God, what a waste. Airplanes are bad enough for climate change when they actually carry people.
For example
"The number of cargo-only flights at Heathrow has surged to five times normal levels, with the airport now saying it is prioritising medical supplies as passenger travel grinds to a halt."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/14/heathrow-pas...
The surge in "cargo only" is flooding supply into a waning demand market.
There may be some that are, although this article says the flights are upto 10% full. Given the average car is only 20% full that doesn't sound a terribly low amount.
The article also says
* One reason to keep so many flights going is to help the airlines implement their policies that promote social distancing
* Some travel is essential and it’s important that people who truly need to travel by air retain a way to do it.
It then goes on to say that many of the "13 Washignton-Boston flights" will be cancelled. Indeed of the 10 arrivals currently listed on [0], 5 have been cancelled.
[0] https://www.massport.com/logan-airport/flights/flight-status...
According to wikipedia, Germany's economy (GDP $3.863T) is only about 4% of global economy (GDP $87.265T). Would you call Germany's economy insignificant?
More interestingly, there are only three nations (the US, China, Japan) with higher GDP. So, by the same criterion, we could argue that only these three countries have any significant economy (total $40.733T), and the rest can be ignored. But then we will be ignoring more than half of global economy! It's clearly a logical fallacy.
* Numbers taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Also, it seems intuitively obvious that moving N kg by plane is vastly less efficient than other forms of transport like rail or ocean shipping. We should be doing fewer energy-inefficient things and more efficient things.