this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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I think one thing that could realistically reduce flying is making it much more expensive. Of course that would exacerbate what this article calls the global justice gap. But sometimes you have to accept a trade-off and I think that could work
My guess is that approach would do relatively little to mitigate the overall environmental impact. If you raise fees enough then private airplanes, with much higher CO2 per passenger, become more desirable. To make air travel "worth it" airlines - who have fleets of aircraft with 35-50 year useful lifespans - would dial back to business and first class only.
Spitballing it, I'd say we could reduce flying passenger count by 80% but only see a 10-20% reduction in net CO2 generation. And then, to offset the loss in 80% travel, you would need to find an alternative travel source that is only 12-20% of the use of an aircraft per passenger mile for actual traveled miles just to break even on net passenger travel. 20% seems to be the marker for national rail vs most air travel, so we're at best break even. And for passenger ocean ships, the net cost per passenger in CO2 is higher than flying, so it's a lose-lose for any trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific travel (not to mention the week travel time each way).
Those are good considerations. However I question this:
In other words, you're suggesting that the number of flights would remain the same or near the same, and the seats would just be backfilled with higher-paying customers. That could be a problem, yeah.
My presumption/goal is that you'd need to raise prices enough to make the demand drop sharply at whatever price point be necessary to reduce the number of flights. Airlines would have to price in reduced demand on top of whatever fees are imposed to continue making it worth it to them. If the prices only result in an 80% carbon reduction, raise them some more.
Additionally, at a certain price point it may be that alternative fuels become viable - fees could take this into account to encourage them.
As for trans-ocean flights, these are probably unavoidable, yeah.
Perhaps it could be accomplished by simply limiting the number of permitted flights and allowing prices to float. I suppose that's taking up the same goal from the other end. Whatever happens, it seems inevitable that fewer people will be flying, and they'll be paying more. If we're to tackle the problem at all.
It's not like our current state of affairs is equitable either though. Flying is specifically cheap today because of a combination of subsidization, lobbying, and big business demands. It's not built to be fair to the little guy either, and if it ever is it's just a convenient side-effect.
As much as big oil, airlines, automakers, et al are subsidized, if we could round up even 50% of that money, we could easily accomplish low-cost mass transit and reliable long distance rail. Even high-speed rail between major cities in some cases. Combined with cutting out taxpayer subsidized air, thay would go a long way to make things more equitable