Majority of private jets carrying 3 passengers or less, releasing 10 times as much carbon per passenger than a commercial flight.
As a peasant, I don’t think reducing my carbon footprint will offset the disgusting (increasing) display of greed from the elites.
Perhaps the greatest scam the rich ever pulled off was convincing the common people that climate change is somehow our fault instead of theirs. A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
But if you and your family stop using plastic straws, turn the heat down in winter, meticulously sort all your recycling and use public transport more for the next decade, you can help Jeff Bezos offset the emissions for his next weekend trip to the Maldives!
Well yea. If every person reduced their impact by a tonne, that’s 65 tonnes of CO2 saved
How many private jets is that?
In other words, if all the billionaires just ceased to exist, it would result in the humanity achieving the emission goals?
Well for example, I read the other day that 1 in 10 flights taking off from the UK are private jets.
I was being incredibly conservative and generous to the billionaires, considering the carbon footprint of just 125 of them is bigger than the entire nation of France
The easy solution is to just directly tax carbon emissions and dump the money into methods to reduce emissions (transit, trains, green construction, agricultural controls, etc.)
People don’t like taxes though, so this will never happen. An emissions-based tax is possibly the easiest way to disproportionately tax the wealthy.
Yes!!
I’ve long argued that courageous states should radically reform their tax system. Rebase the entire tax system around carbon tax, setting the level to ensure the state has the same income base.
There’s a naturally progressive tax system built into that but we could make it even more progressive by laddering up the rates as the carbon emissions increase.
We might as well extract the fat from billionaires and burn them as carbon neutral fuel.
We need both. The elite’s footprint is gross and disgusting, but we peasants are far more numerous, so reducing the elite’s footprint alone won’t do the trick.
the thing is, i will refuse to behave until the bigger misbehavers are held accountable
This kind of reasoning is why we are not making progress. It’s much easier to hold others to high standards when you’ve applied these to yourself first. The same goes for countries: it will be easier to pressure China/India when the West has done their part.
Yeah I can recycle and grow my own food and compost and ride my bike and walk places as much as I want. It won’t save as much carbon in my lifetime as even one of these flights.
It’s depressing, but I still do it because I don’t want to be part of the problem and I’ll need to know how to do these things when the world really goes to shit.
How does this compare to other countries?
Edit: piss poor googling lead me to 17% of flights in USA being private.
Private != Jet though, a 172, while still not the most efficient method of travel is much different than a leerjet.
For anyone wondering, a 172 can hold 3 adults including the pilot, cruises at 115mph, and burns about 9 gallons of fuel per hour so it gets 12.8 miles per gallon. A Learjet 45 can hold 11 people, cruises at 510mph, and burns about 200 gallons per hour so it gets 2.2 mpg. A Boeing 787-9 can hold 290 people, cruises at 560mph, burns 2000 gph, and gets 0.28mpg.
The 172 uses 2.63 gallons per person to go 100mi, the Learjet uses 4.06 gallons, and the 787 uses 1.23.
A 2022 Toyota Corolla gets around 40mpg highway and squeezes 5 people inside so it uses 0.5 gallons per person per 100mi.
These are all talking about max capacity too.
The 172 is more likely to be full and the pilot has a good chance of being part of the group instead of just a pilot.
The 787 is likely to be at least 90% full and the crew are a much smaller proportion of the load.
If there are just two people missing from max capacity on the Learjet then that’s making things even more inefficient than the others. And it’s very likely that they will be at least that much under capacity.
A 2022 Toyota Corolla gets around 40mpg highway and squeezes 5 people inside so it uses 0.5 gallons per person per 100mi.
5 people in the Corolla is 2–3 times as many people as are at all likely to be in there. That’s a very skewed number.
When using realistic numbers, cars come in at about the same per mile as large commercial airliners. (Flights tend to be far, far longer of course.)
It’s pretty crazy how it spiked on 2020, rich really were not risking getting sick…
Maybe an unpopular take, but I honestly don’t think private jets should even exist. When does a private citizen actually need one; if you want to fly in luxury that is what first class on commercial airlines is for, you shouldn’t need more than that. I get that people operating in a government capacity might need, but that’s not really the same as a private citizen owning one.
Then again, I don’t think anyone should be rich enough to be buying private jets to begin with.
