6 ms·

The best solution to flying and long distance travel is to reduce it as much as possible. This means no more travelling for hedonistic (touristic) purposes. I.

by steve1977 1mo ago

The best solution to flying and long distance travel is to reduce it as much as possible. This means no more travelling for hedonistic (touristic) purposes. I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).

toomuchtodo 1mo ago
Electrified high speed rail solves this, with flying reserved for transoceanic needs. Private jets should not exist outside of scientific, medical, or other non luxury/personal use cases. Travel and tourism will always be with us, and should be imho. Carbon taxes, laws, whatever is needed to accomplish it.
- mdp2021 1mo ago
  > should not exist outside of Externalities can be made to bear a cost.
  - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
    Currently, there is no effective way to put carbon back in the ground, and therefore no way to make the externality bear the cost. This is an excuse to justify high emission, low efficiency use cases. It’s capitalism cope meets buying a Catholic indulgence. “I am wealthy and deserve this and so I will pay a token amount that is meaningless to continue to justify this excessive, unnecessary consumption.” If the use case does not require fossil fuels, certainly, carry on. Same if your biofuel isn’t going to cause the Amazon to be clear cut and can be economically produced at scale. But until then, have to aggressively impair the consumption of fossil fuels, because it’s only going to keep getting hotter, year after year, long after we reach net zero (which is still a decade or two away). Maybe one day we’ll have a mechanism to sequester carbon, and enough low carbon energy to suck all of the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution started out of the atmosphere for long term, stable storage to mitigate climate change. But not today, and therefore, these are the facts that must drive policy until the facts change. Climeworks' capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017317 - May 2025 > Al Gore gave a TED talk in 2023 where he discussed the carbon capture and disposal industry and specifically mentioned Climeworks. He made fun of the company, calling the capture industry nothing more than a cover for oil and gas companies to keep their businesses afloat. Even if you don’t like Al Gore, the math remains the math.
    - mdp2021 1mo ago
      > there is no effective way to put carbon back in the ground, and therefore no way to make the externality bear the cost The cost applied to externalities can be spent to amend the specific damage, which is sometimes impossible, or can be commensurate to the estimate damage in order to create different benefit. > indulgence I concour with the analysis, but not necessarily with the moral evaluation. I have already mentioned nearby that money is a token to be spent on freedom in a framework of choice in allocation: Economics, science of Optimization, is the science of the management of Scarcity to some authors - and that scarcity is structural, existential (as evident in the case of Time). The purpose of resources is to invest them according to preference - some choices more loaded, but the computation compares the values of said "load" with the "preference" and the "resource (money etc.)". The actual rebuttal: if you had to go "black vs white" in preferences, vs the continuous framework I proposed, than heating for example would be a problem - an externality bearing investment that we could not compensate with a reversal of the damage. But should we do without heating? You yourself defend touristic travel. Where can we put a threshold? At that point, it is best to quantify damages and charge the externalities.
      - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
        Mental model: Electricity->Batteries, renewables, geothermal, hydro, transmission, cross country interconnectors HVAC->Heat pumps, low carbon district heating, insulation, sand heat batteries Mobility->Electric vehicles, bikes, scooters, light rail, heavy duty electric vehicles Marine traffic->Low carbon produced methanol or ammonia For air travel that must remain and cannot be replaced with an electrified or low carbon alternative (until low carbon solutions exist), the component that must remain be made as efficient as possible. Regardless of wealth, you fly commercial, just like everyone takes the subway, regardless of wealth or status, in cities with high quality mass transit. Your need is met, just within our collective societal tolerance for the harm incurred for the travel desired (Point A->B). We may disagree, and that’s fine. I believe the climate data is clear as an input to this decisioning. Whether you’re wealthy should not be a factor in outsized carbon emissions (private jet travel, specifically) simply because the socioeconomic system is defective on this. I assume the appetite for this goes up as climate change consequences become more dire, compelling more appetite for extreme actions to course correct.
- runako 1mo ago
  > Electrified high speed rail solves this Curious -- what speed are you assuming for such a high speed rail?
  - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
    The last high speed rail I was on was Fuxing Hao series in China, ~200mph. If we can go faster, go faster. Shanghai Maglev can do ~260mph. Japan’s Shinkansen tops out at ~199mph, a bit higher than the TGV in France (~186mph during commercial operations, but has achieved speed records as high as ~360mph). Within the scope of land travel, it’s clear it can be built. If it isn’t built, of course, that’s a choice. But it’s a lie to say it cannot be done.
    - runako 1mo ago
      Obviously a choice, but also at 200mph it's obviously a vastly slower experience in a lot of way for many of the most-trafficked US domestic routes. Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example. Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter. Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.
      - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
        Is ~400 million to ~4 billions excess deaths over the next ~50 years worth it? How many excess deaths is it worth? Everything is about trade offs. How much mortgaging of the future with are we comfortable with for today’s luxuries? Because this is a debt that will need to be paid back, potentially by someone not even yet born, through no fault of their own. At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it. https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/current-remaining-carbon-budget-and-trajectory-till-exhaustion https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/cur... https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.pdf https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... (page 32 risk impact matrix) (day job is risk assessment and management, and the lens through which I see and model this entire system)
WillPostForFood 1mo ago
So no tourist travel for the poor or middle class, just the elite rich? And no tourist income for the poor and middle class? This is a policy only the top .1% will enjoy.
- mdp2021 1mo ago
  But the purpose of money is exactly to be a currency to be spent on choices. And, I must unfortunately repeat myself with regards to what I wrote nearby, externalities can be charged as a cost - and it is probably the way to handle it. "You pollute, you pay" - then, you acquire money to invest it, especially in activities with downsides.
- steve1977 1mo ago
  I didn't say tax everyone the same amount. Make it hurt. Tax the elite a million per flight. And yes, no tourist income. It's dirty money.
  - openasocket 1mo ago
    Do you really think that traveling somewhere to experience a natural or historical or cultural landmark is intrinsically immoral? Do you think less of me for traveling to South Africa to go on a Safari? For visiting the Louvre? Why?
- fc417fc802 1mo ago
  I don't support the idea as described, but playing devil's advocate presumably it would shift demand towards train and boat travel. That would push tourism closer to home and largely eliminate visiting other continents for those who couldn't either afford the air travel tax or to take several months off of work if going by boat. But it wouldn't eliminate tourism by any means. Even the poor could still easily travel the better part of a given continent.
- xp84 1mo ago
  Exactly. The travel permits will still be easy to get for the elites and their friends. In fact I bet even the climate change academics, and their friends and anyone they went to school with, will be able to get their travel permits just fine. You and me though? F your family, you’ll never see them again. The climate simply can’t spare it. These people are so out of touch it’s bananas.
openasocket 1mo ago
I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement. As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
- steve1977 1mo ago
  Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.
- leni536 1mo ago
  The difference between removing plastic straws and reducing air travel is that reducing air travel would have an impact.
  - openasocket 1mo ago
    Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it. Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.
xp84 1mo ago
Degrowth, and “everyone should just do without X” is such an easy solution. Too bad for you we don’t live in a political system where you guys can pass such unpopular policy and force the majority (who wants improving living standards) to just ‘own nothing and be happy,’ trading all the things they like for promises that the climate will be fixed. And other countries will also choose to keep their privileges and climate change will not be reduced anyway.

toomuchtodo 1mo ago

Electrified high speed rail solves this, with flying reserved for transoceanic needs. Private jets should not exist outside of scientific, medical, or other non luxury/personal use cases. Travel and tourism will always be with us, and should be imho. Carbon taxes, laws, whatever is needed to accomplish it.

mdp2021 1mo ago
> should not exist outside of Externalities can be made to bear a cost.
- toomuchtodo 1mo ago
  Currently, there is no effective way to put carbon back in the ground, and therefore no way to make the externality bear the cost. This is an excuse to justify high emission, low efficiency use cases. It’s capitalism cope meets buying a Catholic indulgence. “I am wealthy and deserve this and so I will pay a token amount that is meaningless to continue to justify this excessive, unnecessary consumption.” If the use case does not require fossil fuels, certainly, carry on. Same if your biofuel isn’t going to cause the Amazon to be clear cut and can be economically produced at scale. But until then, have to aggressively impair the consumption of fossil fuels, because it’s only going to keep getting hotter, year after year, long after we reach net zero (which is still a decade or two away). Maybe one day we’ll have a mechanism to sequester carbon, and enough low carbon energy to suck all of the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution started out of the atmosphere for long term, stable storage to mitigate climate change. But not today, and therefore, these are the facts that must drive policy until the facts change. Climeworks' capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017317 - May 2025 > Al Gore gave a TED talk in 2023 where he discussed the carbon capture and disposal industry and specifically mentioned Climeworks. He made fun of the company, calling the capture industry nothing more than a cover for oil and gas companies to keep their businesses afloat. Even if you don’t like Al Gore, the math remains the math.
  - mdp2021 1mo ago
    > there is no effective way to put carbon back in the ground, and therefore no way to make the externality bear the cost The cost applied to externalities can be spent to amend the specific damage, which is sometimes impossible, or can be commensurate to the estimate damage in order to create different benefit. > indulgence I concour with the analysis, but not necessarily with the moral evaluation. I have already mentioned nearby that money is a token to be spent on freedom in a framework of choice in allocation: Economics, science of Optimization, is the science of the management of Scarcity to some authors - and that scarcity is structural, existential (as evident in the case of Time). The purpose of resources is to invest them according to preference - some choices more loaded, but the computation compares the values of said "load" with the "preference" and the "resource (money etc.)". The actual rebuttal: if you had to go "black vs white" in preferences, vs the continuous framework I proposed, than heating for example would be a problem - an externality bearing investment that we could not compensate with a reversal of the damage. But should we do without heating? You yourself defend touristic travel. Where can we put a threshold? At that point, it is best to quantify damages and charge the externalities.
    - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
      Mental model: Electricity->Batteries, renewables, geothermal, hydro, transmission, cross country interconnectors HVAC->Heat pumps, low carbon district heating, insulation, sand heat batteries Mobility->Electric vehicles, bikes, scooters, light rail, heavy duty electric vehicles Marine traffic->Low carbon produced methanol or ammonia For air travel that must remain and cannot be replaced with an electrified or low carbon alternative (until low carbon solutions exist), the component that must remain be made as efficient as possible. Regardless of wealth, you fly commercial, just like everyone takes the subway, regardless of wealth or status, in cities with high quality mass transit. Your need is met, just within our collective societal tolerance for the harm incurred for the travel desired (Point A->B). We may disagree, and that’s fine. I believe the climate data is clear as an input to this decisioning. Whether you’re wealthy should not be a factor in outsized carbon emissions (private jet travel, specifically) simply because the socioeconomic system is defective on this. I assume the appetite for this goes up as climate change consequences become more dire, compelling more appetite for extreme actions to course correct.
runako 1mo ago
> Electrified high speed rail solves this Curious -- what speed are you assuming for such a high speed rail?
- toomuchtodo 1mo ago
  The last high speed rail I was on was Fuxing Hao series in China, ~200mph. If we can go faster, go faster. Shanghai Maglev can do ~260mph. Japan’s Shinkansen tops out at ~199mph, a bit higher than the TGV in France (~186mph during commercial operations, but has achieved speed records as high as ~360mph). Within the scope of land travel, it’s clear it can be built. If it isn’t built, of course, that’s a choice. But it’s a lie to say it cannot be done.
  - runako 1mo ago
    Obviously a choice, but also at 200mph it's obviously a vastly slower experience in a lot of way for many of the most-trafficked US domestic routes. Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example. Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter. Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.
    - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
      Is ~400 million to ~4 billions excess deaths over the next ~50 years worth it? How many excess deaths is it worth? Everything is about trade offs. How much mortgaging of the future with are we comfortable with for today’s luxuries? Because this is a debt that will need to be paid back, potentially by someone not even yet born, through no fault of their own. At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it. https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/current-remaining-carbon-budget-and-trajectory-till-exhaustion https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/cur... https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.pdf https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... (page 32 risk impact matrix) (day job is risk assessment and management, and the lens through which I see and model this entire system)

WillPostForFood 1mo ago

So no tourist travel for the poor or middle class, just the elite rich? And no tourist income for the poor and middle class? This is a policy only the top .1% will enjoy.

mdp2021 1mo ago
But the purpose of money is exactly to be a currency to be spent on choices. And, I must unfortunately repeat myself with regards to what I wrote nearby, externalities can be charged as a cost - and it is probably the way to handle it. "You pollute, you pay" - then, you acquire money to invest it, especially in activities with downsides.
steve1977 1mo ago
I didn't say tax everyone the same amount. Make it hurt. Tax the elite a million per flight. And yes, no tourist income. It's dirty money.
- openasocket 1mo ago
  Do you really think that traveling somewhere to experience a natural or historical or cultural landmark is intrinsically immoral? Do you think less of me for traveling to South Africa to go on a Safari? For visiting the Louvre? Why?
fc417fc802 1mo ago
I don't support the idea as described, but playing devil's advocate presumably it would shift demand towards train and boat travel. That would push tourism closer to home and largely eliminate visiting other continents for those who couldn't either afford the air travel tax or to take several months off of work if going by boat. But it wouldn't eliminate tourism by any means. Even the poor could still easily travel the better part of a given continent.
xp84 1mo ago
Exactly. The travel permits will still be easy to get for the elites and their friends. In fact I bet even the climate change academics, and their friends and anyone they went to school with, will be able to get their travel permits just fine. You and me though? F your family, you’ll never see them again. The climate simply can’t spare it. These people are so out of touch it’s bananas.

openasocket 1mo ago

I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement. As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?

steve1977 1mo ago
Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.
leni536 1mo ago
The difference between removing plastic straws and reducing air travel is that reducing air travel would have an impact.
- openasocket 1mo ago
  Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it. Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.

xp84 1mo ago

Degrowth, and “everyone should just do without X” is such an easy solution. Too bad for you we don’t live in a political system where you guys can pass such unpopular policy and force the majority (who wants improving living standards) to just ‘own nothing and be happy,’ trading all the things they like for promises that the climate will be fixed. And other countries will also choose to keep their privileges and climate change will not be reduced anyway.