Just 1% of people are responsible for half of all toxic emissions from flying.
It is really nice to fly privately, though I understand why proplr don’t like them.
As someone who has taken a private flight provided through work, and rode on a fancy sleeper cabin on a train, trains are 1000x more enjoyable. It’s honestly really saddening we’ve let our rail system get this bad compared to other countries.
Rail is excellent for freight transport. There is no cheaper way to move a hell of a lot of heavy or bulky stuff across a continent, especially if what you’re transporting is not particularly time sensitive and can wait for you to acquire full loads before setting off.
Rail is absolutely terrible for passenger transport. All the advantages of freight rail are lost once you switch to passenger service.
The only place passenger rail works is in the densest of urban environments.
The worst possible case is allowing a passenger train - serving a couple hundred people - to take priority over and interfere with a freight train that serves tens of thousands of people.
Yeah I have no idea where this idea came from because it simply isn’t true in other countries if you are from the US.
Sure, modern rail starts falling short when you start doing long distances like from New York to Los Angeles.
However, for medium long distances, this is absolutely false.
Distance wise, a trip from Beijing to Shanghai is comparable to Chicago to New York or about 100 miles short compared to Dallas to Chicago.
Sure, a flight does that same distance in 2hrs 18minuties on average.
But compare that to the train cost only being $30 and showing up every 30 minutes as opposed to 4 times that amount for a plane ticket. If you miss that plane as well, then you’re SOL so you better show up to the airport two hours early according to the FAA!
No, I’m not some user from hex bear simping over China either. The sleeper car I was referring to was from Paris to Venice. Was like $70 for two. Departed at night, went to sleep, and woke up in the morning to keep enjoying my vacation. Sure, not as fast as the Chinese train, but this European train is also dated compared to that bullet train, plus there are way more mountains to traverse in this route. And it was absolutely lovely as opposed to playing $500 per ticket for a flight to the same destination.
A proper bullet train setup in the US, especially through the Midwest, not only would make travel cheaper, but you’d make rural towns more attractive to live in if a 2 -> 4 hour drive to the closest big city turns into a 30 minute train trip.
If it were up to me we’d blanket ban anything that only the ultra rich can afford and force them to put the funds into improving public services. If they want private flights, great, but they also have to offer them at an affordable price to the average person. Basically, “if you didn’t bring enough for the whole class, you can’t eat it,” but for rich people.
If they want private flights, great, but they also have to offer them at an affordable price to the average person.
Individual motorized transport for the masses, but in the skies? This would ultimately doom our ecosphere. Let’s instead have less flights, less individual transport and more mass transit.
I think I generally agree to your idea but want to include future generations; sustainability. It’s not enough to allow all currently living people a certain lifestyle. What good is it if the result is a scorched Earth a few decades later?
Or maybe you didn’t mean it that way. Sorry then, still wanted to make that point.
You’ve got it exactly backwards. The problem isn’t that the rich buy too much. The problem is that they don’t buy enough. They lend and invest and leverage and otherwise use their money to create debts owed to them.
The cars they buy each pay autoworker wages. The shares they buy in that car company creates an obligation on the company to pay them dividends.
We should be doing everything we can to increase their costs and decrease returns on excessive investments, while removing impediments on them buying services and manufactured products.
Skewed analysis is skewed.
From their own source, 4% of the fuel consumption comes from private flights, so the 1% of people are mostly taking commercial flights (70% of gas consumption), the petition should be to ban private and the majority of passenger commercial flights.
Did you know that four passengers in a Suburban pollute less for the same amount of miles traveled than if they were going to their destination by plane? Don’t see many people thinking about that when taking the plane to visit the world, not even those who are eco anxious.
Although nothing you’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect, I feel like you’re leaving out a big part of the equation - time. A Suburban can’t travel the same number of miles anywhere near as fast as a plane or jet and that, in most cases, is the number one reason someone chooses a flight over a drive, even if it uses less fuel and is more eco-friendly.
I totally agree with you but there’s a question that should be asked when it comes to going on vacation all over the place (and from what I understand it’s more common in the USA/English Canada to move very far for school and to take the plane multiple times a year to go see one’s family)… It’s simply unsustainable but people keep pointing at the rich with their private jet but when looking at the big picture, it’s tourists that allow commercial flights companies to continuously increase the number of flights they offer…
It’s really not, though. Commercial aviation and transport (including private jets, commercial flights, and shipping/import) combined make up only 5.3% of the total CO2 in use. While commercial flights make up 70% of that slice, they also have an exponential effect vs. the alternative. Even if there are more flights, unless they are less than half-full, using commercial airlines is more sustainable and also safer than the other alternatives because the effect is multiplicative.
Imagine everyone was taking private jets. If you forced everyone to fly in pairs, you would literally halve the amount of CO2. Force them to fly in 4’s, and it’s a further halving of that first half (equal to 1/4 the amount of CO2 now). Extend that further and further until you have a flight with 647 passengers (the “average” amount for commercial flight globally) and look how much CO2 you’ve prevented from entering the atmosphere. Even if someone is touring 6 or more times per year, as long as they’re flying a commercial flight, it’s better for CO2 production than a car or individual transport.
It’s far more effective to direct efforts to something outside of that 5% (or especially a subsection of that 5%) like manufacturing or industrial CO2 pollution.
Everyone in these comments so far is misrepresenting the information here and arguing off of an incorrect assumption.
This is NOT saying that the 1% wealthiest people are responsible for half of these emissions. This is saying that 1% of travellers are responsible for half these emissions because those travelers travel so frequently. It has nothing to do with their wealth or using private jets. It’s about how much they’re flying.
Source: From the study linked in the petition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307779
“1% of world population emits 50% of CO2 from commercial aviation.” Not private jets. Commercial aviation.
“Data also supports that a minor share of air travelers is responsible for a large share of warming: The percentile of the most frequent fliers – at most 1% of the world population - likely accounts for more than half of the total emissions from passenger air travel.”
“Everyone in these comments doesn’t understand”
You’ve been arguing against me that commercial flights aren’t an issue because I’ve pointed out the same fucking thing 7h before you!
I never said that. I said that they’re not as big of an issue as cars. You’re lying. If you’re going to focus your efforts, as I’ve stated now multiple times, it would be more impactful to tell people to drive less, not more. Airline travel is more efficient than driving.
When used for passengers and for the same purpose, no they’re not. They only are if they’re used for the same distance and the car has one passenger and the plane is full, but I’m sure even you realise how disingenuous that comparison is.
I stopped flying cross country a year ago. Not looking back. Thanks wife.
