3 ms·

> the availability for the select few that need it is still a good thing If you actually believe that, you might want to look deeper into the environmental imp

> the availability for the select few that need it is still a good thing If you actually believe that, you might want to look deeper into the environmental impact of the lifestyle of the super-rich. A very large percentage of aircraft emissions comes from frequent flyers already and an even more disproportionate part is by charter flights and private aircraft.

iso1631 5y ago
Aircraft emissions come from the engines. Charge a carbon tax. If one set of people (specialist field engineers for example) are disproportionatly causing mroe emissions, they (or their company) will pay disproportionately pay more.
- lhorie 5y ago
  The general counter-argument to this position is that it assumes over-consumption to be ok. In other words, saying "X put Y tons of CO2 in the air, they must pay for carbon offsets" doesn't necessarily disincentivize the CO2 to be put out in the first place (meaning there's no downward pressure to reduce consumption of other ancillary resources, e.g. oil extraction, metal mines, etc) Case in point: bottled water costs a fortune compared to the equivalent amount of tap water (despite being basically the same or worse quality in many cases) and yet people are more than happy to pay the premium. The CA surtax on plastic bottles is but a blip on the radar for most consumers there. It's similar to the discussion about how one side says having recycling programs makes over-consumption forgivable, but in practice, everything breaks down because manufacturers meld different recyclable materials together in such a way that makes the package unrecycleable, or use plastic types that cannot be sold by recyclers due to low demand, or consumers contaminate their trash, etc, and we just end up trucking mountains and mountains of unusable bales of materials to landfills somewhere instead.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    If the cost of carbon is the cost to rip it out of the air then everything works out let them fly as much as they want. We don't really care per say about reducing consumption just fixing the side effects of consumption (green house effects).
    - lhorie 5y ago
      > If the cost of carbon is the cost to rip it out of the air then everything works out let them fly as much as they want The "let people do whatever as long as someone else picks up the externalized costs" is exactly how we got to the situation where the US was exporting plastic waste to China only to realize we now have a microplastics clusterfuck in our hands. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about the assumption that carbon offsets work 100% efficiently by merely looking at the amount of money transferring hands.
      - iso1631 5y ago
        We need to fix that problem - especially the apportionment of carbon output (both from physical goods and from things like bitcoin). Political capital is better spent on that than on creating trivial loopholes while charging MSF doctors a fortune because they fly a to a warzone dozen times a year

iso1631 5y ago

Aircraft emissions come from the engines. Charge a carbon tax. If one set of people (specialist field engineers for example) are disproportionatly causing mroe emissions, they (or their company) will pay disproportionately pay more.

lhorie 5y ago
The general counter-argument to this position is that it assumes over-consumption to be ok. In other words, saying "X put Y tons of CO2 in the air, they must pay for carbon offsets" doesn't necessarily disincentivize the CO2 to be put out in the first place (meaning there's no downward pressure to reduce consumption of other ancillary resources, e.g. oil extraction, metal mines, etc) Case in point: bottled water costs a fortune compared to the equivalent amount of tap water (despite being basically the same or worse quality in many cases) and yet people are more than happy to pay the premium. The CA surtax on plastic bottles is but a blip on the radar for most consumers there. It's similar to the discussion about how one side says having recycling programs makes over-consumption forgivable, but in practice, everything breaks down because manufacturers meld different recyclable materials together in such a way that makes the package unrecycleable, or use plastic types that cannot be sold by recyclers due to low demand, or consumers contaminate their trash, etc, and we just end up trucking mountains and mountains of unusable bales of materials to landfills somewhere instead.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  If the cost of carbon is the cost to rip it out of the air then everything works out let them fly as much as they want. We don't really care per say about reducing consumption just fixing the side effects of consumption (green house effects).
  - lhorie 5y ago
    > If the cost of carbon is the cost to rip it out of the air then everything works out let them fly as much as they want The "let people do whatever as long as someone else picks up the externalized costs" is exactly how we got to the situation where the US was exporting plastic waste to China only to realize we now have a microplastics clusterfuck in our hands. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about the assumption that carbon offsets work 100% efficiently by merely looking at the amount of money transferring hands.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      We need to fix that problem - especially the apportionment of carbon output (both from physical goods and from things like bitcoin). Political capital is better spent on that than on creating trivial loopholes while charging MSF doctors a fortune because they fly a to a warzone dozen times a year