change without some industries shrinking massively or even disappearing. I don't know whether airlines are in that category but expecting to fix it without some pretty big changes isn't realistic.
  - alpineidyll3 6y ago
    The miracle of the price discovery process is that efficiency (such as electric planes) can often be found if there is market pressure. The reason we do nothing about climate change is that subconsciously we believe it's hopeless.
ajuc 6y ago
Just include externalities in the oil taxes. It doesn't matter if it's 10 plane trips a year or driving 100 miles to work each day - both are bad and both should be taxed into unaffordability.
- hansvm 6y ago
  One argument is that externalities aren't usually linearizable or localizable, so any attempt to tax them will result in loopholes that are patched with...you guessed it, more laws with their own loopholes growing into an insurmountable lovecraftian horror. Elaborating on the nonlinearizability, on a global scale it doesn't matter if a single person (or an entire city) drives 100 miles to work each day. In isolation their decision to drive has an externality of approximately $0 (wrt carbon). It's only a problem because of the global scale involved -- as an extremely simplistic (and wrong) model for the sake of fitting into a HN comment, there's a fuzzy cutoff point in total carbon production rates below which externalities are small and above which they're devastating and grow rapidly (and superlinearly). Adopting the obvious scheme of dividing total costs by total production, adding a healthy margin to further disincentivize carbon, and assigning that value as an externality tax (which gets updated periodically to never be too inaccurate) won't actually suffice to keep carbon production below the critical threshold because the marginal taxation of externalities for a unit of carbon is substantially less than the marginal externality itself. Underlying the above example is something that should be obvious to programmers -- not all problems can be efficiently solved by assigning a local value function to autonomous agents. In the case of people we value autonomy as a right in and of itself independently of its ability to benefit the whole, so many potential global optimizations are left on the table, but at the point where we need to enact taxes or legislation to prevent a global problem (e.g. the carbon issue) the illusion of autonomy no longer exists, and we might as well go straight for a solution that has a chance of working (e.g. carbon credits could work if implemented correctly) rather than handicapping ourselves with attempts to adjust our local reward function like trying to tax the externalities.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    If your tax is linear whole classes of loopholes stop working (it doesn't matter how you split the usage - the total is still the same). > on a global scale it doesn't matter if a single person (or an entire city) drives 100 miles to work each day. In isolation their decision to drive has an externality of approximately $0 (wrt carbon) That's such a disingenuous argument. Their emissions add up. That's like saying at individual level gravity doesn't work because you don't feel a gravity from 1 atom. If you add oil tax the global consumption falls, it's only a matter of choosing a number big enough to make the total consumption fall below the threshold. I don't understand why you're trying to make it so complicated - we don't only have 1 try, we can introduce tax, look at effects, make corrections. Opening a valve in your tap isn't linear. But you can pretty easily choose the proper level after a few corrections.
SamReidHughes 6y ago
Aviation is responsible for 2.4% of CO2 emissions. A tiny fraction of overall transportation, electricity, and other sources. This is just a bitter journalist training the Guardian-reading climate change freakout crowd to hate the rich.
- 0xfaded 6y ago
  Yet the wealthy are disproportionately represented in that 2.4%. You can literally look at it as a business class seat taking 3x the footprint of a cattle class seat. According to https://phys.org/news/2019-02-income-attitudes-affect-greenhouse-gas.html https://phys.org/news/2019-02-income-attitudes-affect-greenh..., transport related GHG emissions are most strongly correlated to income. So it's convenient to sweep air travel under the rug as a small contributor, when the "rich" are the biggest offenders.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Exactly, the journalist is bitter that rich people can afford to fly airplanes. You can tell because it's a "data journalist" who forgot to mention she's writing about 2.4% of emissions.
- cagenut 6y ago
  This is a case of someone use a "technically correct" fact to make a misleading statement (at least in tone), and then following it up with a 'kill-the-messenger' political snipe at journalists. This is textbook contrarian reactionary misdirection. #1 - C02 emissions account for only about half of the overall GHG emissions impact of air travel. Anytime you see someone specifically isolating just the CO2 emissions you know they are either poorly informed or deliberately misleading you. #2 - It doesn't actually matter. If something is 2.5% of X or 5% of X and X needs to get to 0 then the distinction is without a difference. Its only the tone of phrasing that makes this sound like a counterpoint, when it is in fact not. #3 - unlike much of the other 95 percent of emissions airline travel is by far the most uniquely isolated to very wealthy (globally speaking) people. If you believe in any basic notion of "progressive taxation", and you apply that to GHG emissions, then getting rich (again globally relatively rich) people to stop flying or fly less is by far the most blatant outlier to address quickly and early.
sukilot 6y ago
This is carbon tax but with extra steps.
- alpineidyll3 6y ago
  I would support carbon taxes placed at the point of fossil fuel production, but not this. It's very likely the subsidy to non travelling countries would merely increase thier local Co2 emissions.
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  More precisely, its a carbon fee and dividend scheme with more steps. As that also has the effect of rewarding those who choose not yo fly with money from those who do fly, but eothoit the middleman and with the benefit that it applies to everything.
- angio 6y ago
  This is worse than a carbon tax: a carbon tax would incentivise airlines to be more carbon efficient, but this system of fixed air miles means there is no such incentive.
imagine99 6y ago
Many comments here (and elsewhere) argue for an "allowance", bans, prohibition, prohibitive taxation etc. which all boil down to the same thing. I find it difficult to understand why intelligent people (such as those on HN) who have themselves profited greatly from freedom and choice, who are often of a progressive and liberal [1] mindset adopt such a reactionary stance when it comes to dealing with climate change. It is utterly clear from our history that prohibiting or banning something has never really stopped us. If anything, people have invested all their brainpower to finding and exploiting loopholes and the more difficult and illegal something is, the more enticing and attractive it becomes to many. Wouldn't it be much better to throw our combined brainpower into developing ways to deal with climate change that come without curtailing, prohibiting and banning stuff? By all means, throw billions of dollars towards fundamental research to create breakthroughs in science and technology, such as airliners powered by renewable energy, methane-free meat production and large-scale carbon capture! We've done amazing feats before, we put people on the moon, we will probably put them on Mars, why shouldn't we be able to solve climate change and in the process advance our civilization to the next level? Personally, I'm convinced this will be the easier way compared to artificially limiting ourselves and others which is something that truly has never been sustainable in our history. Telling others what they can and cannot do has always ultimately led to bloodshed and fuelled sectarian and anti-democratic tendencies, always. I credit incredibly cheap and highly available international travel (for everyone from broke students, business travellers to seniors) with the peace and almost unprecedented level of cooperation between nations and people we have seen in places like Europe and elsewhere. Think of it this way: You are unlikely to vote for someone to go to war with countries you fly to on holiday every year, you are unlikely to want to bomb places with whom you have extensive and intertwined trading and manufacturing relationships, you're unlikely to join the army and go shoot people with whom you've broken bread and gotten drunk on your "incredibly cheap" international road trip with a no-frills airline on your gap year before college. Force everyone but the rich (who will ALWAYS be able to afford travelling internationally, no matter how high you tax it) back to rarely or never leaving their country, state or hometown and you'll grow a generation of reactionary hillbillies who get all their information second- or third-hand from the media if at all and whom you can rile up to go to war with "Oceania" or "Eastasia" or "throw out those pesky immigrants" with a little propaganda at any time. You'll throw civilization back a hundred years. If you, on the other hand, foster international relationships, exchange ideas and people freely, then you will spark innovation, ideas and cooperation and ideally you will get progress and better conditions almost as a by-product of international exchange. Smallmindedness, backward thinking and limited horizons have never benefitted humanity or any larger group of people in the long run. Innovators, inventors, internationally collaborating scientists and, yes, merchants and traders with an international focus are those who have brought us everything we have today. Stepping out of the (allegoric [2]) cave was once the first step to advance as a species. I'd argue that in many ways international travel and freedom of movement is us stepping out of our caves again today. Into a bigger world of knowledge, cooperation and scientific advancement. Limiting our horizons (by whatever means) is not the solution. -- [1] not in the political meaning of these words as commonly used in the US, but to mean forward-thinking and open to progress [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

18 points by Freak_NL 6y ago

Alternatively, put much higher taxes on flights, and fund train/coach travel to make it more afforable, so more people can take lower impact, near home trips. I’ve lived in north western Europe my entire life, and enjoy travelling by train/ferry and explore neighbouring countries - there is more than enough to see for a life time. It is astonishing to me how many people find it neccessary to fly to the other side of the globe to feel like they are on vacation (or more likely.. for vanity.)

Freak_NL 6y ago
Higher taxation is probably the most realistic we can get. I do wonder if it would succeed in actually limiting the amount of flying done. The cost of an all-inclusive trip to the Turkish coast by plane should become high enough for tourists to consider the alternatives. The taxation level should be somewhat dynamic and simply rise or fall to discourage flying as much as is needed to remain below a predetermined yearly ceiling of Revenue Passenger Miles (RPM). On the bright side: in recent years train travel in Europe has been getting better, with a renewed interest in sleeper trains. I just hope this whole Covid-mess doesn't stop these developments completely.
3327 6y ago
Much better solution. These marketplace schemes never work in reality. except for creating a bunch of marketplace middleman saas that makes money.
- 0xfaded 6y ago
  The problem is that the tax would need to be super-linear. There are two effects going on. First, with a fixed quota, the value of a credit is bid up by people wanting to fly, not dissimilar to the Norwegian butter crisis where a stick of butter cost upward of €40. Second, with a credit transfer system, people selling their credits receive a "negative" tax, while people buying credits pay a positive tax. This system ensures everyone still has access to a basic level of air travel at today's prices, but is also super-linearly incentivize to travel less. A linear (fixed) tax on travel will just price out the lowest class, and a linear tax means nothing to those on top of a power-law wealth distribution.
middaymoon 6y ago
Before I have a chance to study abroad, I never saw snow at all. Flying to the other side of the globe is more than a vacation for me. It was like a trip to gain the experience, the perspective of many interesting cultures.I do agree though that train in Europe and some country is so good that you can avoid the flight. Maybe, because I was born and lived here in SouthEast Asia. Almost no one in my circle or news outlet here talk about avoiding travelling by air. Every national holiday here, you can expect to see people crowded at the airport. I do understand that traveling by air has higher cabon emission, but I think the experiece and perspective you gain from travelling make you understand the world better. I do hope we can come up with sustainable alternative of air traveling soon.

computerphage 6y ago

So, cap and trade but only for one type of consumption?

Freak_NL 6y ago
Basically. Although I wonder if the trade-part can be kept fair and accessible for people willing to part with their air-miles (the majority of people on Earth I think).

mattinsydney 6y ago

How about a plastics allowance?

LatteLazy 6y ago

We've decided as a species to do nothing about climate change. So what is the point of discussing various proposals for climate change action? This is like me telling you about all the different diets and all their upsides\downsides while continuing to eat 3000 calories a day of junk food.

Tepix 6y ago
> We've decided as a species to do nothing about climate change. I see a lot of changes happening. They are overdue, but indeed things are changing. We will suffer from climate change for at least a century or so (depending on whether we will master massive scale carbon sequestration or not), but it's not like humankind isn't trying to reduce CO2 emissions at all.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  We're not trying at all. Co2E globally continues to rise. None of this is rocket science. And to be clear, it needs to have basically stopped ALREADY. Right now, all we've done is make non binding "commitments" and then missed them...

epanchin 6y ago

I love taking the train but it’s so expensive. I’ve booked on the day flights to Edinburgh from London cheaper than an on the day train. Flying is usually cheaper than taking a full car full of people through the Channel tunnel. Last time I flew to Vancouver I returned to London from New York and flew from there rather than flying direct because it was cheaper. That’s what needs to be fixed. Cheaper trains and more direct flights that are cheaper than flying indirect. To allow airlines to fly less people and remain solvent, ticket prices need to rise. This solution doesn’t address that at all. A minimum cost per mile could work, but needs global implementation.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
To allow airlines to fly less people and remain solvent, ticket prices need to rise. We can't really solve climate change without some industries shrinking massively or even disappearing. I don't know whether airlines are in that category but expecting to fix it without some pretty big changes isn't realistic.
- alpineidyll3 6y ago
  The miracle of the price discovery process is that efficiency (such as electric planes) can often be found if there is market pressure. The reason we do nothing about climate change is that subconsciously we believe it's hopeless.

ajuc 6y ago

Just include externalities in the oil taxes. It doesn't matter if it's 10 plane trips a year or driving 100 miles to work each day - both are bad and both should be taxed into unaffordability.

hansvm 6y ago
One argument is that externalities aren't usually linearizable or localizable, so any attempt to tax them will result in loopholes that are patched with...you guessed it, more laws with their own loopholes growing into an insurmountable lovecraftian horror. Elaborating on the nonlinearizability, on a global scale it doesn't matter if a single person (or an entire city) drives 100 miles to work each day. In isolation their decision to drive has an externality of approximately $0 (wrt carbon). It's only a problem because of the global scale involved -- as an extremely simplistic (and wrong) model for the sake of fitting into a HN comment, there's a fuzzy cutoff point in total carbon production rates below which externalities are small and above which they're devastating and grow rapidly (and superlinearly). Adopting the obvious scheme of dividing total costs by total production, adding a healthy margin to further disincentivize carbon, and assigning that value as an externality tax (which gets updated periodically to never be too inaccurate) won't actually suffice to keep carbon production below the critical threshold because the marginal taxation of externalities for a unit of carbon is substantially less than the marginal externality itself. Underlying the above example is something that should be obvious to programmers -- not all problems can be efficiently solved by assigning a local value function to autonomous agents. In the case of people we value autonomy as a right in and of itself independently of its ability to benefit the whole, so many potential global optimizations are left on the table, but at the point where we need to enact taxes or legislation to prevent a global problem (e.g. the carbon issue) the illusion of autonomy no longer exists, and we might as well go straight for a solution that has a chance of working (e.g. carbon credits could work if implemented correctly) rather than handicapping ourselves with attempts to adjust our local reward function like trying to tax the externalities.
- ajuc 6y ago
  If your tax is linear whole classes of loopholes stop working (it doesn't matter how you split the usage - the total is still the same). > on a global scale it doesn't matter if a single person (or an entire city) drives 100 miles to work each day. In isolation their decision to drive has an externality of approximately $0 (wrt carbon) That's such a disingenuous argument. Their emissions add up. That's like saying at individual level gravity doesn't work because you don't feel a gravity from 1 atom. If you add oil tax the global consumption falls, it's only a matter of choosing a number big enough to make the total consumption fall below the threshold. I don't understand why you're trying to make it so complicated - we don't only have 1 try, we can introduce tax, look at effects, make corrections. Opening a valve in your tap isn't linear. But you can pretty easily choose the proper level after a few corrections.

SamReidHughes 6y ago

Aviation is responsible for 2.4% of CO2 emissions. A tiny fraction of overall transportation, electricity, and other sources. This is just a bitter journalist training the Guardian-reading climate change freakout crowd to hate the rich.

0xfaded 6y ago
Yet the wealthy are disproportionately represented in that 2.4%. You can literally look at it as a business class seat taking 3x the footprint of a cattle class seat. According to https://phys.org/news/2019-02-income-attitudes-affect-greenhouse-gas.html https://phys.org/news/2019-02-income-attitudes-affect-greenh..., transport related GHG emissions are most strongly correlated to income. So it's convenient to sweep air travel under the rug as a small contributor, when the "rich" are the biggest offenders.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  Exactly, the journalist is bitter that rich people can afford to fly airplanes. You can tell because it's a "data journalist" who forgot to mention she's writing about 2.4% of emissions.
cagenut 6y ago
This is a case of someone use a "technically correct" fact to make a misleading statement (at least in tone), and then following it up with a 'kill-the-messenger' political snipe at journalists. This is textbook contrarian reactionary misdirection. #1 - C02 emissions account for only about half of the overall GHG emissions impact of air travel. Anytime you see someone specifically isolating just the CO2 emissions you know they are either poorly informed or deliberately misleading you. #2 - It doesn't actually matter. If something is 2.5% of X or 5% of X and X needs to get to 0 then the distinction is without a difference. Its only the tone of phrasing that makes this sound like a counterpoint, when it is in fact not. #3 - unlike much of the other 95 percent of emissions airline travel is by far the most uniquely isolated to very wealthy (globally speaking) people. If you believe in any basic notion of "progressive taxation", and you apply that to GHG emissions, then getting rich (again globally relatively rich) people to stop flying or fly less is by far the most blatant outlier to address quickly and early.

sukilot 6y ago

This is carbon tax but with extra steps.

alpineidyll3 6y ago
I would support carbon taxes placed at the point of fossil fuel production, but not this. It's very likely the subsidy to non travelling countries would merely increase thier local Co2 emissions.
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
More precisely, its a carbon fee and dividend scheme with more steps. As that also has the effect of rewarding those who choose not yo fly with money from those who do fly, but eothoit the middleman and with the benefit that it applies to everything.
angio 6y ago
This is worse than a carbon tax: a carbon tax would incentivise airlines to be more carbon efficient, but this system of fixed air miles means there is no such incentive.

imagine99 6y ago

Many comments here (and elsewhere) argue for an "allowance", bans, prohibition, prohibitive taxation etc. which all boil down to the same thing. I find it difficult to understand why intelligent people (such as those on HN) who have themselves profited greatly from freedom and choice, who are often of a progressive and liberal [1] mindset adopt such a reactionary stance when it comes to dealing with climate change. It is utterly clear from our history that prohibiting or banning something has never really stopped us. If anything, people have invested all their brainpower to finding and exploiting loopholes and the more difficult and illegal something is, the more enticing and attractive it becomes to many. Wouldn't it be much better to throw our combined brainpower into developing ways to deal with climate change that come without curtailing, prohibiting and banning stuff? By all means, throw billions of dollars towards fundamental research to create breakthroughs in science and technology, such as airliners powered by renewable energy, methane-free meat production and large-scale carbon capture! We've done amazing feats before, we put people on the moon, we will probably put them on Mars, why shouldn't we be able to solve climate change and in the process advance our civilization to the next level? Personally, I'm convinced this will be the easier way compared to artificially limiting ourselves and others which is something that truly has never been sustainable in our history. Telling others what they can and cannot do has always ultimately led to bloodshed and fuelled sectarian and anti-democratic tendencies, always. I credit incredibly cheap and highly available international travel (for everyone from broke students, business travellers to seniors) with the peace and almost unprecedented level of cooperation between nations and people we have seen in places like Europe and elsewhere. Think of it this way: You are unlikely to vote for someone to go to war with countries you fly to on holiday every year, you are unlikely to want to bomb places with whom you have extensive and intertwined trading and manufacturing relationships, you're unlikely to join the army and go shoot people with whom you've broken bread and gotten drunk on your "incredibly cheap" international road trip with a no-frills airline on your gap year before college. Force everyone but the rich (who will ALWAYS be able to afford travelling internationally, no matter how high you tax it) back to rarely or never leaving their country, state or hometown and you'll grow a generation of reactionary hillbillies who get all their information second- or third-hand from the media if at all and whom you can rile up to go to war with "Oceania" or "Eastasia" or "throw out those pesky immigrants" with a little propaganda at any time. You'll throw civilization back a hundred years. If you, on the other hand, foster international relationships, exchange ideas and people freely, then you will spark innovation, ideas and cooperation and ideally you will get progress and better conditions almost as a by-product of international exchange. Smallmindedness, backward thinking and limited horizons have never benefitted humanity or any larger group of people in the long run. Innovators, inventors, internationally collaborating scientists and, yes, merchants and traders with an international focus are those who have brought us everything we have today. Stepping out of the (allegoric [2]) cave was once the first step to advance as a species. I'd argue that in many ways international travel and freedom of movement is us stepping out of our caves again today. Into a bigger world of knowledge, cooperation and scientific advancement. Limiting our horizons (by whatever means) is not the solution. -- [1] not in the political meaning of these words as commonly used in the US, but to mean forward-thinking and open to progress [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave