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> Airline security measures is not only a threat to civil liberties, it's also a threat to the airline industry. On short distances (<500 km) I chose cars and t

> Airline security measures is not only a threat to civil liberties, it's also a threat to the airline industry. On short distances (<500 km) I chose cars and trains. Good. Planes are somewhat decent means of transportation on long, rarely travelled distances, but for everything else, both cars and trains are the more ecological, economical and scalable way to get from A to B. Unfortunately, both cars and planes (and, to a lesser extent, trains) are still subsidised to a large extent, masking the real costs of going from A to B in a little tube with wings, thirty other people and so-and-so many litres of kerosine. If you had to pay the ‘real’ price to use airplanes (i.e. the costs of airports, air traffic control, standard-taxed kerosine, appropriate taxes to revert the ecological destruction caused by airplane traffic etc.), you’d prefer to walk.

Symmetry 13y ago
Air travel is bad for the environment, but only because the distances are long compared to driving. The fact that planes take lots of energy to propel through the air is defrayed by the fact that you can pack a lot of people on a plane - both typically consume on the order of .5 kWh of energy per kilometer of travel. Rail and buses are, of course, an order of magnitude lower.[1] You can talk about all the other energy costs surrounding air travel, but you can do the same thing with cars. Really, they're small potatoes compared to the costs of the fuel for vehicles and in the case of cars the cost of building all those roads. And then there's the fact that flying a distance is much safer than driving it even on distances as short as a couple hundred kilometers. The diversion of people from flying to driving after 9/11 causes on the order of a hundred excess road deaths each year. [1] http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml

Symmetry 13y ago

Air travel is bad for the environment, but only because the distances are long compared to driving. The fact that planes take lots of energy to propel through the air is defrayed by the fact that you can pack a lot of people on a plane - both typically consume on the order of .5 kWh of energy per kilometer of travel. Rail and buses are, of course, an order of magnitude lower.[1] You can talk about all the other energy costs surrounding air travel, but you can do the same thing with cars. Really, they're small potatoes compared to the costs of the fuel for vehicles and in the case of cars the cost of building all those roads. And then there's the fact that flying a distance is much safer than driving it even on distances as short as a couple hundred kilometers. The diversion of people from flying to driving after 9/11 causes on the order of a hundred excess road deaths each year. [1] http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml