6 ms·

Great I guess, but isn’t “personal aviation” (and 90% of general aviation) exactly the type of activity we should be discouraging? It’s incredibly carbon ineffi

Great I guess, but isn’t “personal aviation” (and 90% of general aviation) exactly the type of activity we should be discouraging? It’s incredibly carbon inefficient. (I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much?

S201 3y ago
> is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people. The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.
- abricq 3y ago
  "only the 1% fly" is not true, but "only the 11% fly" is a fact [1]. About the 1%: "1% of the population emits 50% of the commercial aviation's emission". You can keep going like that to show that it is indeed reserved to an upper-part of the society. Maybe the ultra-rich are not the only one flying, but they are responsible for a bigger part of the problem than the upper middle class. Maybe the misunderstanding comes from the fact that we're looking at the global population. Global warming being a global problem, looking only at the population of your region is not a sufficient reasoning. I live in Switzerland, I guaranty that it's a lot more than 11% of the population that flies. At the end of the day, it's a question of moral and of fairness: do we want to live a life-style which can't be generated to the entire global population and which will ultimately lead to extreme conditions for future-generations and poorer social-classes than ours ? Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences ? My personal answer is that it should not be a personal decision, but that politicians should keep these numbers to start making laws such as taxing kerosene to the same level as cars' fuel. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307779 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
  - hnav 3y ago
    you aren’t going to foist those kinds of global limits on the rest of the world, especially not with billions of people in asia emerging from poverty for the first time. They’re going to consume, fly, eat meat and interact with power-hungry AIs. The only way forward is through engineering our way towards minimizing the impact of these activities. The CFC ban was only successful because it was easy to replace them.
    - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      Then we aren’t going to achieve it because there is no solution to emissions from air travel that doesn’t look like vapourware.
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      I've come around to believing this as well, but the problem is that that also means that humanity is most likely doomed. Yet another reason I'm glad I never wanted to have children, but now seeing them just makes me sad.
  - S201 3y ago
    > Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences? This isn't an aviation unique topic. You can replace "fly" in that sentence with countless other activities and the same tradeoff applies as virtually every activity currently involves carbon emissions at some point. There is a massive difference between an airliner's emissions flying from US to Europe and your local GA pilot cruising to the next town over to get lunch on the weekend though. Does that person need to fly to do that? No, they could drive. But the guy that wants to go cruise around the lake all day on his boat or drive his semi-truck sized RV to go camping for the weekend doesn't need to do either of those activities yet no one here has a moral problem with that.
    - test6554 3y ago
      I’m working on getting my PPL now and it’s a lot of work. Claims of elitism are going to be thrown around for anything that is difficult and worthwhile. Flying is not the issue. Carbon emissions are. That sounds like something that can be resolved to varying degrees of satisfaction one way or another.
- esoterica 3y ago
  GA involves spraying lead over and poisoning the (mostly low income) communities that live near airports. Probably the most evil hobby you could possibly take up in modern society.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    No longer, there's a generally certified lead-free fuel available that's rolling out over the next years [1], and on top of that there's fully electric ultralights. [1] https://www.flyingmag.com/g100ul-avgas-replacement-set-to-soon-hit-pumps/ https://www.flyingmag.com/g100ul-avgas-replacement-set-to-so...
  - hnav 3y ago
    the only reason it’s so hard to get rid of 100LL is because the regulations make it so. The automotive industry was able to get rid of lead 50 years ago.
  - S201 3y ago
    Alright, here we go yet again with the "leaded gas from GA is going to kill us all!" scare mongering. First, the GA fleet worldwide uses 500 tons of lead per year. Compared to 5,000,000 tons when leaded car gas was in use. That's a 99% reduction in lead pollution, so let's not be so dramatic and claim that flying a piston GA plane is "evil" and that we're all going to die from it and how it's poisoning low income communities in particular. Last I checked there are many middle and upper middle class neighborhoods that exist near regional airports. I know this all too well because those are the same NIMBYs that move in next to an airport that has existed there for the past century and then try to close it because of noise complaints. Second, since I'm sure you don't know, most GA planes can fly perfectly fine on unleaded gas. Some engines are diesel and some burn Jet A (the same as airliners), none of which have lead. Some small trainer aircraft are electric now too. Third, unleaded G100UL exists, is certified, and is actively being rolled out. If only we could get the FAA to stop doing what they always do, which is move as slow as glaciers about anything related to GA. I'm not going to defend leaded gas, we all want to see it gone if for nothing else than to take away this ridiculous talking point from the ignorant. It should have been done 50 years ago if the FAA wasn't boneheaded, but I'm also not going to loose sleep over burning a minuscule amount of lead when natural lead sources and lead pipes/paint still exist in the world. By the way, my home water source is a well 250ft from the end of a runway. I've had lab tests run on it for lead and it's well below the EPA limit. I put my health where my mouth is, I look forward to the day when it's all unleaded fuel being burned but until then it's not something that concerns me.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already It seems to be a European obsession. Generously, because intercontinental flights are super cheap compared to similarly-scheduled and more eco-friendly rail. (As well as to America. Our mandatory taxes are more than a budget European flight.) Less generously, because it's a popular bogey bear.
- namdnay 3y ago
  but "upper middle class" in the US is the 1% ! I think it starts at something like 60k income per family member (so 120k for a couple)
  - S201 3y ago
    You have a funny notion of "the 1%." Unless you're in a very low cost of living area $60k in the US is barely scraping by, even $120k/yr in high COL areas like the Bay Area is basically a poverty wage. At large, something like 12% of US households are over $200k/yr. The top 1% of income is considerably higher than that so I have no idea where you're getting $60-120k from unless you're comparing against global incomes, but that's not accounting for local cost of living levels making it an apples-to-oranges comparison.
    - namdnay 3y ago
      yes I'm talking about the global 1%. i.e. us, who are polluting far far more than our fair share
dotancohen 3y ago
No, it is too little. Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction. And it makes you feel good because you're "sticking it to the rich". But that percent of a percent means nothing in terms of reducing real emissions and affecting climate change. Stop doing "feel good" activism and start being effective. Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter. And publicly, loudly, denounce the carbon market. I'm proudly driving an electric car powered by rooftop solar. And I am not rich. That solar install produces more power than my frugal home and driving habits use. Yes, I am aware that night charging uses energy produced from coal. My solar install more than offsets that during the day, when peak grid power is critical, and I am constantly pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid. It's not viable yet due to base power loads at night being too low, but as more solar roofs are installed and more electric cars hit the road, it will become viable.
- esoterica 3y ago
  There is also no single catch-all solution to carbon emissions. There are 10,000 solutions that each only fix 0.01% of the problem. If we refuse to pursue any of the solutions because they only contribute a little to solving the problem in totality then we end up solving none of the problem.
  - hnav 3y ago
    not really, most of carbon emission is because either clean generation, storage or distribution of power is inadequate. Solar has been making strides in displacing daytime peak generation, batteries are ever improving, making zero carbon land vehicles viable. Distribution is top of mind for a lot of people these days. Carbon capture is getting closer to viable. Cutting single digit percentages of emissions here and there by banning things humanity actually needs is counterproductive at best
- addicted 3y ago
  Your claim makes no sense. Any move towards reducing carbon will require many 1% improvements. Personal aviation isn’t a problem because it’s the rich doing it, but because it’s extremely expensive, and in the vast majority of cases there is a much better alternative (flying commercial). If there’s an easy way to knock out 0.1-0.5% of emissions you absolutely take it, even if in itself it doesn’t achieve everything we need, but it gets us closer. And that’s before we consider the psychological/political impacts of telling a farmer to buy a new truck while not saying anything to a celebrity traveling in a private plane that will emit more carbon in a month than that farmer’s dirty truck would in its lifetime.
dude187 3y ago
I don't understand what you're asking for. Ban activities that aren't necessary which could have an impact on the environment? This is an article about a new set of standards designed to shift the category of planes pilots fly away from homebuilt ones (done out of a cost/availability necessity) by allowing a wider range of accessible commercial ones to be certified. What does that have to do with the environment? This change has been needed for a long time and is good to see
jillesvangurp 3y ago
This is true only for planes that burn fuel. There are about to be a lot of new planes entering the market that don't burn fuel but have batteries and will charge from any usable power source. I.e. mostly renewables given the price of everything else. Basically think flying bath tubs with batteries, propellers, and some fancy fly by wire logic. They are not that hard to build. There are already several flying and flight proven prototypes. Several are in advanced stages getting certified, and factories that will produce these things are being built and financed. The big bottleneck (in the US) for this is the FAA and its certification bureaucracy. This will go from very small volume production now to mass volume production by the tens/hundreds of thousands units in the space of a few decades. That's the reason there's a lot of pressure on the FAA to adapt to new realities because they are suddenly in the business of certifying lots of planes that no longer fit their existing rules and are looking at a vast increase in the number of these things. Most of these things are either capable of flying autonomously or at least vastly simplify pilot workloads. You and I could learn to operate these things in an hour or so. Another reason is that the world is bigger than the bit the FAA has jurisdiction over (the US). These new planes are going to be flying in China, Europe, Africa, and wherever and there's a world where the FAA adapts proactively in anticipation of these changes and where they adapt late reacting and responding to general public and politicians asking them WTF is keeping them in the stone age while the rest of the world gets to play George Jetson. A smart policy maker would want to be conservative but not too late to the party here. And a smarter one smells the money and business potential and would want to be an enabler rather than an obstacle. So, right now is a good moment to let startups experiment a bit and and adapt existing rules. Waiting until these things are flying all over China would be too late. This btw. is not a hypothetical risk but actually starting to happen.
eastbound 3y ago
GA is necessary for commercial aviation. Airline pilots first learn as GA pilots. GA is also essential throughout their career to complete their flying hours, become instructors, and acquire a large range of experience which are useful/necessary for the good stewardship of the pilot profession.
- namdnay 3y ago
  that's why i said 90% , there are also things like flying doctors etc.. i'm talking about the "american dentist flies around on the weekend for fun" usecase
mschuster91 3y ago
> I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much? At least the ultralight world is beginning to change - Pipistrel has a fully electric model that Green Flight Academy in Sweden is using for instructions [1]. Even in the passenger aircraft world, there's progress - some startups did a full-electric conversion of a Cessna Caravan [2] as a prototype, and a from-scratch design [3]. Yes, these are only short hop capable, but hey - everything counts. [1] https://greenflightacademy.com/fleet/ https://greenflightacademy.com/fleet/ [2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/redmond-startup-powers-all-electric-first-flight-of-a-cessna-turboprop/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/redmo... [3] https://www.dw.com/en/are-electric-planes-ready-for-takeoff/a-64491147 https://www.dw.com/en/are-electric-planes-ready-for-takeoff/...
rlpb 3y ago
If it's "recreational carbon emission categories" you want to ban, whether as a proportion of global carbon emissions or recreational carbon emissions per person, then I think there are much larger categories that would be banned first. If you just consider aviation, there's a really wide spread: people travelling the world in private jets cause orders of magnitude higher carbon emissions that someone enjoying the local area in a microlight. It seems odd to bundle them into a single bucket since this spectrum crosses so many other more typical non-aviation activities in magnitude of emissions that you don't seem to be suggesting banning. If you want to be discussing recreational carbon emissions you should use the size of those emissions to discriminate, not some very broad arbitrary category that varies in emission magnitude across the entire spectrum of the emissions that you're simultaneously ignoring.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Yeah, a carbon tax sure would have been nice, but the failure to pass one in the 00's was one of the reasons I began to realize that the issue would never be solved.

S201 3y ago

> is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people. The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.

abricq 3y ago
"only the 1% fly" is not true, but "only the 11% fly" is a fact [1]. About the 1%: "1% of the population emits 50% of the commercial aviation's emission". You can keep going like that to show that it is indeed reserved to an upper-part of the society. Maybe the ultra-rich are not the only one flying, but they are responsible for a bigger part of the problem than the upper middle class. Maybe the misunderstanding comes from the fact that we're looking at the global population. Global warming being a global problem, looking only at the population of your region is not a sufficient reasoning. I live in Switzerland, I guaranty that it's a lot more than 11% of the population that flies. At the end of the day, it's a question of moral and of fairness: do we want to live a life-style which can't be generated to the entire global population and which will ultimately lead to extreme conditions for future-generations and poorer social-classes than ours ? Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences ? My personal answer is that it should not be a personal decision, but that politicians should keep these numbers to start making laws such as taxing kerosene to the same level as cars' fuel. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307779 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
- hnav 3y ago
  you aren’t going to foist those kinds of global limits on the rest of the world, especially not with billions of people in asia emerging from poverty for the first time. They’re going to consume, fly, eat meat and interact with power-hungry AIs. The only way forward is through engineering our way towards minimizing the impact of these activities. The CFC ban was only successful because it was easy to replace them.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    Then we aren’t going to achieve it because there is no solution to emissions from air travel that doesn’t look like vapourware.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    I've come around to believing this as well, but the problem is that that also means that humanity is most likely doomed. Yet another reason I'm glad I never wanted to have children, but now seeing them just makes me sad.
- S201 3y ago
  > Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences? This isn't an aviation unique topic. You can replace "fly" in that sentence with countless other activities and the same tradeoff applies as virtually every activity currently involves carbon emissions at some point. There is a massive difference between an airliner's emissions flying from US to Europe and your local GA pilot cruising to the next town over to get lunch on the weekend though. Does that person need to fly to do that? No, they could drive. But the guy that wants to go cruise around the lake all day on his boat or drive his semi-truck sized RV to go camping for the weekend doesn't need to do either of those activities yet no one here has a moral problem with that.
  - test6554 3y ago
    I’m working on getting my PPL now and it’s a lot of work. Claims of elitism are going to be thrown around for anything that is difficult and worthwhile. Flying is not the issue. Carbon emissions are. That sounds like something that can be resolved to varying degrees of satisfaction one way or another.
esoterica 3y ago
GA involves spraying lead over and poisoning the (mostly low income) communities that live near airports. Probably the most evil hobby you could possibly take up in modern society.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  No longer, there's a generally certified lead-free fuel available that's rolling out over the next years [1], and on top of that there's fully electric ultralights. [1] https://www.flyingmag.com/g100ul-avgas-replacement-set-to-soon-hit-pumps/ https://www.flyingmag.com/g100ul-avgas-replacement-set-to-so...
- hnav 3y ago
  the only reason it’s so hard to get rid of 100LL is because the regulations make it so. The automotive industry was able to get rid of lead 50 years ago.
- S201 3y ago
  Alright, here we go yet again with the "leaded gas from GA is going to kill us all!" scare mongering. First, the GA fleet worldwide uses 500 tons of lead per year. Compared to 5,000,000 tons when leaded car gas was in use. That's a 99% reduction in lead pollution, so let's not be so dramatic and claim that flying a piston GA plane is "evil" and that we're all going to die from it and how it's poisoning low income communities in particular. Last I checked there are many middle and upper middle class neighborhoods that exist near regional airports. I know this all too well because those are the same NIMBYs that move in next to an airport that has existed there for the past century and then try to close it because of noise complaints. Second, since I'm sure you don't know, most GA planes can fly perfectly fine on unleaded gas. Some engines are diesel and some burn Jet A (the same as airliners), none of which have lead. Some small trainer aircraft are electric now too. Third, unleaded G100UL exists, is certified, and is actively being rolled out. If only we could get the FAA to stop doing what they always do, which is move as slow as glaciers about anything related to GA. I'm not going to defend leaded gas, we all want to see it gone if for nothing else than to take away this ridiculous talking point from the ignorant. It should have been done 50 years ago if the FAA wasn't boneheaded, but I'm also not going to loose sleep over burning a minuscule amount of lead when natural lead sources and lead pipes/paint still exist in the world. By the way, my home water source is a well 250ft from the end of a runway. I've had lab tests run on it for lead and it's well below the EPA limit. I put my health where my mouth is, I look forward to the day when it's all unleaded fuel being burned but until then it's not something that concerns me.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already It seems to be a European obsession. Generously, because intercontinental flights are super cheap compared to similarly-scheduled and more eco-friendly rail. (As well as to America. Our mandatory taxes are more than a budget European flight.) Less generously, because it's a popular bogey bear.
namdnay 3y ago
but "upper middle class" in the US is the 1% ! I think it starts at something like 60k income per family member (so 120k for a couple)
- S201 3y ago
  You have a funny notion of "the 1%." Unless you're in a very low cost of living area $60k in the US is barely scraping by, even $120k/yr in high COL areas like the Bay Area is basically a poverty wage. At large, something like 12% of US households are over $200k/yr. The top 1% of income is considerably higher than that so I have no idea where you're getting $60-120k from unless you're comparing against global incomes, but that's not accounting for local cost of living levels making it an apples-to-oranges comparison.
  - namdnay 3y ago
    yes I'm talking about the global 1%. i.e. us, who are polluting far far more than our fair share

dotancohen 3y ago

No, it is too little. Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction. And it makes you feel good because you're "sticking it to the rich". But that percent of a percent means nothing in terms of reducing real emissions and affecting climate change. Stop doing "feel good" activism and start being effective. Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter. And publicly, loudly, denounce the carbon market. I'm proudly driving an electric car powered by rooftop solar. And I am not rich. That solar install produces more power than my frugal home and driving habits use. Yes, I am aware that night charging uses energy produced from coal. My solar install more than offsets that during the day, when peak grid power is critical, and I am constantly pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid. It's not viable yet due to base power loads at night being too low, but as more solar roofs are installed and more electric cars hit the road, it will become viable.

esoterica 3y ago
There is also no single catch-all solution to carbon emissions. There are 10,000 solutions that each only fix 0.01% of the problem. If we refuse to pursue any of the solutions because they only contribute a little to solving the problem in totality then we end up solving none of the problem.
- hnav 3y ago
  not really, most of carbon emission is because either clean generation, storage or distribution of power is inadequate. Solar has been making strides in displacing daytime peak generation, batteries are ever improving, making zero carbon land vehicles viable. Distribution is top of mind for a lot of people these days. Carbon capture is getting closer to viable. Cutting single digit percentages of emissions here and there by banning things humanity actually needs is counterproductive at best
addicted 3y ago
Your claim makes no sense. Any move towards reducing carbon will require many 1% improvements. Personal aviation isn’t a problem because it’s the rich doing it, but because it’s extremely expensive, and in the vast majority of cases there is a much better alternative (flying commercial). If there’s an easy way to knock out 0.1-0.5% of emissions you absolutely take it, even if in itself it doesn’t achieve everything we need, but it gets us closer. And that’s before we consider the psychological/political impacts of telling a farmer to buy a new truck while not saying anything to a celebrity traveling in a private plane that will emit more carbon in a month than that farmer’s dirty truck would in its lifetime.

dude187 3y ago

I don't understand what you're asking for. Ban activities that aren't necessary which could have an impact on the environment? This is an article about a new set of standards designed to shift the category of planes pilots fly away from homebuilt ones (done out of a cost/availability necessity) by allowing a wider range of accessible commercial ones to be certified. What does that have to do with the environment? This change has been needed for a long time and is good to see

jillesvangurp 3y ago

This is true only for planes that burn fuel. There are about to be a lot of new planes entering the market that don't burn fuel but have batteries and will charge from any usable power source. I.e. mostly renewables given the price of everything else. Basically think flying bath tubs with batteries, propellers, and some fancy fly by wire logic. They are not that hard to build. There are already several flying and flight proven prototypes. Several are in advanced stages getting certified, and factories that will produce these things are being built and financed. The big bottleneck (in the US) for this is the FAA and its certification bureaucracy. This will go from very small volume production now to mass volume production by the tens/hundreds of thousands units in the space of a few decades. That's the reason there's a lot of pressure on the FAA to adapt to new realities because they are suddenly in the business of certifying lots of planes that no longer fit their existing rules and are looking at a vast increase in the number of these things. Most of these things are either capable of flying autonomously or at least vastly simplify pilot workloads. You and I could learn to operate these things in an hour or so. Another reason is that the world is bigger than the bit the FAA has jurisdiction over (the US). These new planes are going to be flying in China, Europe, Africa, and wherever and there's a world where the FAA adapts proactively in anticipation of these changes and where they adapt late reacting and responding to general public and politicians asking them WTF is keeping them in the stone age while the rest of the world gets to play George Jetson. A smart policy maker would want to be conservative but not too late to the party here. And a smarter one smells the money and business potential and would want to be an enabler rather than an obstacle. So, right now is a good moment to let startups experiment a bit and and adapt existing rules. Waiting until these things are flying all over China would be too late. This btw. is not a hypothetical risk but actually starting to happen.

eastbound 3y ago

GA is necessary for commercial aviation. Airline pilots first learn as GA pilots. GA is also essential throughout their career to complete their flying hours, become instructors, and acquire a large range of experience which are useful/necessary for the good stewardship of the pilot profession.

namdnay 3y ago
that's why i said 90% , there are also things like flying doctors etc.. i'm talking about the "american dentist flies around on the weekend for fun" usecase

mschuster91 3y ago

> I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much? At least the ultralight world is beginning to change - Pipistrel has a fully electric model that Green Flight Academy in Sweden is using for instructions [1]. Even in the passenger aircraft world, there's progress - some startups did a full-electric conversion of a Cessna Caravan [2] as a prototype, and a from-scratch design [3]. Yes, these are only short hop capable, but hey - everything counts. [1] https://greenflightacademy.com/fleet/ https://greenflightacademy.com/fleet/ [2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/redmond-startup-powers-all-electric-first-flight-of-a-cessna-turboprop/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/redmo... [3] https://www.dw.com/en/are-electric-planes-ready-for-takeoff/a-64491147 https://www.dw.com/en/are-electric-planes-ready-for-takeoff/...

rlpb 3y ago

If it's "recreational carbon emission categories" you want to ban, whether as a proportion of global carbon emissions or recreational carbon emissions per person, then I think there are much larger categories that would be banned first. If you just consider aviation, there's a really wide spread: people travelling the world in private jets cause orders of magnitude higher carbon emissions that someone enjoying the local area in a microlight. It seems odd to bundle them into a single bucket since this spectrum crosses so many other more typical non-aviation activities in magnitude of emissions that you don't seem to be suggesting banning. If you want to be discussing recreational carbon emissions you should use the size of those emissions to discriminate, not some very broad arbitrary category that varies in emission magnitude across the entire spectrum of the emissions that you're simultaneously ignoring.

hotpotamus 3y ago
Yeah, a carbon tax sure would have been nice, but the failure to pass one in the 00's was one of the reasons I began to realize that the issue would never be solved.