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Comment by V__ | Hacker News Reader

I think the whole debate about air travel boils down to the different people which would be affected by a ban or increased prices/taxes.

A lot of activists see the (often) unnecessary flights taken by business travelers or celebrities, in addition to the entire private jet market. They, (probably) rightfully so, attack this behavior. People who travel maybe once a year or less, say for vacation or to visit their families, feel now attacked as well and fight back. This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.

As is regularly the case this develops into a flame-war and in the end more and more extreme viewpoints are taken, and the nuance gets lost.

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> who travel maybe once a year or less, say for vacation or to visit their families, feel now attacked as well and fight back.

They should. France recently stated that we'd need to go from 11T to 2T of co2 per year per inhabitant by 2050. A classic short distance vacation flight (Paris -> Barcelona for example) is already ~0.5T

> This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.

The thing is people get used to convenience and leisure, no matter the environmental cost. So yeah, if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more, maybe you wouldn't "need" to take a plane to see your family, &c. We all live like fucking kings, better than kings in fact. It's time to swallow our pride and take our responsibilities. The world won't function with 8B+ people taking the plane once a year to roast on a beach or ski for a week

Of course people don't want to let go what they've been told is their goal in life: "consume and travel", the problem is that it simply doesn't scale

What about replacing short haul jets with turbo props? Apparently they are more efficient which I find very surprising.

The rebound effect will take care of whatever progress you make in energy efficiency. As they say, it's not about the energy consumption of a single toaster, it's about the combined energy consumption of all the toasters.

Plane engines are more efficient than ever but we also fly waaaaay much more than we used to, same for cars, &c.

There aren't any ways to solve the problem without taking away personal convenience. At the end of the day you're still burning insane amount of non renewable energy for leisure.

The way to solve the problem without taking away convenience is to take yesterday’s atmospheric carbon, turn it into today’s jet fuel, and burn it tomorrow.

Yea, that takes energy today, but is close to carbon neutral and I strongly suspect will happen in the next 50 years on a commercially viable scale.

Nuclear and solar energy can get us there.

The endgame would be reproducing the plants cycle: grab atmospheric CO2, turn it into fuel (jet fuel instead of sugars), burn it, rinse, repeat.

It sounds cool and all but that's sci fi for now... What we need is solution for now, not some hypothetical magical solution that's "just around the corner" and will save us all. What people thinking like that want is to not give a personal shit and let others figure out how to fix the issue they're part of long after they died. That's the "face responsibilities" part I was talking about.

Direct air capture fuels are not science fiction. They are not economically competitive at the moment with fossil fuels, but lithium ion batteries weren’t economically viable 25 years ago either for electric cars. Now they are.

Do I think there could be an order of magnitude or more improvement in the costs for DAC fuels with research and scale? I do.

If the air travel has become cheaper, why?

I'd say that combustion engines / turbines are so cheap to operate only because the cost of the fuel is the cost of drilling + refining + transportation, and it lacks the cost of exhaust.

Now that the exhaust started to have a very real cost for the environment, it should start passing that cost to the engine operation.

Estimating this cost is, of course, not very easy, but rough estimates can definitely be made. Levy a CO2 tax, and spend it exclusively on measures to fight the consequences of the global warming, like building dams around coastal cities.

The "cost" view is bound to fail. Non renewable energies are free, the only cost you pay is extraction, the real work was done by nature during billions of years and is infinitely more valuable than anything humanity has ever made.

There is no way to pass the cost to airline companies, because the cost is infinite. We're playing a losing game, and we know it, it's just a matter of time until we either run out of renewable energy or until the damage done to the environment is so bad that we physically can't continue. There is no winning combination for us, we have to accept that earth won't be able to sustain 8b+ people living like the average westerner, especially once we phase out non renewable energies

The more I read about these issues the more it seems the only path forward is a market pricing mechanic. We'll never convince people with emotion or logic, but we can convince them with their wallet. Right now we don't realize the costs of the negative externalities of our choices. We need not just a carbon market though, but an environmental market. How much is a flock of wild geese worth? What's their habitat worth? How much should someone pay to destroy a wetlands to build new housing?

I guess one downside to this is then people can just actually pay to destroy these things and so we might wind up with just ultra expensive and rare "natural environments".

> We'll never convince people with emotion or logic, but we can convince them with their wallet.

I'm not trying to attack you in particular here, but is this this actually a big realization to people here? This is a "no shit, sherlock" statement in my eyes. We were never going to control climate change with a "please do the right thing" argument.

It feels wrong to me to group "consume" and "travel" together. Travel is legitimately a positive force for exposing people to new cultures, ideas, and wealth sharing, which in turn strengthens the global community. Of course, to your point, some people just want to go to a private resort with other tourists and sit on a beach.

> if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more

I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities, especially when a lot of that movement is to escape local political inability/poverty/etc.

I agree largely with your point, particularly about "consumption" and that we get used to convenience and leisure, but I think travel is a totally different beast and should be treated with more nuance.

> Travel is legitimately a positive force for exposing people to new cultures, ideas, and wealth sharing

I live in Berlin, I see the people coming here, it's not about sharing and culture, it's about consuming, same in virtually every other tourism hotspot I can think of in Europe. Globalisation took care of levelling off everything and making every city some kind of disneyland for lost souls. I'll give you that travel isn't inherently bad, tourism and especially the kind of mass tourism we mostly see these days is though

> I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities

Yeah I guess I should blame the game and not the players.

It would be interesting to see a progressive taxation on flights. First flight of the year is tax free. Subsequent flights incur a charge at an increasing rate each flight taken.

This sounds interesting. I just googled this and there seem to be some proposals:

https://stay-grounded.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/progres...

I'll just say that my issue with it is that I see people especially politicians and celebrities get on my case about climate change and global warming and then see that they are jetting around all over the world to go to their conferences and appearances emitting more carbon emissions in a year than I will in my entire life and I start to question why I should pay a higher price on gas through taxes and have my energy limited and monitored when it is clear I am a much smaller part of the problem here compared to those that are advocating those ideas.

Presumably they pay those gas taxes too. They're just very rich, so they don't care. Maybe your issue is with wealth inequality rather than with carbon taxes per se?

The problem is that nuance gets emotional. Then whoever has a better (or sadder) story to tell, wins. Yet pollution is pollution.

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