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A man’s lonely fight to ban private jets

93 points by optimalsolver 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago
Good intention but in my opinion this is a non-starter. I believe a more reasonable approach that could get traction would be to invest in research groups that are trying to improve fuels and jet engine efficiency. This would actually make a dent in emissions and fuel waste and most notably, the bottom line for airline costs. Money talks. If you can show that there is potential to save {x} percentage in fuel costs for an airline, they will get behind it and might even help fund it. For short trips one possibility may eventually be EVTol aircraft using renewable energy. Those are evolving weekly and making steady progress. Some commercial airlines are already buying them and planning to use them to get people to/from the airport. One advantage these will have over private jets is the ability to land on private helipads. These only have a tiny fraction of the range of a private jet however and also do not have the same speed rating and will only fill a tiny fraction of the business needs.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I think the most reasonable approach is definitely the one mentioned by this activist: “The most privileged people should be the ones who start sacrificing first,” Huber told Motherboard. “It’s unfair to ask the poorest people to give up polluting activities first if the richest don’t have to give up anything.” Now if you're starting from there and with the response "well they won't" then your plan is an answer to the question "how can we make them?" but I don't think it's a particularly effective one compared to some others that it's easy to imagine.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > “The most privileged people should be the ones who start sacrificing first,” He's right but, unfortunately, this is one of the best jokes i ever heard. The most privileged people are also the most greedy.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yes I don't think we want to wait for them to decide to care.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    And I think it is pretty reasonable to start limiting things from things that even those people don't really need. Private planes, super yachts, super and hyper cars. Mansions. The stuff 99% of world population successfully live without. After this we can ask regular people to maybe trade for more efficient cars, houses and so on. Maybe consider impacts of holidays.
  - gruez 4y ago
    > I think the most reasonable approach is definitely the one mentioned by this activist: “The most privileged people should be the ones who start sacrificing first,” Huber told Motherboard. “It’s unfair to ask the poorest people to give up polluting activities first if the richest don’t have to give up anything.” No, the most reasonable solution is for everyone to be responsible for their own pollution. If you generate 15 tons of co2, you need to either eliminate those emissions or find some way of offsetting them. Who cares if you're a global jet setter generating hundreds of tons of co2, if you're properly sequestering them? "Banning private jets" is how we go from something reasonable (ie. "you shouldn't be able to damage a shared resource") to moralizing (ie. "you should be prevented from doing something, even though it's not harming others").
    - rurp 4y ago
      I agree with the principle here, but worry that carbon offsets will always be a lossy abstraction. My prior is that any metric that is hard to measure, while having strong financial incentives to game, will be heavily gamed. Offsets are hard to track and measure accurately and we've already seen a lot of dishonest behavior in this area. This is not to say that banning private jets is the answer, but I think the actual solution (if we get to one) will have to be a messy hodgepodge of approaches.
    - TremendousJudge 4y ago
      >Who cares if you're a global jet setter generating hundreds of tons of co2, if you're properly sequestering them "Sequestering" carbon is, right now, complete science fiction. Nobody can actually do it. The most that can be done is paying to maybe prevent other people from emitting -- but the emissions always go up. So if one day proper carbon capture technologies exist, this argument can be made. Right now, it can't.
      - gruez 4y ago
        >Nobody can actually do it They can. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/these-companies-are-sucking-carbon-from-the-atmosphere.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/these-companies-are-sucking-...
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    I am going to stand by the "well they won't" because all the people I know with private jets most certainly won't. Even if the government used eminent domain and forced buy-backs at $10-$50 million per aircraft they would just buy something that skirts the line to meet business needs. More likely they would just buy out all the seats on a 737 so they can change the flight plan, leading to even more waste and longer lines at airports but that won't meet the needs of business folks that are landing at small class C airports and thereby leading to lawsuits. Folks land near me all the time in their private jets. The nearest commercial airline is a couple hours away. Time is money and is also critical for back-to-back business meetings. There are likely a small number of celebrities that use these aircraft to avoid sitting with us plebs and for status but the vast majority of them are use for business purposes that can not be replaced by commercial airlines in a manor that business folks would consider acceptable. Most of these people have legal teams that would battle any action taken by the government and in the end we would just waste vast amounts of taxpayer funds. That may sound defeatist but we have all witnessed the legal fallout of smaller changes.
    - ahtihn 4y ago
      What kind of business reasons are there for travel that can't be replaced by videoconferencing?
      - LinuxBender 4y ago
        That is a good question. One use case would be signing documents in person when that and a public notary is required. Some legal documents can be pseudo signed over various document sharing platforms but some business deals do not support this, especially when talking about acquisitions, mergers and sales of multi-million/billion dollar companies. Another disputable use case would be the human interaction factor when making large business deals. Historically people in person will be favored over people online. There are debates about this use case but money talks and people will go where the money is. Another use case are deals that require negotiating and/or discussing things too sensitive to discuss online and that is a topic in and of itself.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    We don't really have noblesse oblige these days. (If we ever did)
    - gruez 4y ago
      It got replaced with progressive taxation, which is much better defined than whatever "noblesse oblige" stood for. > 1. Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly. > 2. (Figuratively) One must act in a fashion that conforms to one's position and privileges with which one has been born, bestowed and/or has earned. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
- etrautmann 4y ago
  Jevon's paradox comes to mind here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#:~:text=In%20economics%2C%20the%20Jevons%20paradox,demand%2C%20negating%20the%20efficiency%20gains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#:~:text=In%20ec.... (yes this is frequently brought up here on hn...)
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    It's also not like a fact or law of nature or anything. Just kind of an idea of something that might happen.
- fomine3 4y ago
  What about to encourage (or enforce) replacement of older private jets? Older jets should be not good for fuel efficiency, but it's cheap so TCO could be cheap.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    Absolutely. Incentive programs to upgrade the engines for tax breaks and trade-in discounts would surely get their attention as it would extend the life of the aircraft and reduce maintenance costs. Newer engines may also be quieter and could mean less complaints about noise in some small airports.
fiat_fandango 4y ago
This article reads with so much ego I have to wonder if Vice is planning on starting a "climate satire" column. The biggest irony is at some level the axis of control here is the government, a government which uses more fossil fuels flying weapons around than all of the ludicrously rich expel flying their expensive aeronautical toys combined. It's Vice, so unfortunately I'm just not that surprised this article sounds like it was written by an irate english major who just discovered /r/socialism - who would proceed to yell at engineering majors on campus interning at Boeing because they're "complicit with ruining the future". Improving education is how we avoid this kind of dissonance among people who actually want to improve the world or effect actual climate progress.
ffggvv 4y ago
120% on board with this. why can all these woke celebrities and politicians tell me I cant buy the car i want but they pollute the equivalent to 2000 people a year each. maybe they should be first to make a “sacrificel
- hn_version_0023 4y ago
  In the past we used to make the sacrifice ourselves, by throwing such beautifully perfect people into a volcano or similar.
  - stevenwoo 4y ago
    The book Ministry for the Future has a melange of ideas in the plot, one of which is a world wide terrorist movement against environmental destruction that uses drones to crash every private plane with extremely rich people on one day to discourage their usage, it's sort of a variation on the Unabomber and 9/11. It seems like it would require wide ranging conspiracy that it would be infeasible, things would have to be really bad environment wise but at the same time there would be enough capital and people in the movement to support a large scale coordinated attack, there are so many ideas thrown in there that this part is not really explored that much in the book after building up the rationale behind the movement.
    - suoduandao2 4y ago
      Or one ecoterrorist able to play a long game slips a backdoor into a widely-bought drone's software.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > celebrities and politicians tell me I cant buy the car I want What are you talking about? When has someone told you you cannot buy the car you want?
  - ffggvv 4y ago
    regulations which ban them from being made
yieldcrv 4y ago
One upside of banning private jets is that it would make the security theatre at the airport non-optional (from a legal perspective), and could more easily result in its abolition via the courts Hanging on by a thread
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I doubt it. I remember the uproar about those body scanners that look through your clothes. That seemed to be the closest we came towards actually re-evaluating the TSA and what kinds of measures they make passengers take at the airport. Nothing came of it, and now it is normalized. I don't believe forcing CEOs and celebrities to go through the same process as us proles will result in any meaningful change.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    They did tweak those so it just displays a generic person icon with overlays of findings and not a pseudo-nude image.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Only takes someone to challenge it again in court after the other avenue is cut-off Not really involving political pressure to an unelected executive branch entrepreneur
alkonaut 4y ago
Banning private jets is a bit silly and seems difficult tbh. Tax jet fuel enough first (pick any high cost European country for a good reference on what CO2 taxes should be per gallon or liter). Today it’s a tragedy that air travels enjoy very low fuel taxes while better forms of transportation has higher taxes.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Today it’s a tragedy that air travels enjoy very low fuel taxes while better forms of transportation has higher taxes. that's more of an artifact of what "fuel taxes" represent. For roads at least they're not typically taxed as some sort of sin/environment tax, they're taxed as a way to finance road maintenance. Obviously that does not apply to airplanes. I'm not sure about other "better forms of transportation" (trains? boats?) have fuel taxes.
  - afiori 4y ago
    Road/fuel taxes almost nowhere cover road maintenance and increasing fuel taxes for environmental reasons is extremely common in Europe.
    - gruez 4y ago
      That might be the case, but that doesn't mean the tax is primarily used to finance road construction. The availability of fuels with reduced taxes[1] (eg. for agricultural or domestic purposes) makes it obvious that it's not about carbon emissions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dye
      - afiori 4y ago
        Agriculture is heavily regulated and subsidized in many ways. It is perfectly reasonable to give farms access to lower cost fuel to allow for lower cost of food. The only thing this proves is that low emission is not the only priority of a government. For an example of my claim look at [0] which started as protest from rural France for an environmental fuel tax. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
anovikov 4y ago
What will motivate people to develop their careers and businesses beyond the middle class level? Flying a private jet is about the only thing of any benefit that someone making $1M per year cannot do while someone making $10M per year can.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  If that's what motivates you most as an entrepreneur you're not going to be making $10M, let alone $1M. And that's a good thing.
  - anovikov 4y ago
    What are other meaningful ways to spend that money? All i can think of are rare wines but that also needs some taste which by far not everyone can develop. At $1M, you can already live anywhere, or nowhere in particular, you can already afford elite school for your kids and luxury cars. There's little left to strive for consumption-wise. At $10M? A very large house/mansion and lots of personal servants? That's hardly environmentally better than a jet, and is very much out of fashion today, people don't like to be tied to one place like that. A Manhattan penthouse? I don't even know. Art collection? A way to be tricked out of your money by 'advisors'.
    - MandieD 4y ago
      I dunno, more effectively support causes you already donate to? Help less well-off people participate more fully in your hobbies? Fund cool projects in your hobby?
vwcx 4y ago
Similar to the level of healthcare one receives in the US as a function of wealth, so is the level of mobility. Litmus test: if cost was not a factor, wouldn't you prefer to travel via private jet? Tells me that we're still hurting for better mobility in this world.
- defrost 4y ago
  For a decade or so my preferred method of flight for several million line kilometers about the planet was at 70 m/s 120 odd feet above the ground in a STOL high wing prop airframe. Climate wise that cost was amortised from metals consumption by the developed world. If I'm going to consume vast quantities of resources then I do like to see benefits flow to as many others as possible. Now that I'm in a rural area I see large quantities of fuel consumed by tractors to put grain into the mouths of millions.
- beefield 4y ago
  Well, if cost was not a factor, I'd prefer traveling long hauls with a space visiting rocket thingy, not a mundane private jet. Shorter ones, again, if cost was not a factor, I'd prefer high-speed rail or supersonic Hyperloop stations next to my origin and destination.
jefftk 4y ago
Instead of banning them, tax airplane emissions enough to remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the air. At scale this is in the range of $150/T. For example, if you fly commercial BOS-LAX for $500 this means your flight costs something like $200 in carbon removal, while if you're in a large private jet emitting 150x you'd need to pay more like $30k.
- elil17 4y ago
  Just because the environmental offsets could be done, that doesn't mean it's a good way for society to spend our limited resources. You could just ban private jets, still tax the people who could afford to use them, and tax fuel for all modes of transit.
KoftaBob 4y ago
Another example of the frequently touted idea that to show conviction in a problem, you must either support the non-compromising right to do it (ex: 2nd amendment absolutists), or the non-compromising banning of it (the guy in this article). To be quite frank, this is a very childish way of viewing the world. I get that media companies like Vice portray things in this way because it's an easy way to get views, and therefore makes for a headline that's an easy way to get upvotes. We should aim to be better than this.
dboreham 4y ago
What category of person flies often on private jets? Politicians.
- sgt 4y ago
  That won't be banned of course. Not even taxed additionally. Well, maybe that's OK, since there's near unlimited funds paid for by the tax payers.
- ct0 4y ago
  Entirely untrue. Politicians are not the only type of role that a person on a private jet falls under. Executives, Religious, etc.
- stephenhuey 4y ago
  Actually, I think businessmen, generally wealthy private citizens and also famous celebrities wanting to avoid the spotlight more commonly fly on private jets than politicians, at least in the USA. It's tough flying back and forth to your home state almost every week and maybe not seeing your family very much, and often they tell the airlines in advance to reserve seats on more than one flight to ensure they make it home. This talks about how it's not as luxurious as it might sound: https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/11/21/members-of-congress-mark-walker-fly-out-of-dc-airport-routine/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/11/21/members-of-congress... There is a lot of info online about the travel allowances members of Congress in the USA have: https://liveandletsfly.com/politicians-first-class/ https://liveandletsfly.com/politicians-first-class/ I didn't know it was a recent change that began allowing Senators to use their allowance to book private: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/senate-rule-change-charter-flights/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/senate-rule-change-c... When there is a general expectation that these people spend a lot of time in both DC and their home where the people they represent are living, I'm not sure how you get around their need to be able to pay for all that traveling. It's part of our expectations in how they do their job. If you want to pick on someone, probably best to focus on the list at the beginning of my comment, but honestly, many of them have compelling reasons, e.g. no one is hassling you or me everywhere we go because half of the people in the country recognize us. :)
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Don't ban. Tax it and make the money go into carbon capture and green energy. Each time they flight, make them remove in Co2 the equivalent of a 100 times their consumption and produce a 100 time the energy consumed. Then make it very trendy to have your own jet, like the highest level of social status.
- kennend3 4y ago
  "Taxing" for change rarely works. what happens is the "jet fuel tax" goes into general government revenue. Politicians seeking re-election use said money to create new programs instead and effectively "buy votes" with your own money. Can you provide an example of this ever working? I can give you several of it being an absolute failure and having no impact. In Canada we have "sin" taxes (Alcohol, cigarettes, gasoline). - Smoking has declined, but more because of the negative marketing (ugly pictures on a pack of smokes). It is also less "socially acceptable" and so young people dont pick up the habit. - Alcohol - Slight downtrend, but sales are still very strong https://www.statista.com/topics/2998/alcohol-consumption-in-canada/#dossierKeyfigures https://www.statista.com/topics/2998/alcohol-consumption-in-... - Gas https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=2310006601 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=231000.... Covid caused a decline, but it will trend back up.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > - Smoking has declined, but more because of the negative marketing (ugly pictures on a pack of smokes). It is also less "socially acceptable" and so young people dont pick up the habit. These things don't happen on their own. Canaday's Tobacco Strategy, presumably funded with money that has to come from somewhere (e.g. sin taxes): https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/healthy-living/canada-tobacco-strategy.html https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications...
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    Are you saying that price has no effect on demand?
- impossiblefork 4y ago
driverdan 4y ago
As others have pointed out, the solution to this is not a ban but a carbon tax. All negative externalities should be taxed appropriately. If someone still wants to have a private jet they can but must pay the full costs of it instead of offloading the pollution cost on society.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- perilunar 4y ago
  Yes. We as a society should stop taxing income and profits, and start taxing resource use and externalities. Go full Georgist.
- frognumber 4y ago
  Taxes have the additional upside of leading to fewer stupid consequences. A lot of the EU bans means if you're designing some kind of e.g. medical life-saving device of which there will be a few dozen units produced total, you can't do a whole bunch of things designed to make consumer devices better. The laws are on the surface reasonable, but they fail in corner cases. Corner cases sometimes go to be important. Housing in the US is a big one. Building codes don't allow experimentation. Charge me a grand for using lead, the wrong connector, or whatever, but please don't ban me.
- viktorcode 4y ago
  They will, because a typical private plane passenger is already someone who chose to pay extra. The carbon tax will hit economy passengers harder.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Here's one thing that i don't get about the climate change movement. It would seem that the biggest contributors to climate change and pollution are developing nations that use carbon based energy (ie coal plants in China, Russia, India, etc). With that said it seems that the only real solution would be to convince these countries to adopt greener energy (which is unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons) which leads me to ask: is anything else really making a difference? We can talk about adopting plant based diets, talk about banning private jets and mandating electric cars, there's lot of things that we can do, but the question is any of that even going to matter when the vast majority of global warming is contributed to by other nations that we have no control over. Furthermore I think we have to weigh our sacrifices against the impact. If were going to ban something like private jets, there better be a real impact. What I see now though is, if we ban private jets for example, we will bear the cost of that ban without any of the associated green benefits because again, the developing nations with their coal plants are pumping out exponentially more greenhouse gasses than any private jet would. My conclusion is rather cynical but I don't see why we should be making sacrifices, when none of those sacrifices lead to quantifiable results. And what I particularly don't like now is that we seem to be making policy not on what will make a quantifiable difference in climate, but rather what will make us feel like we're making an impact. It's really a more broad issue than that, we as a society seem to have ceased trying to actually solve problems, rather we "solve" them by doing something that makes us feel good, regardless of whether than thing actually has any real impact.
- doopy1 4y ago
  I agree with you, but it's also one of those things where if everyone did their part, the impact would be quantifiable. I think these things have compounding effects. The changes have to start somewhere.
- next_xibalba 4y ago
  The lack of prioritized problem solving amongst the climate activist set sure does seem to imply some inconvenient questions about their motivations. Either that or their numeracy and competence. My personal conclusion is that any "solution" which significantly limits either a) economic growth, b) national security, and/or c) personal freedoms and choice is doomed to fail. Rather, the only practicable solutions will be technological (as throughout history has always been the case).
viktorcode 4y ago
> Not only is flying in a private plane just about the worst thing one can do for the planet, it is also one of the habits with the easiest substitutes. Apparently, Vice don't get that private jets are also used to get someone into a random location in a shortest time possible. There's a demand, but no substitute for that.
geff82 4y ago
The problem with banning private jets for reasons of climate change: it is nothing but symbolism. A private jet user might be personally guilty of having a large carbon footprint, but as there are only comparatively small numbers of private jets flying around, fighting against them serves the planet about nothing. Changing the way we produce electricity, the way we power our cars, the way we heat homes, on the other hand, can have MASSIVE effects on carbon emissions (without sacrificing too much - just as an example: my rather new house has thick walls, so in summer we do not need a cooler and in winter a heat pump is enough).
- scrumper 4y ago
  Don't forget shipping too - a huge, huge contributor. Itself dwarfed by agriculture... Humans go for symbolism though and hate hypocrites. Banning private jets has a delicious reveng-y feeling against the sanctimonious super-rich lecturing us about reducing our footprint - anyone who's flown commercial knows exactly how much it would hurt them. I'm against the ban because it's pointless, and because the GA sector isn't minuscule so there are a lot of jobs at risk, and because once they ban private jets they'll come for my powerboat. Better I think to just suck some more out of their bloated wallets to cover the externalities. Earmarked Jet-A taxes, for example. Mandatory offsetting.
wszfahwbwbaha 4y ago
In this thread: a group of temporarily embarrassed billionaires over and over saying banning private jets is a bad idea for the dumbest reasons. Hacker news is a cesspool when it comes to climate change.
cpascal 4y ago
Air travel contributes to about 2.5% of greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for about 3.5% of anthropogenic warming [1]. In my opinion, there is an outsized amount of public outrage going on and we should be directing this outrage toward larger sources of anthropogenic warming. There is only so much people can take before they get fatigued. "Spending" this outrage on something that is only 3.5% of the problem seems wasteful. [1]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-commercial-aviation https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...
jacknews 4y ago
This seems like the worst kind of envy politics. Why not also ban motor racing, private yachts. mansions, excessive jewellery, etc, etc. The right answer is to tax it. The 'business class ticket' alternative given in the article is not very realistic. I believe most private jet travel is for business, and it means people can fly directly between locations, at whatever time is convenient, which might be difficult or highly inconvenient otherwise. And exchanging the hell that is airports and airport security for a dedicated private jet terminal is surely worth paying for if you travel frequently.
entropicgravity 4y ago
And ban sexy young mistresses while we're at it. I'm not jealous, this is about saving the planet.

93 points by optimalsolver 4y ago

Good intention but in my opinion this is a non-starter. I believe a more reasonable approach that could get traction would be to invest in research groups that are trying to improve fuels and jet engine efficiency. This would actually make a dent in emissions and fuel waste and most notably, the bottom line for airline costs. Money talks. If you can show that there is potential to save {x} percentage in fuel costs for an airline, they will get behind it and might even help fund it. For short trips one possibility may eventually be EVTol aircraft using renewable energy. Those are evolving weekly and making steady progress. Some commercial airlines are already buying them and planning to use them to get people to/from the airport. One advantage these will have over private jets is the ability to land on private helipads. These only have a tiny fraction of the range of a private jet however and also do not have the same speed rating and will only fill a tiny fraction of the business needs.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I think the most reasonable approach is definitely the one mentioned by this activist: “The most privileged people should be the ones who start sacrificing first,” Huber told Motherboard. “It’s unfair to ask the poorest people to give up polluting activities first if the richest don’t have to give up anything.” Now if you're starting from there and with the response "well they won't" then your plan is an answer to the question "how can we make them?" but I don't think it's a particularly effective one compared to some others that it's easy to imagine.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > “The most privileged people should be the ones who start sacrificing first,” He's right but, unfortunately, this is one of the best jokes i ever heard. The most privileged people are also the most greedy.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yes I don't think we want to wait for them to decide to care.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And I think it is pretty reasonable to start limiting things from things that even those people don't really need. Private planes, super yachts, super and hyper cars. Mansions. The stuff 99% of world population successfully live without. After this we can ask regular people to maybe trade for more efficient cars, houses and so on. Maybe consider impacts of holidays.
- gruez 4y ago
  > I think the most reasonable approach is definitely the one mentioned by this activist: “The most privileged people should be the ones who start sacrificing first,” Huber told Motherboard. “It’s unfair to ask the poorest people to give up polluting activities first if the richest don’t have to give up anything.” No, the most reasonable solution is for everyone to be responsible for their own pollution. If you generate 15 tons of co2, you need to either eliminate those emissions or find some way of offsetting them. Who cares if you're a global jet setter generating hundreds of tons of co2, if you're properly sequestering them? "Banning private jets" is how we go from something reasonable (ie. "you shouldn't be able to damage a shared resource") to moralizing (ie. "you should be prevented from doing something, even though it's not harming others").
  - rurp 4y ago
    I agree with the principle here, but worry that carbon offsets will always be a lossy abstraction. My prior is that any metric that is hard to measure, while having strong financial incentives to game, will be heavily gamed. Offsets are hard to track and measure accurately and we've already seen a lot of dishonest behavior in this area. This is not to say that banning private jets is the answer, but I think the actual solution (if we get to one) will have to be a messy hodgepodge of approaches.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    >Who cares if you're a global jet setter generating hundreds of tons of co2, if you're properly sequestering them "Sequestering" carbon is, right now, complete science fiction. Nobody can actually do it. The most that can be done is paying to maybe prevent other people from emitting -- but the emissions always go up. So if one day proper carbon capture technologies exist, this argument can be made. Right now, it can't.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >Nobody can actually do it They can. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/these-companies-are-sucking-carbon-from-the-atmosphere.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/these-companies-are-sucking-...
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I am going to stand by the "well they won't" because all the people I know with private jets most certainly won't. Even if the government used eminent domain and forced buy-backs at $10-$50 million per aircraft they would just buy something that skirts the line to meet business needs. More likely they would just buy out all the seats on a 737 so they can change the flight plan, leading to even more waste and longer lines at airports but that won't meet the needs of business folks that are landing at small class C airports and thereby leading to lawsuits. Folks land near me all the time in their private jets. The nearest commercial airline is a couple hours away. Time is money and is also critical for back-to-back business meetings. There are likely a small number of celebrities that use these aircraft to avoid sitting with us plebs and for status but the vast majority of them are use for business purposes that can not be replaced by commercial airlines in a manor that business folks would consider acceptable. Most of these people have legal teams that would battle any action taken by the government and in the end we would just waste vast amounts of taxpayer funds. That may sound defeatist but we have all witnessed the legal fallout of smaller changes.
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    What kind of business reasons are there for travel that can't be replaced by videoconferencing?
    - LinuxBender 4y ago
      That is a good question. One use case would be signing documents in person when that and a public notary is required. Some legal documents can be pseudo signed over various document sharing platforms but some business deals do not support this, especially when talking about acquisitions, mergers and sales of multi-million/billion dollar companies. Another disputable use case would be the human interaction factor when making large business deals. Historically people in person will be favored over people online. There are debates about this use case but money talks and people will go where the money is. Another use case are deals that require negotiating and/or discussing things too sensitive to discuss online and that is a topic in and of itself.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
- HPsquared 4y ago
  We don't really have noblesse oblige these days. (If we ever did)
  - gruez 4y ago
    It got replaced with progressive taxation, which is much better defined than whatever "noblesse oblige" stood for. > 1. Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly. > 2. (Figuratively) One must act in a fashion that conforms to one's position and privileges with which one has been born, bestowed and/or has earned. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
etrautmann 4y ago
Jevon's paradox comes to mind here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#:~:text=In%20economics%2C%20the%20Jevons%20paradox,demand%2C%20negating%20the%20efficiency%20gains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#:~:text=In%20ec.... (yes this is frequently brought up here on hn...)
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  It's also not like a fact or law of nature or anything. Just kind of an idea of something that might happen.
fomine3 4y ago
What about to encourage (or enforce) replacement of older private jets? Older jets should be not good for fuel efficiency, but it's cheap so TCO could be cheap.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Absolutely. Incentive programs to upgrade the engines for tax breaks and trade-in discounts would surely get their attention as it would extend the life of the aircraft and reduce maintenance costs. Newer engines may also be quieter and could mean less complaints about noise in some small airports.

fiat_fandango 4y ago

This article reads with so much ego I have to wonder if Vice is planning on starting a "climate satire" column. The biggest irony is at some level the axis of control here is the government, a government which uses more fossil fuels flying weapons around than all of the ludicrously rich expel flying their expensive aeronautical toys combined. It's Vice, so unfortunately I'm just not that surprised this article sounds like it was written by an irate english major who just discovered /r/socialism - who would proceed to yell at engineering majors on campus interning at Boeing because they're "complicit with ruining the future". Improving education is how we avoid this kind of dissonance among people who actually want to improve the world or effect actual climate progress.

ffggvv 4y ago

120% on board with this. why can all these woke celebrities and politicians tell me I cant buy the car i want but they pollute the equivalent to 2000 people a year each. maybe they should be first to make a “sacrificel

hn_version_0023 4y ago
In the past we used to make the sacrifice ourselves, by throwing such beautifully perfect people into a volcano or similar.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  The book Ministry for the Future has a melange of ideas in the plot, one of which is a world wide terrorist movement against environmental destruction that uses drones to crash every private plane with extremely rich people on one day to discourage their usage, it's sort of a variation on the Unabomber and 9/11. It seems like it would require wide ranging conspiracy that it would be infeasible, things would have to be really bad environment wise but at the same time there would be enough capital and people in the movement to support a large scale coordinated attack, there are so many ideas thrown in there that this part is not really explored that much in the book after building up the rationale behind the movement.
  - suoduandao2 4y ago
    Or one ecoterrorist able to play a long game slips a backdoor into a widely-bought drone's software.
andsoitis 4y ago
> celebrities and politicians tell me I cant buy the car I want What are you talking about? When has someone told you you cannot buy the car you want?
- ffggvv 4y ago
  regulations which ban them from being made

yieldcrv 4y ago

One upside of banning private jets is that it would make the security theatre at the airport non-optional (from a legal perspective), and could more easily result in its abolition via the courts Hanging on by a thread

BitwiseFool 4y ago
I doubt it. I remember the uproar about those body scanners that look through your clothes. That seemed to be the closest we came towards actually re-evaluating the TSA and what kinds of measures they make passengers take at the airport. Nothing came of it, and now it is normalized. I don't believe forcing CEOs and celebrities to go through the same process as us proles will result in any meaningful change.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  They did tweak those so it just displays a generic person icon with overlays of findings and not a pseudo-nude image.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Only takes someone to challenge it again in court after the other avenue is cut-off Not really involving political pressure to an unelected executive branch entrepreneur

alkonaut 4y ago

Banning private jets is a bit silly and seems difficult tbh. Tax jet fuel enough first (pick any high cost European country for a good reference on what CO2 taxes should be per gallon or liter). Today it’s a tragedy that air travels enjoy very low fuel taxes while better forms of transportation has higher taxes.

gruez 4y ago
>Today it’s a tragedy that air travels enjoy very low fuel taxes while better forms of transportation has higher taxes. that's more of an artifact of what "fuel taxes" represent. For roads at least they're not typically taxed as some sort of sin/environment tax, they're taxed as a way to finance road maintenance. Obviously that does not apply to airplanes. I'm not sure about other "better forms of transportation" (trains? boats?) have fuel taxes.
- afiori 4y ago
  Road/fuel taxes almost nowhere cover road maintenance and increasing fuel taxes for environmental reasons is extremely common in Europe.
  - gruez 4y ago
    That might be the case, but that doesn't mean the tax is primarily used to finance road construction. The availability of fuels with reduced taxes[1] (eg. for agricultural or domestic purposes) makes it obvious that it's not about carbon emissions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dye
    - afiori 4y ago
      Agriculture is heavily regulated and subsidized in many ways. It is perfectly reasonable to give farms access to lower cost fuel to allow for lower cost of food. The only thing this proves is that low emission is not the only priority of a government. For an example of my claim look at [0] which started as protest from rural France for an environmental fuel tax. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

anovikov 4y ago

What will motivate people to develop their careers and businesses beyond the middle class level? Flying a private jet is about the only thing of any benefit that someone making $1M per year cannot do while someone making $10M per year can.

tjpnz 4y ago
If that's what motivates you most as an entrepreneur you're not going to be making $10M, let alone $1M. And that's a good thing.
- anovikov 4y ago
  What are other meaningful ways to spend that money? All i can think of are rare wines but that also needs some taste which by far not everyone can develop. At $1M, you can already live anywhere, or nowhere in particular, you can already afford elite school for your kids and luxury cars. There's little left to strive for consumption-wise. At $10M? A very large house/mansion and lots of personal servants? That's hardly environmentally better than a jet, and is very much out of fashion today, people don't like to be tied to one place like that. A Manhattan penthouse? I don't even know. Art collection? A way to be tricked out of your money by 'advisors'.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    I dunno, more effectively support causes you already donate to? Help less well-off people participate more fully in your hobbies? Fund cool projects in your hobby?

vwcx 4y ago

Similar to the level of healthcare one receives in the US as a function of wealth, so is the level of mobility. Litmus test: if cost was not a factor, wouldn't you prefer to travel via private jet? Tells me that we're still hurting for better mobility in this world.

defrost 4y ago
For a decade or so my preferred method of flight for several million line kilometers about the planet was at 70 m/s 120 odd feet above the ground in a STOL high wing prop airframe. Climate wise that cost was amortised from metals consumption by the developed world. If I'm going to consume vast quantities of resources then I do like to see benefits flow to as many others as possible. Now that I'm in a rural area I see large quantities of fuel consumed by tractors to put grain into the mouths of millions.
beefield 4y ago
Well, if cost was not a factor, I'd prefer traveling long hauls with a space visiting rocket thingy, not a mundane private jet. Shorter ones, again, if cost was not a factor, I'd prefer high-speed rail or supersonic Hyperloop stations next to my origin and destination.

jefftk 4y ago

Instead of banning them, tax airplane emissions enough to remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the air. At scale this is in the range of $150/T. For example, if you fly commercial BOS-LAX for $500 this means your flight costs something like $200 in carbon removal, while if you're in a large private jet emitting 150x you'd need to pay more like $30k.

elil17 4y ago
Just because the environmental offsets could be done, that doesn't mean it's a good way for society to spend our limited resources. You could just ban private jets, still tax the people who could afford to use them, and tax fuel for all modes of transit.

KoftaBob 4y ago

Another example of the frequently touted idea that to show conviction in a problem, you must either support the non-compromising right to do it (ex: 2nd amendment absolutists), or the non-compromising banning of it (the guy in this article). To be quite frank, this is a very childish way of viewing the world. I get that media companies like Vice portray things in this way because it's an easy way to get views, and therefore makes for a headline that's an easy way to get upvotes. We should aim to be better than this.

dboreham 4y ago

What category of person flies often on private jets? Politicians.

sgt 4y ago
That won't be banned of course. Not even taxed additionally. Well, maybe that's OK, since there's near unlimited funds paid for by the tax payers.
ct0 4y ago
Entirely untrue. Politicians are not the only type of role that a person on a private jet falls under. Executives, Religious, etc.
stephenhuey 4y ago
Actually, I think businessmen, generally wealthy private citizens and also famous celebrities wanting to avoid the spotlight more commonly fly on private jets than politicians, at least in the USA. It's tough flying back and forth to your home state almost every week and maybe not seeing your family very much, and often they tell the airlines in advance to reserve seats on more than one flight to ensure they make it home. This talks about how it's not as luxurious as it might sound: https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/11/21/members-of-congress-mark-walker-fly-out-of-dc-airport-routine/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/11/21/members-of-congress... There is a lot of info online about the travel allowances members of Congress in the USA have: https://liveandletsfly.com/politicians-first-class/ https://liveandletsfly.com/politicians-first-class/ I didn't know it was a recent change that began allowing Senators to use their allowance to book private: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/senate-rule-change-charter-flights/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/senate-rule-change-c... When there is a general expectation that these people spend a lot of time in both DC and their home where the people they represent are living, I'm not sure how you get around their need to be able to pay for all that traveling. It's part of our expectations in how they do their job. If you want to pick on someone, probably best to focus on the list at the beginning of my comment, but honestly, many of them have compelling reasons, e.g. no one is hassling you or me everywhere we go because half of the people in the country recognize us. :)

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Don't ban. Tax it and make the money go into carbon capture and green energy. Each time they flight, make them remove in Co2 the equivalent of a 100 times their consumption and produce a 100 time the energy consumed. Then make it very trendy to have your own jet, like the highest level of social status.

kennend3 4y ago
"Taxing" for change rarely works. what happens is the "jet fuel tax" goes into general government revenue. Politicians seeking re-election use said money to create new programs instead and effectively "buy votes" with your own money. Can you provide an example of this ever working? I can give you several of it being an absolute failure and having no impact. In Canada we have "sin" taxes (Alcohol, cigarettes, gasoline). - Smoking has declined, but more because of the negative marketing (ugly pictures on a pack of smokes). It is also less "socially acceptable" and so young people dont pick up the habit. - Alcohol - Slight downtrend, but sales are still very strong https://www.statista.com/topics/2998/alcohol-consumption-in-canada/#dossierKeyfigures https://www.statista.com/topics/2998/alcohol-consumption-in-... - Gas https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=2310006601 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=231000.... Covid caused a decline, but it will trend back up.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > - Smoking has declined, but more because of the negative marketing (ugly pictures on a pack of smokes). It is also less "socially acceptable" and so young people dont pick up the habit. These things don't happen on their own. Canaday's Tobacco Strategy, presumably funded with money that has to come from somewhere (e.g. sin taxes): https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/healthy-living/canada-tobacco-strategy.html https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications...
- ahtihn 4y ago
  Are you saying that price has no effect on demand?
impossiblefork 4y ago

driverdan 4y ago

As others have pointed out, the solution to this is not a ban but a carbon tax. All negative externalities should be taxed appropriately. If someone still wants to have a private jet they can but must pay the full costs of it instead of offloading the pollution cost on society.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
perilunar 4y ago
Yes. We as a society should stop taxing income and profits, and start taxing resource use and externalities. Go full Georgist.
frognumber 4y ago
Taxes have the additional upside of leading to fewer stupid consequences. A lot of the EU bans means if you're designing some kind of e.g. medical life-saving device of which there will be a few dozen units produced total, you can't do a whole bunch of things designed to make consumer devices better. The laws are on the surface reasonable, but they fail in corner cases. Corner cases sometimes go to be important. Housing in the US is a big one. Building codes don't allow experimentation. Charge me a grand for using lead, the wrong connector, or whatever, but please don't ban me.
viktorcode 4y ago
They will, because a typical private plane passenger is already someone who chose to pay extra. The carbon tax will hit economy passengers harder.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Here's one thing that i don't get about the climate change movement. It would seem that the biggest contributors to climate change and pollution are developing nations that use carbon based energy (ie coal plants in China, Russia, India, etc). With that said it seems that the only real solution would be to convince these countries to adopt greener energy (which is unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons) which leads me to ask: is anything else really making a difference? We can talk about adopting plant based diets, talk about banning private jets and mandating electric cars, there's lot of things that we can do, but the question is any of that even going to matter when the vast majority of global warming is contributed to by other nations that we have no control over. Furthermore I think we have to weigh our sacrifices against the impact. If were going to ban something like private jets, there better be a real impact. What I see now though is, if we ban private jets for example, we will bear the cost of that ban without any of the associated green benefits because again, the developing nations with their coal plants are pumping out exponentially more greenhouse gasses than any private jet would. My conclusion is rather cynical but I don't see why we should be making sacrifices, when none of those sacrifices lead to quantifiable results. And what I particularly don't like now is that we seem to be making policy not on what will make a quantifiable difference in climate, but rather what will make us feel like we're making an impact. It's really a more broad issue than that, we as a society seem to have ceased trying to actually solve problems, rather we "solve" them by doing something that makes us feel good, regardless of whether than thing actually has any real impact.

doopy1 4y ago
I agree with you, but it's also one of those things where if everyone did their part, the impact would be quantifiable. I think these things have compounding effects. The changes have to start somewhere.
next_xibalba 4y ago
The lack of prioritized problem solving amongst the climate activist set sure does seem to imply some inconvenient questions about their motivations. Either that or their numeracy and competence. My personal conclusion is that any "solution" which significantly limits either a) economic growth, b) national security, and/or c) personal freedoms and choice is doomed to fail. Rather, the only practicable solutions will be technological (as throughout history has always been the case).

viktorcode 4y ago

> Not only is flying in a private plane just about the worst thing one can do for the planet, it is also one of the habits with the easiest substitutes. Apparently, Vice don't get that private jets are also used to get someone into a random location in a shortest time possible. There's a demand, but no substitute for that.

geff82 4y ago

The problem with banning private jets for reasons of climate change: it is nothing but symbolism. A private jet user might be personally guilty of having a large carbon footprint, but as there are only comparatively small numbers of private jets flying around, fighting against them serves the planet about nothing. Changing the way we produce electricity, the way we power our cars, the way we heat homes, on the other hand, can have MASSIVE effects on carbon emissions (without sacrificing too much - just as an example: my rather new house has thick walls, so in summer we do not need a cooler and in winter a heat pump is enough).

scrumper 4y ago
Don't forget shipping too - a huge, huge contributor. Itself dwarfed by agriculture... Humans go for symbolism though and hate hypocrites. Banning private jets has a delicious reveng-y feeling against the sanctimonious super-rich lecturing us about reducing our footprint - anyone who's flown commercial knows exactly how much it would hurt them. I'm against the ban because it's pointless, and because the GA sector isn't minuscule so there are a lot of jobs at risk, and because once they ban private jets they'll come for my powerboat. Better I think to just suck some more out of their bloated wallets to cover the externalities. Earmarked Jet-A taxes, for example. Mandatory offsetting.

wszfahwbwbaha 4y ago

In this thread: a group of temporarily embarrassed billionaires over and over saying banning private jets is a bad idea for the dumbest reasons. Hacker news is a cesspool when it comes to climate change.

cpascal 4y ago

Air travel contributes to about 2.5% of greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for about 3.5% of anthropogenic warming [1]. In my opinion, there is an outsized amount of public outrage going on and we should be directing this outrage toward larger sources of anthropogenic warming. There is only so much people can take before they get fatigued. "Spending" this outrage on something that is only 3.5% of the problem seems wasteful. [1]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-commercial-aviation https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...

jacknews 4y ago

This seems like the worst kind of envy politics. Why not also ban motor racing, private yachts. mansions, excessive jewellery, etc, etc. The right answer is to tax it. The 'business class ticket' alternative given in the article is not very realistic. I believe most private jet travel is for business, and it means people can fly directly between locations, at whatever time is convenient, which might be difficult or highly inconvenient otherwise. And exchanging the hell that is airports and airport security for a dedicated private jet terminal is surely worth paying for if you travel frequently.

entropicgravity 4y ago

And ban sexy young mistresses while we're at it. I'm not jealous, this is about saving the planet.