this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Are we forced to take a flight across the world and a cruise in a ginormous cruise ship every year? A lot of people do this. I totally agree that we're forced to be part of the system, but that excuse only goes so far. A lot people go way, way, way beyond what we're forced to do. Granted, we keep being told by the media and politicians mostly that it's no big deal, but even what little they say already gets a lot of people riled up. Imagine what would happen if they told the full truth and told us the true extent of the measures that were required?
I dont know about you but im 36 and ive been on 1 boat and 4 planes in my entire life. And those planes flew from the uk to france.
I think the demographic for going on cruise ships is more the people over 50. amd flights every year? Well how about private jet flights multiple times a day.
We may not be helping that much but we arent the main cause of the problem. Thats the mega rich and the corporations.
Im ot shirking responsibility but it helps to aim at the root of the problem if you want to solve it.
I actually used to fly for vacation about once a year for several years before COVID, but never taken cruise. However, my feeling now is that air travel for leisure should be banned outright worldwide because it's low hanging fruit to reduce human carbon output. This says that aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of total carbon output. Heck, ban private jets at the same time!
As much as I love to dunk on mega rich people and corporations as much anyone else, we will never handle the issue of airplane pollution if we focus only on them. There are only so many people who fly in private jets. They are vastly outnumbered by middle class people who combined take millions of flights a year. This FAA document says: "The number of passengers flown by air carriers increased by 55 percent, to 917 million in FY2022 (Section 1). This remains below the pre-pandemic (FY2019) level of 1,057.6 million passengers." That's around 1 billion passengers every year!
Unfortunately I couldn't find actual figures that compare total fuel consumption of private jets vs commercial jets in aggregate, but according to this article, 1 out of every 6 flights handled by the FAA is for a private jet, and a private jet emits at least 10x more pollutants per passenger than a commercial plane. Do you see the problem? Private jets probably carry an average of 10 passengers and commercial jets probably carry an average of 200 passengers (both of these are complete guesstimates). 10 passengers x 1 flight x 10x pollutants (total: 100 pollutant units) vs 100 passengers x 5 flights vs 1x pollutants (total: 500 pollutant units). In other words, just going by these completely thrown together numbers, it would appear that commercial flights produce at least 5x more carbon in total as private flights, and I feel that I was very conservative in my estimates. I suspect that commercial airlines produce much more than 5x the pollutants of private jets in total.