I really hate this. Let people decide, don’t treat them like kids.
Let’s fix the 98% of emissions that are not air travel first and then let’s fix air travel with sun fuels
> Speaking in Tonga, during a meeting of Pacific Island leaders, Guterres said “This is a crazy situation: rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making.
Kind of ironic given the flight from the UN headquarters to Tonga generates nearly 1500 kg of CO2 per person.
Loves the drink but curses the bottle.
I thought the "Al Gore flies first class so let's not do anything about global warming" trope was dead, but I guess not.
That said, it would be refreshing if public figures led by example. So if we're serious about changing public perception, maybe we should create viable alternatives to jet airline travel and encourage them to use them. Here viable means getting there with comparable travel time and cost but fewer CO2 emissions.
Until then, without viable alternatives, criticizing environmentalists for traveling the way everyone else does is not a great look, and I think we're entering an era where we'll be seeing influencers and politicians called out for it in real time.
>maybe we should create viable alternatives to jet airline travel and encourage them to use them.
What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive? What if alternatives will only be available after we get a steady supply of biomass driven by clean fusion?
What if "encouraging" doesn't work?
Then what -- keep flying, pumping CO2 and sleepwalking into disaster we all know is happening?
> keep flying, pumping CO2 and sleepwalking into disaster we all know is happening?
Focus on solveable problems. If you plot on the vertical axis amount of CO2 emitted and on horizontal public enthusiasm, flying is in the bottom right. It's a stupid thing to lobby against because for each unit of effort expended you're removing comparatively little CO2.
> What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive?
You're talking as if air travel isn't the slowest and/or most expensive option in some cases. See for example high-speed rail for travel distances under 800km.
> What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive?
Just like the sacrifices they expect the rest of us to make? They want me to give up my car for one with worse range or no car at all, while they still get to own cars and fly on jets because "there aren't many rich people, it's only logical that we are given a pass for everything we want you to stop doing."
To the contrary, "sacrifice for thee but not for me" is not real leadership. They can't advocate that the work of common people is less important and can therefor be done by Zoom.
To your point, I don't think people take umbrage with creating or advocating for compelling alternatives. But there's a difference between that and playing the blame game.
> To the contrary, "sacrifice for thee but not for me" is not real leadership.
Right, it's indeed the "Al Gore flies first class so let's not do anything about global warming" zombie rising from the dead.
Your type won't shut up with this nonsense until you hear a hermit saying it from the comfort of his hut. Except you won't listen then as well.
>Here viable means getting there with comparable travel time and cost but fewer CO2 emissions.
That's the rub. It's rarely comparable travel time except some point to points. Even in Europe. I travel by train within Europe (mostly) whenever I can. But it usually takes longer, costs more, and may involve sleepers on longer routes.
Why fly at all? Why not hold meetings over the internet like other working people? Or organize the conference in Bradford or Blackpool, instead of some tropical paradise, and see how many people are still motivated to fly in?
> Why fly at all? Why not hold meetings over the internet like other working people?
Speaking as someone who flies for high-value meetings, I will beat the guy literally phoning it in about three times out of four solely because I expended the effort to meet in person. Partly because it's a social gesture, showing I'm willing to expend time and resources for the person [1]. Partly because we're human beings who connect better in person than virtually.
When the stakes are international relations, the CO2 impact of the flights is peanuts.
They're supposed to follow Greta's lead and mooch of rich people to sail them around the world.
They're never going to do that. To them, we are ants in their ant farm.
A young person who grew up in my rural community and was on the town board for a while flew to a conference in South Africa on climate change which was one of the worst possible places you could have one.
I’ve been thinking about what carbon price would change people’s behavior and incentivize alternatives, $100 a ton is a round number close to estimates of what it costs to capture carbon from an oil refinery or coal burning power plant. It adds $1 a gallon to gas prices which people would bitch about in the US (e.g. Kamala Harris’s answer to “what do you do about climate change” in the debate was basically “drill baby drill” because she wants to win) but I don’t think would change behavior (gas was $1 a gallon before and I didn’t change my driving habits; $500 a year more in gas is not quite enough to make an EV attractive, 3x that is getting there)
Similarly adding $150 to that ticket isn’t going to stop people from making that flight.
> $100 a ton is a round number close to estimates of what it costs to capture > carbon from an oil refinery or coal burning power plant
That's a wildly optimistic number, and almost certainly too low for the carbon sources yoU're naming. Equinor estimated over 600USD for gas burners at an LNG plant, under almost ideal conditions (existing nearby storage site, company with lots of experience): https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...
I think that's just it. Politicians are just going to play both sides whenever they can so we can't expect them to be different.
But blaming oil companies for providing for consumer demand while they also propping up modern Western economies is kind of pointless. Oil companies have even signaled a willingness to divest from their products. Investment in new exploration was at an all time low until the current administration actively encouraged the industry to expand.
A bit of a weird complaint, do you expect people that work on the topic and are aware of it to just stay at home and live off the land? Change isn't happening instantly.
I wonder if a more effective tool for battling air emissions would be to only allow ads for airlines that address contrails. Contrails are something like 2% of global warming power and when addressed effectively could actually cool the planet (as some stop gap efforts while we figure out the rest of emissions, hydrocarbons in planes don't seem like they're going away any times soon).
There's a neat map and some contrail science at https://contrails.org
*more effective tool for battling airline contributions to global warming...
Oil ads? I hardly recall seeing ads for oil. Maybe ban ads for ICE vehicles would be more in line with their goals. Not that I necessarily support that.
They mean oil-industry-beneficial ads. The source article[0] words it better:
> The Hague became the first city in the world to ban advertisements promoting fossil fuel products and carbon-intensive services including cruise ships and air travel.
[0] https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/2024/09/13/the-hague-i...
Shell ads are quite common in the Netherlands. Usually it's shell trying to greenwash itself.
When I was living in Belgium I frequently saw ads for heating oil, as they were battling a rise in more stringent emission standards for home furnaces, and they were losing against the natural gas ones, whose emissions are much much lower.
It's crazy to think that people are campaigning against natural gas when there are still so many worse energy sources in the world.
Germany is reactivating lignite coal plants, for goodness sakes.
May have something to do with who the supplier of natural gas to Europe used to be.
Unsure about the effectiveness of banning air travel ads. If you have a compelling reason to go somewhere the time savings of air travel often make it a no-brainer compared to other forms of transport. Banning oil ads seems more effective long term because there alternative forms of energy for most purposes, and it helps to mitigate fossil fuel propaganda.
> you have a compelling reason to go somewhere the time savings of air travel often make it a no-brainer compared to other forms of transport
People who have strong reasons to fly aren't really the main audience for those adverts, then. It's more about advertising cheap fights to Italy for example.
It's also funny given that The Hague is specifically an international destination for diplomats. So the city itself contributes more to international flights than any billboards ever did.
Are diplomats actually a meaningful fraction of air travel? I would assume leisure travel accounts for magnitudes more travelers and airplanes
High-ranking officials (like presidents, kings, prime ministers) come in their own private jets, sometimes more than one. It's not like you can have 30 prime ministers coming on the same cheap airline plane.
There is no compelling reason to fly to Bali from the Hague each year. Except the weather ofc. People just like it. Because the weather. Did I complain about the weather in Holland already? No? It was raining again. The summer is gone.
> There is no compelling reason to fly to Bali from the Hague each year.
I know the feeling, but you do not need to travel to the opposite side of the planet to enjoy nice weather.
But why the ad doesn't have a big fat letter warning like cigarettes do? "Flying increases amount of CO2 in the athmosphere which we have no way to decrease and causes big fucking misery, wrath of God and more pressure on the housing market"
Why?
> Unsure about the effectiveness of banning air travel ads. If you have a compelling reason to go somewhere (...)
I'm not sure you realize this, but travel ads are used to create demand among those who do not have a compelling reason to go to the advertised travel destination. That's the point, and the whole reason they are posted. I mean, if you already have a compelling reason to go somewhere, how would an advertisement affect you?
With that reasoning advertising for air travel is wasted money anyways and we don't harm anybody by banning it.
I truly hope this is performance art, because there is no way that anyone with half a brain cell or more could believe that banning ads for travel will magically make it possible to bike to New Zealand, or that it will impact real polluters (India, China)
No it won't, but ads are only done because they believe the ROI is worth it. If you accept that they're not just throwing money away, ads must increase consumption. Banning the ads must, therefore, decrease consumption.
Yes, people will still fly, but maybe a few trips a year won't happen due to it not being right in someone's face.
There's no harm in reducing consumption.
An airline's ad is mostly trying to get your business away from the competing airlines, not to increase overall passenger flight (afaik). The main effect if that's right seems like it'll be to protect established firms at the expense of new entrants.
There is harm in reducing consumption as money will be allocated elsewhere: someone will lose, someone else might gain.
Let me fix that for you. You actually meant: United States and Europe, by far the world's largest polluters since the industrial revolution (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...).
Climate change didn't start today, so it makes no sense to blame whoever happens to be today's top polluter as the culprits. China emitted half the CO2 as the US, and India around 10%. Calling out those two countries is absurd.
These graphs are misleading because they overestimate the "relevant emissions" of the global south countries.
What I mean is that it is possible to emit some CO2 and it will just get absorbed and transformed back to O2 via natural processes in a sustainable fashion. So really from a country's emissions you should subtract off this number in some per capita fashion to get the actually relevant or excess emissions.
If you do that I think you will find that a good number of countries have never emitted any excess emissions at all, and more than half have barely emitted anything of consequence. The blame on US, Europe, Canada, Australia will be even bigger than the ~70% shown on this chart.
>United States and Europe, by far the world's largest polluters since the industrial revolution
Not just that. US and Europe got into the position of prosperity and hegemony we are enjoying right now thanks to industrial revolution which emitted all that CO2 in the first place.
> Climate change didn't start today, so it makes no sense to blame whoever happens to be today's top polluter as the culprits
Blame isn't helpful, period. Industrialised nations industrialised by polluting. But CO2 in the air is orders of magnitude more difficult to recover than carbon unburnt.
Most CO2 was emitted by the industrialised world. Most CO2 we can prevent from being emitted will come from India and China.
There is no good guy bad guy here, just places with a higher or lower return on action.
The problem with cumulative data is that you can't justify your wrongdoing just because someone else did it too.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
The EU and USA are both shrinking, unlike China and India which are growing.
We should all be cutting.
The other part that I actually don't like about any of these metrics is that they don't take land-mass and population into account.
Ideally you'd measure CO2 emissions per capita per square km/mile and compare that.
These are the top five countries with population > 10 million by per capita emissions
United Arab Emirates 25.8 t
Saudi Arabia 18.2 t
Australia +15.0 t
United States 14.9 t
Canada 14.2 t
Dividing by land is not reasonable at all. Because immediately you will get into a discussion of which land absorbs CO2 more (rainforest vs desert), how air flows across borders, how to divide up the oceans which absorbe a lot of CO2, which is very hard to resolve.
> The problem with cumulative data is that you can't justify your wrongdoing just because someone else did it too.
In this case, yes, you can.
US, EU became developed by polluting first at the cost of the rest of the world, and now can't simply morally tell India, China to remain poor and undeveloped because that might harm the environment.
You should also keep in mind that, US/EU's manufacture is done in China and other countries in Asia, and when you factor in consumption as well as production, even today, US/EU will fair very poorly.
>The problem with cumulative data is that you can't justify your wrongdoing just because someone else did it too.
It's a classic tragedy of commons problem.
Who is growing and who is shrinking? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
You are both right. It is both worth calling out historical polluters and also making sure we push back on creating more polluting energy sources.
> real polluters (India, China)
Per capita CO2 emissions of
India China US UK
2.07 9.24 13.83 4.42
The amount of carbon you emit to go to the groceries is probably equal to produce all my groceries for a week.
Not to mention what's China doing with its CO2 emissions: making laptops, phones, cheap toys for USA and Europe...
To be fair, it’s incredibly cheap to take a flight to about anywhere else in Europe, for which alternatives often do exist, and that’s probably what it’s mostly targeted against. That being said, I doubt that it’s very effective. It’s more symbolic I guess.
I would agree that the flying has become "unreasonably" cheap given the negative externalities, but if we are talking about traveling over distances of >500 km, the alternatives are rarely compelling -- unless you are lucky enough have a direct high-speed-rail connection to your destination.
Then don't travel further than 500 km until we have a sustainable bio fuel. That's the only right answer.
Icelandair sent me a marketing email about cheap tickets to go there, I had a look around their website and I booked a holiday in Iceland... woah, advertising works!?!
A nice 300% tax on air travel and suddenly you don't need to go to New Zeeland for a weekend anymore. And ad and tax-exemption for air travel is the opposite of it.
> A nice 300% tax on air travel and suddenly you don't need to go to New Zeeland for a weekend anymore. And ad and tax-exemption for air travel is the opposite of it.
NZ just raised their tourist tax...