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The climate doesn't care who benefits from emissions, only how much is emitted. Air travel is much harder to do without fossil fuels than ground transport or e
by samatman 4y ago
The climate doesn't care who benefits from emissions, only how much is emitted.
Air travel is much harder to do without fossil fuels than ground transport or electrical generation, and is essential to civilization on the basis of cargo alone. It's simply not an efficient target for change right now.
- morsch 4y agoSome air travel may be essential to civilization, most of it isn't. We don't really have a way to determine which is which on a societal level. The best we can do is price in the externalities (and deal with income disparity, but that's an orthogonal issue).
- samatman 4y agoAir travel itself is essential, it's one of the defining abilities of the modern world and can't just be shut off. It would be corrosive to try and separate the essential from the frivolous, I agree with that. I favor carbon taxes that dig an industries grave for it: such as taxing coal to build nuclear, wind, solar. That's not feasible with air travel yet, which leaves a consumption tax, those are regressive.
- morsch 4y agoYou can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable, or alternatives for work trips, or local tourism, or slow tourism, all kinds of things. Air travel itself may be defining and I don't envision getting rid of it; but the weekend trip to Vegas or Mallorca or Delhi is a defining feature of the present that is not sustainable in the future. Taxing dirty electricity generation is regressive taxation, too; like I said, it's an original issue. A first step would be to pay out all the generated carbon taxes on a per capita basis.
- toma_caliente 4y ago> You can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable. This would never happen in America because it would require Americans addressing their views on transit and addressing their pitiful consumer rail or even consumer bus industries.
- uoaei 4y agoInflation and corporate profiteering re: oil prices are having much the same effect anyway.
- toma_caliente 4y agoIs it? I see one side blaming Biden and the other side blaming corporations but neither side is saying we need better public transit.
- b3morales 4y agoHow much cargo actually goes by air? Last I knew boats (ships) were the vast, vast majority of cargo transport, followed by trains, then trucks, with planes coming a distant last.
- samatman 4y agoThis says nothing about the importance of the cargo which is transported by plane. Given the much higher expense, we would expect this cargo to be more important, not less. An extreme example would be organs.
- b3morales 4y agoSure, but I can't agree that our civilization would collapse, or even be at serious risk, if tomorrow airfoils suddenly no longer functioned.