42
votes
Should I stop flying? It’s a difficult decision to make.
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- To Fly or Not to Fly? Why More People Are Saying No to Plane Travel.
- Authors
- Kate Siber
- Published
- Mar 8 2023
- Word count
- 2893 words
As much as I'd love to go for alternate modes of transportation, it's worth nothing that the first paragraph talks about the woman who gave up flying being from London. When you live in Europe and you're afforded 6+ weeks of vacation, it's easier to make those kinds of choices. But in the US where most people only get 2-4 weeks per year of time off (not just for vacation), it's hard to justify to yourself that you're going to spend multiple days in transit instead of just part of one.
It's just a shame that the US doesn't have high speed rail. Occasionally I still come across weebs who are amazed by Japanese "Shinkansen" bullet trains, but this tech is no longer futuristic, it's old. Japan's first Shinkansen was built in 1964. The US just refuses to invest in the infrastructure.
The technology is remarkable even if it isn't brand-new. And while the first Shinkansen line opened in 1964, the rolling stock operating on it has changed over time. The Shinkansen 0 Series initially operated at 210 km/h (130 mph). By comparison, the N700S Series (or similar) that your acquaintances are interested in operates at 300+ km/h (186 mph), or as high as 350 km/h (220 mph). There is a lot of cutting-edge engineering involved here; it is not true that the modern Shinkansen trains are "old."
Not to detract from your point, which is true: the United States' historic lack of investment in high-speed rail is causing itself significant economic, environmental, and social damage. Technically, Amtrak's new "Avelia Liberty" Acela trainsets will have a max speed of 220 mph under optimal conditions. Unfortunately, they won't go that fast when they enter service in late 2024 because there are no operating tracks in the country built to those design specifications. The Northeast Corridor only reaches 150 mph at a few points, 160mph next year. Joe Biden's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allocating $66 billion to rail infrastructure, provides Amtrak with more funding than they have ever received in every year of their history combined. This is an incredible piece of legislation that has the capacity to greatly improve US transportation. See also: Amtrak Connects Us 2035.
I'm writing this comment from Switzerland, having taken the TGV from Paris earlier this month. I was impressed with the speed of the train (350 km/h) near Paris, but thoroughly unimpressed with its speed near the border. Even within Europe, there have been dramatically different amounts of investment in high-speed rail. Switzerland's trains are frequent and reliable, but they aren't particularly fast.
It's happening, slowly and many decades late, but it is happening.
Paywall is blocking me, can you please provide a copy/paste/workaround?
This is an archive link.
I really hope this happens
How come flying is so much cheaper? Is it subsidies or is the aviation infrastructure just cheaper?
It depends on the route and the countries involved. Some routes are inherently more expensive to operate than others. Both rail and aviation infrastructure are expensive; though good rail solutions can be far less expensive over time on a per-capita basis due to the inherent efficiency advantages of trains.
I’m uncertain about the exact figures, but most countries require railways to pay a value-added tax (VAT), while exempting airlines. In some countries a train’s electricity use is taxed, while airline fuel is either not taxed or taxed to a lesser extent.
In almost all rail markets, a relative lack of competition drives up ticket costs compared to planes. Depending on the country, this can be due to excessive regulation on trains (while the airline industry has been deregulated in many places) and/or governmental investment in airport infrastructure instead of rail infrastructure.
For example, in the United States, heavy regulation on passenger rail contributed to bankrupting every single inter-city rail company in the 20th century, and continues to cripple Amtrak. (There’s more to that story, but it’s out of scope.) And less federal/state investment in stations and tracks over airports means fewer rail routes can be operated. This all contributes to an uncompetitive market.
I do not know the extent to which each of these issues individually affects the cost of rail tickets vs. plane tickets on specific routes. I’m sure some studies have been conducted on the topic, but I have not read them.
It’s subsidies, according to this article https://www.politico.eu/article/commercial-plane-flight-cheaper-rail-train-travel-europe/
The article also links to research by Greenpeace.
There's a high speed rail project they're working on in Florida that I think is supposed to start operation soon. I'm interested to see how it works out
That's Brightline between Miami and Orlando, which opened last month. It's not really "high-speed rail" (it only reaches 125 mph for part of the route), but it's faster than anything other form of ground transportation in most of the country. As far as I've heard, the route is doing very well for itself.
Ok... but how fast would high speed rail get me from Washington State to Georgia or New York? That is the kind of distances I have to go if I want to visit my dad and stepmom or my mom (or really any of my family cause they are all east coast). And I'm betting for that kind of distance there is going to be stops too which will definitely make the trip longer (or super expensive if it is non stop as trains are not as flexible as airplanes so it would be pretty niche to have a train just for ga-wa).
I'm just saying even with high speed rail the US is dealing with much bigger distances than Europe or Japan that airplane just is a lot better suited for.
Some quick back of the napkin math:
Japan's high speed rails can max out at 200 mph.
Distance on google earth from seattle to new york (with a deviation to stay below the great lakes) is about 1500 mi.
So ideal travel time is 12.5 hours.
Of course you have stops/acceleration/etc, but that gives us a good idea of the total travel time.
Flying is 5.25 to 5.5 hours. Add in the 2 hours early you are supposed to arrive for domestic flights, and you are easily at 7 hours.
Flight time has a hard minimum because of security screening/getting to and from the airport/etc. But planes can fly really fast, and the up front time cost doesn't change significantly with longer routes. Trains have very little up front time cost, but don't travel as fast. Therefore there will always be a threshold where planes outpace trains.
But this all seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Cross-continent flights are not the only flights americans make. With the same calculations, Seattle to LA is 5 hours by high-speed train and 2.5+2 hours by plane. So almost identical. Seattle to San Francisco is 3.3 hours by high speed train and 2+2 hours by plane. So shorter by train than plane.
I am sure you are going to say that I am comparing ideal train times to actual flight times, and I am. But this is mostly to demonstrate how high speed rail even along the coasts could certainly be comparable to plane flights. If we only had high speed rail along the large coastal cities, it could hugely reduce air travel along these shorter routes. Air travel will always exist (in particular for intercontinental travel), but short plane flights could easily be replaced by high speed trains.
That might be the top speed but the average speed those trains go (considering curves, turns, accell, decell) is around 140 MPH
That's an as the bird flies distance - not going to be feasible in any sort of reality. There are numerous areas where large diversions will be needed due to existing development/terrain (Bullet Trains typically have ZERO intercepts on the track). You are better off using a distance closer to the driving distance from Seattle to NYC. This brings your distance up to roughly 2800 miles.
Given 2800 miles @ 140 mph without any stops (and there would stops likely in chicago or something) you're looking at 20 hours.
Even if you ran side by side the existing "Empire Builder" train that runs from Seattle to Chicago (it takes ~46 hours @ 50mph average) and bumped it up to the 140mph speed that's still 16+ hours just to get to Chicago - things are only going to get slower from there as it's much more densely populated and developed
In the USA you aren't going to get away from having very similar security screening on a bullet train. Especially one that is traveling the most direct route possible (meaning it will be close to major metros.)
So since we can't account for that we are basically looking at two modes of transit one that takes 20 hours and one that takes 5.5 hours. We are also trying to apply a set of trains that have been very successful in missions of around 300 miles and trying to have it go 9x that.
You would also need to look into what the CO2 generation difference is between the two options (where is the electricity running these trains coming from) as well as the CO2 generation cost in constructing this cross-country dedicated track that would be required that has virtually no intercepts on it (something that makes a pure bullet train kinda impossible in this fantasy anyway).
You could argue that the CO2 for construction will eventually get offset but that is assuming no technological advancement in jet fuel (using captured carbon to create it) or electric aircraft.
I would be interested in running the numbers on CO2 externalities, but from previous papers I’ve read, rail generally wins even despite construction emissions. And the grid is more likely to largely decarbonize before jet fuel becomes net-zero.
This is largely going to be a function of the construction processes used and the environmental impact of construction in certain natural ecosystems. This is the sort of thing an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) considers when evaluating the feasibility of a particular route.
I don’t think this is true. Amtrak’s Acela service, reaching speeds of 150mph, has no security screening whatsoever. I am not aware of complex screening mechanisms planned for California High-Speed Rail, which will operate at 220mph. Brightline (125mph) has fairly minimal security screening as well, from what I know.
In Europe, security screening for HSR is limited or nonexistent. I believe Spain has some screening, but the TGV lines I’ve taken in France don’t. This is despite airport security taking, generally, a similar amount of time in Europe as in the US. Because trains operate on fixed routes, a derailment has less potential for collateral damage than a plane crash. It is also much easier and faster for them to stop.
Anyway, a significant portion of airport inefficiency is related to boarding. For many flights this can take 30 minutes or more. Even the relatively inefficient way Amtrak boards takes no more than 5 minutes. Then there is an additional delay as the plane taxis for takeoff; a train can simply start moving. Arriving planes have a similarly slow (if slightly faster) taxi and alighting process upon arrival, while a train does not.
I hope if HSR becomes common that security checks stay away - the security theater that is airport security is such a time loss. I guess my reasoning for it likely to occur would be due to the fear politics in the USA and the fact that it's a known "job creator"... that said I hope your right and it operates basically with as much security checking as the average cities metro would.
The loading and unloading times I hadn't actually considered but that would be a big reduction in my travel "stress"
My understanding is that the argument for security screening with planes is that hijackers can use them as a weapon as we saw with the world trade center and the Pentagon on 9 11.
There were numerous hijacking events where the passengers were captive hostages but lack of security screening didn't change as long as the risk and harm was only to the particular unlucky flight.
As was said earlier, trains run fixed routes, so easier to cope with if a hijacking happened.
For what it’s worth, the new lines Japan is building are targeting a 430km/h (270mph) average over a 500km (310 mile) run from Tokyo to Osaka.
So far it’s expensive and not fully proven, sure, but it’s also something that a country with one of the best track records in the world is confident enough in to commit trillions of yen (tens of billions of dollars) to. It’s not just an idle proposal, basically: it’s something that other countries could absolutely invest in too if they wanted to take a similar infrastructure path today to the one Japan chose in the 60s, betting on the newest tech at the time.
But yeah, planes and trains are different and have different use cases - I’d say anything less than 5 hours is the sweet spot for rail, when considering convenience, security, luggage restrictions, travel to the airport, etc. That means distances less than 5x whatever your maximum speed is become immediately better for the passenger (assuming sensible pricing, at least), and distances more than become a trade off: six hour red eye flight in a crappy economy seat vs 12 hour sleeper train? I’m still probably taking the latter, and it’s an apples to apples comparison because trains are far less sensitive to space and weight. Eight hours in the air or 18 on the train? Yeah, I’ll probably fly unless I can break the train journey over a few days and make it an adventure.
That's a pretty long distance, so it's tough, but as Weldawadyathink points out, theoretically possible with current technology (a TGV/Shinkansen train) in about 12 hours. Given that space on trains is a lot cheaper you could run sleeper trains competitively with economy aircraft seating. Of course a sleeper using existing track would currently take a couple of days which isn't great (but space on slower trains comes at a much lower premium so it might be possible to try to compete on luxury).
For example in Europe there is currently a resurgence in sleeper trains, and some trains are travelling very long distances serving the luxury end of the market (e.g. attempts to revive the Orient express which are ludicrously expensive).
12 hours coast to coast in the USA is not even theoretically possible, and in practice absolutely impossible.
Setting unworldly unreal expectations doesn't help generate this sort of change.
I mean from an engineering perspective it's possible – you have to build high-speed track from one end of the country to another. If the US could build at Spanish cost levels it would probably cost around US$70 billion (4,500km of rail *€15.3 euro/km = €67 billion = ~$70bn USD, and that figure includes stations) or at the level of the original TGV Sud-Est it would cost around US$35 (the original TGV Sud-Est was a marvel of modern engineering which cost only $8.4 million/km for high speed rail). For context California's high-speed rail system is projected to cost somewhere between US$80-120 billion.
The real problem is entirely political, not a question of engineering.
I mean this respectfully - that line sounds like you don't have the engineering background to make that claim.
I mean it's very possible at a technical level to build a high-speed rail line across the US. American geography doesn't prevent it. Whether it works economically is another question.
Of course it makes a lot more sense to build more commuter over shorter distances first (e.g. NY-Chicago, etc).
Your original claim was that it was technically possible to build a high-speed rail across the USA to get a train coast to coast in 12 hours... I disagree... prove your claim.
Excluding traffic interference, most slowdowns are related to track curves, as you can see in OpenRailMap, or a number of extremely specific engineering requirements of the track itself. If the entire track were built to a 220mph standard, then the train could travel at 220mph the entire distance. There is not a technical reason that this is impossible (CAHSR is designed for this speed, and that includes a variety of geographies), though it would be ridiculously expensive. At 2500 miles, that’s about 12 hours, excluding stops. It would obviously stop many times.
Acceleration time is not trivial. Stations can’t be too close together. French TGVs can accelerate to ~200mph in ~10 minutes (this is very rough; but as a rule, acceleration rate decreases as speed increases, so it might be 1.2mph/s at first but gets down to 0.2mph/s at higher speeds. Finding the overall time to accelerate therefore requires an integral, which I am far too lazy to write!). Deceleration would be faster, maybe ~3 minutes in an emergency or more like, oh, 5 minutes in general (that’s an optimistic and unscientific guess, and probably wrong). Dwell time at each station might be 5 minutes or so. For the sake of blatant speculation and easy math, perhaps we can assume a time addition of 20 minutes per stop. (This is wrong, because non-maximum speeds =/= 0, but I’m probably underestimating dwell times and viaduct/tunnel slowdowns in difficult geography, so maybe it evens out.) Now, exactly how many stops a theoretical cross-country train makes depends on its route. If we decided to put a stop every 100 miles (arbitrary number, but about the distance from Fresno to Bakersfield in the real-world CAHSR project), that’s 25 stops. At a possibly optimistic (or possibly inaccurate) +20 minutes per stop, that means about 8 additional hours to the journey.
Maybe you could have some express trains, but 20 hours from coast-to-coast is not super time-competitive with air travel. Even 16 hours—with stops every 200 miles—is slower than air. However, perhaps there exists a market for such things, or there could be? I mean, people drive across the country all the time, and that takes multiple days. And emerging Maglev technology changes the math in HSR’s favor slightly. At SCMaglev’s 315mph, a theoretical 2500-mile route could be traversed in 8 hours, assuming perfect tracks and zero stops. Acceleration/deceleration times to 315mph would be longer, but maybe you could make stops less frequent. I don’t have a sense of the Chuo Shinkansen’s acceleration/deceleration times. In any case, it would still not be strictly time-competitive with air travel, though it does get closer. (Again, my napkin math has low accuracy, so take this with a grain of salt.)
US costs remain perplexingly high to me. Alon Levy has some useful commentary on what might be reasonably built if American costs were typical in “Assume Normal Costs” and other writings. Levy describes the sources of high US costs in another article on their blog. Spoiler: it’s mostly not a technical problem, but a cultural one. (The Transit Costs Project presents case studies more formally.) It will take greater outreach to get our costs down to Spain’s level.
I don’t know if there have ever been any serious cost estimates for a coast-to-coast 220mph line. If we’re going off of California High-Speed Rail costs, it would be in the several hundreds of billions. But as you said, US engineers could get their act together, like Spain has.
American here. If the train has a comfortable way to sleep, 20 hours coast to coast could be preferable to driving, which many people do.
However, I am no engineer but what about mountain ranges? The route coast to coast includes some steep terrain at high altitude.
Does high speed rail exist in Switzerland and Austria?
California High-Speed Rail is designed to have a maximum gradient of no more than 3.50% under exceptional circumstances, per the Alignment Design Standards for High-Speed Train Operation (p. 22). Of course, a gentler vertical alignment of <1.25% is preferred where suitable. This document also describes requirements for attenuation, superelevation, etc., if you’re curious.
In addition to maintaining a reasonable gradient, a route must not have sharp curves which limit speed. CAHSR allows for slowdowns to 125mph under exceptional circumstances, such as tricky mountain passes. You can see § 3.2.5 Curvature (p. 14) for some figures, but they specify a bare minimum of about a 1-mile radius for exceptional curves (125mph), and a preferred radius of more like 6.5–8.5 miles (220–250mph design).
If there exists a series of mountain passes which permit at-grade construction not exceeding the gradient requirements and the curvature requirements, that is the cheapest way to proceed. However, this is unlikely for such a long route, so some amount of tunneling and viaduct construction is likely to be involved. In general, this is technically feasible—rail tunnels are not uncommon, and neither are viaducts—just comparatively expensive. This is primarily why the CAHSR Authority allows some slowdowns in the mountains: to keep costs down. There are also various technical challenges associated with tunneling in particular, like safe power delivery and ventilation.
I have not read any technical documents proposing a specific east-west route through the entire Rocky Mountains, so I can’t comment on exactly what it would look like. It is worth noting that such lines exist at low speeds already, having been built 150+ years ago, so we are not in totally uncharted territory. However, we can also look to some existing and planned HSR tunnels in the European Alps as a point of comparison.
There are not really any true high-speed rail lines in Switzerland or Austria, mostly for geographical reasons. However, the New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA) in English is a pair of fairly extensive rail tunnels through the Alps in Switzerland designed for 155mph and operating at 145mph. The longest tunnel, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, runs for 35 miles. The Lyon–Turin HSR line also proposes a slightly longer rail tunnel connecting the French and Italian HSR networks, and will apparently operate at 137mph. This is not true HSR according to the EU, but is faster than the current lines.
These projects underscore the technical feasibility of building long and elaborate high-speed rail tunnels. While speeds may decrease for the duration of the tunnel, they will be significantly faster than existing infrastructure in the Rockies, which in some cases may go as low as 30mph. I imagine that speeds of ~125mph or even 150mph+ could realistically be maintained, as with CAHSR, or possibly higher if some longer tunnels were to be constructed. I would need to read an EIS for a specific route to say that with confidence, though.
A train from Washington State to New York would be like going from Ireland to Armenia. Europe is also very large; many or most Europeans would still fly such a route, even if a HSR line existed there.
At current speeds, HSR is time-competitive with both automobiles and air travel at about 100–600 miles. It still has a niche above 600 miles—not everyone can or wants to fly—but to a lesser extent.
Cutting-edge high-speed rail technology can deliver a reasonably fast journey at a theoretical max speed of 220mph conventional HSR. Japan’s fastest train (tested; line under construction), called the Chūō Shinkansen, will have a max speed of about 315mph in practice, though it has reached 370mph in tests. No HSR route ever operates at max speed the entire journey, though a dedicated line could get relatively close. Either way, something like that linking the US coasts would probably end up being a sleeper train.
While I think coast-to-coast HSR has great utility, it is not time-competitive against air travel with current 220mph technology. More immediately beneficial projects are things like California High-Speed Rail or Cascadia High-Speed Rail, which will link major metropolitan areas on the West Coast with each other. Strong regional connections are massively important and are the backbone of any rail network. What I do know based on city-pair gravity models is that it is very feasible to build (broadly speaking) a West Coast HSR network and an East Coast/Midwest HSR network, and smaller regional networks in other hotspots, like the Texas Triangle.
Yeah. I'm from New Zealand.
If I want to get anywhere outside my country: flight.
Domestic travel: flight.
Or a road trip, which, idk how that compares. Can't be much better per passenger. Takes multiple days. And we're a fairly tiny country. Can't imagine that for coast to coast USA.
NZ is about 1,000 mi long (1600 km), almost exactly the same distance as Baltimore, MD to Miami, FL (1,096 mi). I made that drive a few times with a boyfriend in my 20s; taking turns and with a few pit/meal stops and hitting traffic it's about 24 hours (Google says it should be 16 and a half hours but Google is a liar). My coworker just made the trip there and back (and damn near killed himself) a few months ago to pick up family that couldn't fly for some reason and it took him about the same amount of time, longer on the way back because of the old people. So it's not technically a multi-day trip, if you're willing and able to bookend your vacation with a gruelling marathon drive.
Yep, Google says 25 hours of driving from Whangarei to Invercargill. And a ferry between the two islands of course.
Granted it's not the full route that I'll ever do. Continuous driving for more than 5 hours is a stretch for me and my family.
Fuck, just driving from chch to the West Coast is hard on me.
Would probably be easier if expressways or interstate quality roads. But I'd rather a functional passenger train system, hopefully frequently serviced, and ideally very fast.
Being a passenger has so many benefits. Actively navigating a route and driving takes a toll.
While the inspiration for the author to write this article was a woman in London who gave up flying, the author herself is from Colorado. I thought the article had an interesting dissection of the cultural, emotional, and financial struggles middle/upper class Americans face when thinking about completely giving up flying. She says for example:
What really made me think though, as a frequent and avid traveler, was her discussion of more conscientious travel. I’ve been thinking about sustainable tourism for years, but never really considered my flights as part of that. I will be thinking about the questions posed here in the future:
I honestly think that is a good reason to move to Europe. Even European countries which are a lot richer than the US (Switzerland) have roughly 1/3 of the CO2 emissions (per capita).
Sadly Eurostar has increased the prices of the London-Paris route to an unreasonable level, but you can get to almost any city in continental Europe overnight by train (train to Paris followed by a sleeper train run by ÖBB to almost any other major city).
Yeah, but like... the discussion is about minimizing flying to help the environment. What would moving to Europe accomplish besides making an individual feel better about their choices via virtue signaling?
Like, the entire US population that flies moving to Europe to take trains everywhere isn't a viable solution. The only way out of this is via policy, not individual choices. Americans fly because its cheap, and because we have to in order to work and travel. Neither of those things actually have to be true, and changing those things is a way more realistic solution to actually have an impact than just moving to Europe to feel better about your choices.
I am not American but I think that it seems very unlikely that the US will be able to get its act together and build the same quality and density of infrastructure as European rail provides. Germany is of course struggling from a lack of investment in its network, but France, Switzerland have fantastic rail systems (each a stellar example of opposite ends of the spectrum).
Sure, everyone who flies in the US moving to Europe isn't realistic, but the US could take some pointers on how to build great rail infrastructure (Europeans should also take some pointers from each other as well as places that do even better, such as Japan).
On a personal level even aside from the lower greenhouse gas emissions I would argue that it is a lot more pleasant to travel around Europe than it is the US, in great part because you can just hop on a train and be in another country in a couple of hours door to door.
Just want to throw out there that the US is fairly significantly larger than Europe and has about half the population. It's not necessarily a (wholly) "getting their act together" problem. It makes about as much sense to build a dense rail network in Montana as it does to build one in northern Norway. Switzerland has a great rail network, but it's also the size of, like, half of south Carolina.
https://images.app.goo.gl/TVZ4gtkoXHwnvcmG9
The refrain “the US is too big for high-speed rail” is misleading and untrue.
Indeed, rural Montana is not the place to build a 220mph passenger rail corridor. And absolutely no serious transportation expert proposes such projects.
High-speed rail suitability is a function of the density of city pairs weighted by their populations and their distance from one another. The larger the cities, and the closer they are, the more suitable the route. The sweet spot is about 250 miles apart, but routes over 600 miles apart are still attractive. There are a very significant number of US city pairs suitable for HSR. Almost all are east of the Mississippi, on the West Coast, or in Texas. It is not just the northeast. There are a few odd cases too, like the Front Range or maybe some of the southwestern desert cities (like Las Vegas), which show promise. When people talk about HSR, that’s what they’re referring to—places where people live. You can see a map of potential pairings from the Regional Plan Association (p. 3). It is extremely feasible to build high-speed rail between such city pairs.
Spain, a particularly not-dense country (at less than half the density of, say, Illinois; somewhere in between Indiana and Ohio), has produced a remarkably competent high-speed rail network.
All major metro areas in the United States, and many minor metro areas, have a large enough population and are geographically small enough that they can benefit from a stronger regional rail network. Urban sprawl exists but is absolutely not the blocker here, funding is.
I'd like to highlight that I was specifically responding to the notion that what prevents the US from building a network of the same "quality and density" as in Europe is that the USA doesn't have its act together.
I agree with you: building high speed rail connections between major US cities would seem to make sense and is probably economically feasible. But the US' rail network will never look like Europe's.
Yes, sorry if I came off as confrontational. Luckily the US is at least sort of getting its act together. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocates $66 billion to passenger rail service, and Amtrak will be getting more funding as a result of this bill than they have ever received in their entire history. I can't overstate how big of a deal that is; it sets the US today apart from its past neglect of rail. This law will not revolutionize rail by itself, but it gets the ball rolling in a massive way.
I agree that the American rail network will never be identical to Europe's. They have different population distributions. But Europe is an extremely diverse place and the all-too-common overarching idea that "they're incomparable" misses some of the useful parallels we can make between regions of each continent. This concept implicitly perpetuates the false notion that high-speed rail à la Europe cannot succeed in the United States.
At a high level, Western Europe is generally analogous to the Eastern US (east of the Mississippi) in terms of density; there are more and less dense places, but the population is reasonably clustered, often linearly. See this map from Eurostat broken up by European sub-region and this map from the Census Bureau broken up by US county. Notice the areas of quite low density in France and Spain, countries with excellent rail networks! (Far surpassing Germany's, despite their lower overall density.) This is comparable, perhaps, to the lower density of portions of Northern New England, Appalachia, and the Deep South.
The Low Countries, Northern France, Southern England, and Western Germany are analogous to the Northeast Corridor. Italy might be analogous to parts of the coastal Southeast US; still pretty dense, with several very dense metro areas, but not as much as the NEC. Parts of France, Eastern Germany, Poland, Denmark, Switzerland, etc. can be thought to be analogous to the Midwest, near-Eastern Europe in particular; certainly not as dense as the NEC or the Low Countries, but strongly punctuated by small regions of high density (like cities in Ohio and Illinois, and perhaps some up-and-coming Northern Sun Belt cities in Kentucky or Tennessee).
West of the Mississippi is sort of its own thing. It would be like building high-speed rail through Eastern Europe and Russia to get to a hypothetical super high-density bloc beyond. Really, the only part of the US that European rail's connectedness largely cannot be replicated in is the Plains states of Tornado Alley up north through the Rocky Mountains, and large portions of the Southwest, notably places that Amtrak currently ignores (they have little relative ridership potential). Still, even within that vast region, there are bright spots, like Coloradoan cities before the mountains and the affront to God known as Phoenix, AZ. This is analogous, perhaps, to Istanbul's incredible density despite its relatively sparse surroundings; or the Levant's. This is all to say that true HSR may remain somewhat disconnected coast-to-coast, even though it's possible, feasible, and realistic for large, interconnected blocs of each coast to operate true HSR.
So as far as regions are concerned, the US has a huge amount of potential. It can match or exceed European rail systems in many respect, if and only if the federal government invests appropriately in the infrastructure. It has the population to support such networks in many states. I think it is critical to preface all conversations about US high-speed rail with this observation. That is, starting off with a recognition of what can be accomplished as opposed to what cannot. Over time, the former leads to excitement and funding and the latter apathy and neglect.
I think this method works fine for a PR / sell this to the public idea - however, those who are actually looking at implementing or planning this NEED to do it by looking at what can't be accomplished first. What are the biggest hurdles, how do you overcome them, and what sacrifices does that entail? I think it would be incredibly unwise to have people spending money and effort into trying to achieve something without having the planning for the largest stumbling blocks first.
It would be like saying my garage is technically big enough for 10 more motorcycles but not considering if I have the budget for them, the time to ride them, or the ability to get enough bodyguards to keep my wife from killing me.
A Tildes thread is probably closer to a PR sell to the public. Transportation engineers have to do years-long (sometimes decades-long) environmental reviews on such projects and are well aware of their limitations.
Public support is necessary to build multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects. Currently, public opinion carries the (false) belief that HSR rail cannot work anywhere in the US because the US is too big, among other similarly false notions. While some implementations may be unrealistic, this default attitude of “it’s impossible” has become extremely embedded in the American psyche. This leads to a runaway effect where people believe (falsely) that a particular, useful HSR project cannot succeed and therefore withhold political and by extension financial support from it, further cementing dependency on inefficient planes and automobiles for inter-city travel. In order to address the issues caused by the overuse of these modes, we have to start by correcting the narrative—that is what I mean by focusing on what is realistically achievable from the beginning.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority lists its environmental review on its website. The Tier 1 reviews analyze feasibility and route utility at a somewhat higher level and the Tier 2 reviews focus on specific project segments in greater depth. They are extremely boring documents, but useful if you’re interested in learning more about the nitty-gritty of implementing HSR.
I guess my mentality just falls closer to the practical than the wishful. If something can be done in a practical manner then I'm all for it but I find it tiresome to see wishful thinking being sold as actual solutions because it seems to lead to people thinking solutions to problems are way easier than they actually are and you get the "twitter bite-sized solutions" that are "obvious" to a specific crowd and it just spirals.
Yeah, unfortunately railfans sometimes stray too far into that territory. While I specifically frame HSR discussions in a positive, optimistic light rather than defeatist one, I’m actually with you about practicality.
There are a bunch of questionable imaginary US HSR maps out there created by railfans who are excited about fast trains. I don’t think these are useless, in the way that far-fetched science fiction isn’t useless; they are nice to think about at a high level—how would transportation patterns change if such a system were to suddenly materialize? How would our cultural understanding of transportation change? But when most news articles and forum threads about individual HSR projects contain almost zero reference to planning, engineering, construction, and cost metrics, I tend to lose focus. This is why I try to link to EIS documents even though normal people don’t care.
The US has a fantastically large railway network (almost all cities are connected), but they haven't been able to get passenger rail to work, sadly. Some of it is that the freight train companies don't really want passenger rail.
In terms of high speed rail I don't think the distance is really a big problem (in fact it's usually cheaper to build in low-density areas where there isn't much stuff) – Japan runs a high-speed line from Tokyo to Hakata which takes ~5 hours and travels ~1.2 thousand kilometers. There's no reason why the US couldn't run a similar line between major cities similarly spaced.
The reason would be that Tokyo is many times the population of any US city. There needs to be sufficient demand for the track to not run in the red. At most I can see some kind of rail corridor between NYC, Boston, Philadelphia and maybe DC. That is really the only even remotely concentrated cluster of semi large population centers.
I mean there are also examples of fast connections between small places – for example there is a direct high-speed train connection between Paris (pop. ~3 million) and Nice (pop. ~300k) which are about 700km apart.
I think what would be very possible for the US is to build a sleeper network, using existing infrastructure. A European model they could try to follow would be that of the Austrian Federal Railway's "NightJet" which connects most European cities.
I've considered it, but my industry (software/IT) pays significantly less in Europe than the US. I'm not really interested in willingly taking that kind of paycut to live there.
Except for Switzerland, the cost of living in mainland Europe is generally considerably lower too. Even Paris is not really that expensive compared to a major US software metro like New York or San Francisco. The best bang-for-your-buck as far as high-speed rail goes is probably Spain, whose excellent inter-city rail system and comparatively low COL make it an attractive home for conscientious travelers on a budget.
Perhaps this is beside the point. It is possibly more useful to measure the "cost of living" beyond quantitative income and expenditure metrics. The connectivity and social systems present in Europe might improve life beyond what any pay cut would take away. Not to argue with you, I just hear this particular statement from apparently unhappy industry colleagues a decent amount and it always strikes me as missing something.
That may be true when comparing 70k US vs 50k EU, but it's not true at all when considering 400k US vs 100k EU (rough ballpark for Spain).
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me because an American moving to Europe would have to fly to see family in the US. A world where people hardly ever fly is one where people don't move that far from family, or they never visit them.
We would need to narrow our horizons and not even consider Europe. This is already true of many Americans
In the continental US you can get quite far by car. Coast-to-coast is a stretch, but thousand mile journeys (like a trip from the northeast to Florida) are pretty reasonable and routine. And there is always Greyhound.
While I'd not judge anyone on their personal choice - if they feel it's worthwhile I say go for it - I'd definitely NOT support this becoming some sort of "hey you should also give up flying or you're a bad person" meme like what often happens with social movements on social media.
There was recently this website (https://celebrityflight.com/) floating around showing how much pollution famous people put out by buzzing around in their private jets. On a different forum, someone put forth the suggestion that the rich should have some sort of "carbon counter" that they will be grounded from flying if they went over ... I pointed out the following:
I can almost promise you even a HEAVY traveler in the USA isn't moving the needle at all. In fact, I believe all air flight in the US (commercial, private, cargo, etc) amounts to something like 8% of total CO2 production. That doesn't mean small things don't matter (moving a mountain one pebble at a time and all that) but if we actually want to make MEANINGFUL CHANGE IN OUR LIFETIME then silly things like focusing on our methods of mass transport aren't the way we should instead be massively pushing for funding/research/legislation around the largest contributors to CO2 production.
Things like:
This is such a bad argument because nothing is responsible for much emissions on its own. We need to cut down on pretty much everything.
It's simply an argument for prioritizing and putting focus and effort on what can make the most impact in the shortest time rather than shotgun attempting a ton of tiny thing and having people focus on items that don't make nearly as much change in the short or long term.
What would make the most impact in the shortest time?
The big carbon sources (e.g. heating or electricity) will take decades to convert. Flying less doesn't have as much impact, but it's immediate.
Everyone can rationalize why they don't have to change anything. But the answer is not that nothing will change, the answer is that things will change uncontrollably and the future will be a nightmare.
What single thing has a larger impact than 8% of total US emissions? 8% is enormous. Also, what makes you think people can't focus on more than one thing? I work a full-time job trying to reduce the emissions of the electricity sector, but I also find plenty of time to advocate for many other things, including recommending people fly less.
I might flip your percentage around: if I spend less than 0.1% of my week trying to shame billionaires into polluting less, isn't that worth it?
All four points I listed at the bottom of the comment you replied to are significantly higher than this (for example personal transport is I believe around 20+% in the USA) and commerical air traffic is only a fraction of the 8% as that 8% contains all cargo flights, etc.
Reducing a bunch of different sectors in tiny ways better than eliminating one or two massive methods? I think you'd have a lot more buy-in and actual progress in a TIMELY manner by focusing. Sure "Every little bit helps" but that is a LONG TERM view of things, which is fine, but if you want quick results you need to focus on the largest and easiest to target areas. It's hard to get people onboard to make sacrifices that massively inconvenience them (like telling them not to fly for vacation or to see family) when it's easy to see how little difference that makes compared to large industrial and energy production sectors put out.
No, it's completely not worth your time - it makes literally zero difference in the world and only serves for you to fool yourself into thinking you actually doing something. Literally, almost any other productive task (educating, charity, producing, exercising, etc) spent during that time would be a greater net good for the world than doing that.
I disagree that solely focusing on the easiest targets is the best use of time, because basically all emissions need to be eliminated, not just the easy ones. Maybe we pick personal transport, and decide to focus all our efforts there because there's a clear path to decarbonization (EVs with renewable charging and better public transit). If we successfully accelerate the decarbonization of personal transport, but completely ignore aviation (where there is basically no realistic plan), then we have failed. If I had to choose a single issue to focus on, I would pick one of the hardest to abate sectors - aviation, shipping, cement, steel, etc. It's better accept slower progress in one sector in exchange for non-zero progress in another, rather than faster progress in one sector in exchange for zero in another. Another way of saying that is that the marginal value of creating a plan where there was none is much higher than the marginal value of improving an existing plan.
All that said, I understand that personally not flying or pressuring a billionaire to fly less does not magically fix the whole industry, but neither does personally buying an EV or installing solar panels on your roof or eating less meat. The theory is that social and financial pressure on airlines and powerful people helps incentivize R&D so that we can figure out a plan for aviation. Obviously it is best to pair that pressure with actual constructive action, like working for a company that's putting up solar panels or improving public transit or any of a million other necessary tasks. If you're just tweeting at billionaires and doing nothing else then I agree you're not helping.
Unless you are immensely powerful, and none of here are, absolutely any action you take as an individual could be described as making "literally zero difference in the world" as you say. But companies are made of individuals, movements are made of individuals, nothing happens without individual action. If every individual decides that flying isn't worth worrying about, then it will never change, and we will fail.
You just successfully showed the age old saying of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". You haven't failed anything, you've improved.
The cost of fuel is doing that to the aviation industry all on it's own.
Yes, but we also live in a democracy and unless you want to change that, you need to see public opinion on something as a resource that you can expend and refill. For example, in my country there was recently a discussion to reduce highway speeds from 130 km/h (~80mph) down to 100 (60) to reduce emissions. It would have some other benefits as well, such as actually increasing the average travel speed due to less accidents etc etc. and in general, I am for this change.
The problem is that on the larger scope, this is going to cost you a lot of public opinion capital. Your political enemies will use this massively against you, and if you are currently in power, you can expect that unless you do something else to improve public opinion again, you'll feel it when the vote for the next governmental cycle comes in. Weighed against how much this would reduce carbon emissions, it's therefore not worth it unless public opinion on the matter changes, which it won't, because we have a aging society where the average age is constantly going up, and thus by average also the conservatism.
Ok, but do we actually need to do that or is that a rhetorical assertion? If all air travel as a whole is like 2 or 3% of global emissions, and we need to drop to and actually is not going to sink global decarbonization efforts, then it sort of makes it seem like the people telling me I NEED to do _______ aren't really basing that on data or fact.
It comes across as kind of patronizing, like the other person is willing to mislead a bit for the greater good, like how parents lie to children for their own good. It's not really a lie to say we need to put effort into every decarbonization strategy, but it seems misleading to not factor in the relative significance that each of those strategies will have on total carbon emissions.
It also comes across as kinda hypocritical, because pretty much everyone has something they don't really care about that might possibly contribute to combating climate change. Some people aren't going vegan, some people aren't anti-car, some people don't support nuclear power, some people still choose to have children. All of those are things that some argue might be helpful to deal with climate change, and all of those things have some kind fo excuse for why people just don't want to do it or don't think we need to do it.
If we don't acknowledge that people don't need to go along with every thing a stranger tells them to do then there's no real point of worrying about climate change at all, because most people have already decided it isnt important enough to change their core beliefs over.
This is definitely an important factor to consider. If you tell people that they're awful because they don't adopt literally every single thing that would cut down on emissions: stop traveling anywhere outside of biking distance of their tiny shared urban space, eat vegan, wear all non-synthetic clothing, grow their own vegetables to reduce the impact of industrial farming, generate their own power by peddling a handmade generator, etc then they're just going to throw their hands up and give up altogether.
There is balance to be had. I'm still going to drive, fly and eat meat, but I have decided not to have children, support nuclear power, minimize my use of single-use consumables and repair items instead of replacing them. You can tell me that I'm a bad person all you want, but I'm at peace with my decisions.
I think that's a good approach. It's intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.
When you are listening to your own sense of what ought to be done with your life, and then act on it, that gives you a sense of equanimity, because you've taken into account all the unique factors of your life and changed what you can and accepted what you cant.
When you listen to other people tell you what you need to do to be good, it becomes an extrinsic validation. You can't really be good until someone else acknowledges you as having hit their standard. But since there are lots of people with lots of different standards, you'll never hit them all.
It's kinda like the plastic straw bans, which weren't even a rounding error when it comes to single use plastic usage but had such a high amount of effort that went into replacing them, often with inferior alternatives (paper or super brittle materials).
Or the trash in the ocean. I remember seeing a video of that barge that goes around and cleans up the great Pacific garbage patch. A guy did an interview from the ship holding a shoebox-size container of toothbrushes, scolding people for their use while standing in front of a literal mountain of commercial fishing nets.
The manufacturing and shipping industry have successfully convinced consumers that they're solely responsible for the green movement while factories and ships are allowed to continue to belch out black smoke into the air with zero consequences.
It's a common strategy for almost every complicated problem - prop up a twitter post sized solution that has a clear "boogie man" that can sound ALMOST convincing as long as you don't dig into the issue at all. Repeat it a bunch and make people emotionally respond to it.... this completely obscures the real issue (and the accountability for it) for another few months and then you just repeat the cycle with a new boogie man and move on.
People seem to love it because they can sound like they care, they have a target to "hate on", and they don't have to think too much about it because "it's obvious".
That comment is almost spectacularly bad logic actually.
There are like 900 billionaires in the entire world. Of course their private jets' flights are "a rounding error" compared to all the CO2 emitted in the world - you're explicitly comparing 900 individuals to the collective activity of the remaining 7,999,999,100 of us. That's an argument for changing the behavior of the entire collective, not against!
Please read the entire comment and actually think about the context and you're entire post wouldn't have been required.
While I have enjoyed reading your comments, it is perhaps unhelpful to express apathy about individual engagement in collective issues. 8% of global emissions is not a trivial amount when considering that the impacts of pollution and climate change intensify over time. And it is certainly not a trivial amount in absolute figures.
An annualized 8% or 1% or 0.1% sector of global pollution may not matter to you, but it matters a great deal to the islander whose homeland is submerged at the particular 0.1% point that one glacier melts or that typhoon is induced; a point which, perhaps, could have been avoided altogether or at least delayed to allow for an infrastructure solution. It also matters a great deal to residents unfortunately living immediately adjacent to an airport, breathing in its noxious fumes and having their lifespans shortened accordingly.
While we can only be activists for so many causes, it is wrong and counterproductive to suppose that people are too stupid to have more than one opinion about environmental justice. Everything you suggest that people pay attention to instead of decarbonizing aviation is good, but there is no reason they cannot support such things also. It’s not one or the other. Technologically, it is also not one or the other: lighter and more efficient batteries, for instance, have utility in electrifying aircraft but also a wide variety of other fields.
Individual beliefs do not operate in a vacuum. While the common refrain that “it’s not worth doing anything individually” is easily defended by emphasizing the powerlessness of the individual, it is not correct. Individual actions, ranging from activism to government outreach to general awareness, affect group behavior. The existence of this phenomenon is known and not itself disputable. For instance, residential solar panels have empirically proliferated in clusters as people see with their own eyes the panels on a neighbor’s house and consider why the change was made; or if they ought to do the same. It puts an idea into their head; one visible act begets many more. Human psychology is extremely entangled with peers. Accordingly, the adoption of solar panels drove down its cost; its greater adoption incentivized government investment and tax breaks; and the level of prominence the technology now has in the public consciousness completely shifts the narrative from “fossil fuels are inevitable” to “renewables can replace fossil fuels.” While you can debate specific metrics, it is undeniable that discussions of change and visibility of those changes has significant, non-trivial impact on surrounding behavior and potentially government policy. In a democracy, policymakers are incentivized to engage with constituents; while laws and regulations do not necessarily require broad public support to pass, they benefit from it greatly. And that starts with a woman in London remarking casually to a friend that she has stopped flying.
Airlines themselves are attuned to such issues, if only for financial reasons. Margins in the industry are notoriously thin. Economically, even a modest decline in revenue from environmental activist boycotts (or longer-term changes in behavior)—even a decline that does not, in itself, greatly affect profitability—can be a sign of things to come for these companies. It can also be understood as a sign of things to come, whether it is or not. That slight pressure realizes an idea—an executive chooses to accelerate R&D in carbon-reducing research, chooses to support rail integration with an airport over the status quo of driving, even chooses to provide corporate scholarships to budding climate scientists.
I suppose my comment boils down to this: yes, commentary on and awareness of environmentally damaging industry practices can and does affect their recurrence. No, we should not completely ignore the non-trivial issue of airline emissions. Yes, we should also invest in other green technologies. No, these are not mutually exclusive.
I started my post in this thread with the above - I feel it addresses much of your post.
I also have several posts in this thread and another talking about electric aircraft and how I think they will impact things in a positive manner.
Yes, I just wanted to redirect your claim that reducing aviation admissions is not a “meaningful change which can happen in our lifetimes.” This is untrue or at least misleading. Though you have qualified it by saying that “small things do matter,” it is probably best to just leave it at that—this is a thread about lifestyle or philosophical changes, not zero-sum budgetary proposals in which R&D funding must be allocated in a specific way.
I'm going to use this line whenever anyone disagrees with me on the internet; good stuff 🧙
Certainly there's an abundance of larger, lower hanging fruit to be harvested. It's not a topic I've studied in depth but based on the bits and pieces I've come across over the years, migrating ocean cargo and factories to cleaner power sources would have a much greater impact.
https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth
Ocean Cargo has been changed and it's actually revealed some interesting things that we hadn't realized prior. It may also lead to us doing more cloud seeding to try and "cool" overly hot areas.
Another one of the “low hanging fruits” not mentioned in your list, I believe, is not only energy production at electricity plants, but also (residential) heating, as well as construction in general. These processes also emit incredibly much CO₂ as far as I read about it.
There are a lot of things I think we could reduce emissions on once they are electrified. Heating like you mention is one. Also I believe steel and cement emissions come largely from carbon monoxide reduction. So if we can replace the carbon monoxide with hydrogen produced from clean energy that could reduce industrial and construction emissions a fair bit.
Problem is, if you make hydrogen or heat homes with electricity from fossil fuels that's not going to look like improvement. Most hydrogen we make now derives from methane reformation, and switching to electrolysis would require more energy and thus more electricity. So either we start working on implementing those technologies now while the energy transition is ongoing, or wait until electricity is mostly clean and there is a lot of surplus electricity at peak daylight and then start doing that stuff.
In the former case, it might appear to some people that you are greenwashing and trying to make fossil fuel usage look like an environmental solution. In the latter case, it might be a decade before we have enough clean energy surplus to implement those other solutions at scale, and we don't have time to waste.
It's kind of a lose-lose if you are a politician or political advocate, especially when you could be putting your weight behind something less controversial.
It's not really the main focus of the article but I'm a bit surpised that the author puts so much emphasis on the cost of flying. Perhaps it's a shallow view on my end (or I'm better at finding cheap flights than I thought), but the time saved often evens out the monetary cost. Slow travel is great, but taking a week off of work to travel is a privilege in itself for many people. Opting to fly and only taking a day or two off for a long weekend but still getting to enjoy the majority of the time on-location due to time saved by flying is more appealing. I don't make much but scrounging up the funds for one or two flights a year is usually pretty doable.
The author did give me a lot to think about when discussing the fact that people feel entitled to travel. While it's not strictly necessary, it's something I struggle to condemn. It's so incredibly important to have opportunities to broaden horizens and world views. But I also won't deny that air travel is terrible for the environment. Reducing whenever possible seems to be the closest thing to a middle ground. I already have a loose rule that I won't fly somewhere I could drive to in ~6hrs, but maybe I can try to push myself to increase that bubble.
It seems like you could spend the same time traveling for vacation but cover less ground? It’s similar to how going for a four-hour hike won’t get you as far as a four-hour bike ride, but it can be just as meaningful.
Maybe we could look at what people did before air travel for inspiration? At one time the Catskills and Saratoga Springs were popular summer destinations for New Yorkers. In the US you can get pretty far on a road trip, and many of those trips could be done in an electric car.
But the place where this breaks down is visiting relatives who are the same distance away however you travel.
Bring back rail travel as an affordable means of travel - make electric/hybrid engines and make it so it isn't as expensive (if not more so) than flying and that would be ideal. I have to travel to NYC (I'm about 8 hours away) next March with my family and it's cheaper for us to drive down and pay for parking (not cheap) than it is to roundtrip fly or train. Even the bus isn't really cheaper.
Not likely for the old summer destinations with the old rail lines converted to bicycle paths, etc.
That's what I do for the majority of the year with lots of little adventures spread out throughout the seasons. However, I also try to do one "big" trip each year and unfortunately that often requires a flight because we've exhausted the big-trip-worthy locations nearby. I guess it's a selfish need for variety and an excuse to get out of the local bubble from time to time
Makes sense!
(I meant that as a generic “you” by the way; I didn’t mean to ask what you personally did.)
What about people who don't live in continent-sized countries though?
What about them? We dont have to have a single solution that solves every single case.
I generally avoid long car trips if I can for safety reasons. While not a death sentence or anything, driving is the most dangerous thing most people do by far, and I've had my closest encounters with near-death encounters on roadtrips - not only are you usually going at faster speeds compared to bogged down city traffic, but on unknown roads, for long periods of time, and often exhausted. I would prefer flying, or some other form of transit at least, but certainly in the US mostly likely flying.
It's also just nice not to have to "perform" in some way on your vacation, like steering a couple ton metal object traveling at 60 mph.
Same, especially about having to "perform" by driving. I have severe motion sickness when riding as a passenger in cars so roadtrips are miserable unless I drive, and driving long distance is stressful. There's no winning
Except that to have any kind of freedom to explore, you need to rent a car at the destination anyway.
Only if you’re flying to another car centric location. My last flights were to NYC, Chicago, Tokyo, and Zurich. Even when I do have to rent a car, like I said, urban driving is different. Arguably more painful, but much less deadly, at least for the driver. Hard to kill yourself when going 5 mph in bumper to bumper traffic. Easier to stay focused when you’re driving for 1-2 hours a day vs 6.
To each his own. Monthly I drive a 1000 mile round trip and I will NEVER take a plane for it. The hassle and bs of going through security is enough to drive me crazy (I used to work for a major airlines and I know how much theatre it really is).
Plus the uncomfortableness of being squeezed into a tiny seat with no legroom when you're over 6' tall, plus the hassle of checking and finding luggage, plus the fact that even that short flight requires a layover, plus it costs MORE than driving - where I live its $775 for the absolute cheapest seat with no refund or seating privileges for a round trip. I can drive that for $400 in fuel, and drive when I want, stop when I want, eat when I want, pee when I want, listen to music as loud as I want and not fight someone for an armrest... And I dont need to rent a car from an incompetent, overpriced company who gave away my booked car when I get there.
There is nothing relaxing, comfortable or enjoyable about air travel anymore. I'll take my own car EVERY time. Im DONE with air travel.
And speaking of deadly - Id much rather have a chance to swerve out of some morons way than be stuck in a tube with 250 screaming people while we plummet 30,000 ft to our deaths. Even hard turbulence is extremely offputting.
Well, I won't get into the subjective differences in experience since that is subjective, but on safety there's multiple points I have issue with.
One is just that swerving is never what you should do anyway. A principle of defensive driving is to never swerve, but brake whenever something unexpected happens. Making split second decisions when lives are on the line is not a strong suit for humans. Frontal collisions are much less likely to be deadly with modern cars. The goal should always be to reduce speed to 0 as quickly as possible.
The other is just that statistics aren't in your favor, there. The last fatal commercial flight incident in the US was in 2009; meanwhile about 40,000 fatal car crashes happen every year in the US. Statistically, your chance of dying in a car accident is about 1/5000, while your chance of being in an accident at all on a flight is 1/1.2 million, and your chance of dying is 1/12 million. That's so many orders of magnitude of difference that it's a bit absurd.
The nice thing about commercial flights is that your "driver" is a professional, and all the other "drivers" are professionals - no need to worry about "morons" on the other side.
The thing about those stats is the dont account for HOW people died. If you are a fan of Admiral Cloudbergs air disaster posts, you know that air disasters are far more horrific than the average car accident. And they are caused by things as innocent as a mechanic forgetting a single pin or greasing one screwjack right down to a suicidal pilot who decided to take a planeload of innocent passengers into the side of a mountain. Theres not much fun in a car accident either but in watching hundreds of collision videos I can tell you that they are generally over in less than 2 seconds, and theres not 250 other fatalities. I'd much rather die quickly, by myself than in a plummeting cigar that's crashing because a tech forgot to grease a jack. Stats dont tell the whole story.
See what I mean? Today's news: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/us/alaska-airlines-disruption-off-duty-pilot-tuesday/index.html
I'll take my chances with my driving rather than some suicidal pilot who's willing to kill 85 people in his madness.
I see that as the opposite. Even with a suicidal pilot, there were still no deaths - the resilience of modern planes and having passengers and crew there is a W. On the other hand, a suicidal driver or even a suicidal passenger in, say, a bus can easily kill everyone.
Driving is a two way street, literally. If a car in front of you swerves into you, or runs a red light, that’s not something you can control or prevent. And indeed there’s been many suicidal, or drink, driving deaths in the US every day, but just attempts in the air.
Nov 29, 2013 Pilot of LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 intentionally killed 33
Mar 8, 2014 Pilot of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 intentionally killed 239
Mar 24, 2015 First officer of Germanwings Flight 9525 intentionally killed 150
Mar 21, 2022 Pilot of China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 intentionally killed 132
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot
Those are just the suicide crashes. We still average over 100 'regular' crashes a year and while deaths have declined, there are still between 500 and 1000 people a year who are 'fortunate' enough to go down in a blaze of glory. No thanks.
My point is that none of those people even had a hope of saving themselves. A driver does. And a bad driver is not likely to take out dozens or hundreds of people at a time.
Been driving for 45 years. Cant say I havent been in an accident, but I'll still take my chances on the road any day. If Im going to go out, Id rather not do it surrounded by a horde of screaming passengers.
The probability of getting caught in a crash on a commercial airline (private flights are a different story) is still staggeringly low, though.
The numbers I’m finding indicate that the chance of dying in a commercial plane crash are about 1 in 1.37 billion and the chance of being in a commercial plane crash is 1 in 20 million. Not impossible but highly unlikely.
This results in a crash rate of about 1.05 per 100,000 flights. By contrast, for driving, the crash rate is about 4.5 per 1,000,000 miles. Practically nobody is going to approach anywhere near 100k flights in their lifetime whereas many will meet or exceed 1m miles driven.
I agree that going down in a plane would be terrifying, but it’s improbable that will happen.
Im well aware that the stats show a low death rate - although I dont know where you got 1 in 1.37 billion. Its more like 1 in 11 million according to anything on a quick google search.
My point was all about HOW you die. I'm one of those who has driven close to a million miles in my 45 years of driving already. And Ive had 2 serious crashes - one rollover with no injury, which was totally my fault for not slowing over an icy bridge, and one serious motorcycle accident where I was side swiped by a mini van. Both were very scary and could have been fatal. However, I would take the few seconds of fear while crashing ANY day over the absolute horror of going down in a plane surrounded by screaming victims who have zero chance of saving themselves. At least I had a chance to save myself in both cases. And both were over in less than 5 seconds.
I realize its anecdotal but I also know several people who have died in plane crashes, as you noted, in smaller planes. One is my cousin who was a pilot flying families home in Papua New Guinea and wind shear pushed his plane into the ground at the end of a runway, killing him and 7 passengers on board. Another was a good friend who died while training and his instructor forgot to check fuel levels, and they crashed and died. And just a few months ago, 5 friends from the subdivision I lived in died in a private plane crash. So I know all about the stats, but crashes can and do happen. We lose about 500 to 1000 people per year to plane crashes. To say nothing of the sheer terror when other things go wrong on commercial flights - like crazy, out of control passengers, engine fires, blown tires on landings, extreme turbulence, emergency landings, lightning strikes - all the stuff that scares the living daylights out of flyers but doesnt make the news very often.
No thanks. I'll take my chances and drive any day. At least I'll know where my luggage is :)
I think the 1 in 11 million stat might include private flights. It improves pretty dramatically when looking at commercial flights only (which is relevant because the overwhelming majority of civilian flight is commercial).
Also yeah, I respect your preference. It’s just hard for me to imagine not flying with the distances I typically travel (family is all on the opposite coast of the US, vacations are typically in Japan).
I think it's far more likely that we'll figure out electric planes long before a significant enough percentage of people give up air travel. Articles like this always seem to focus on pieces of the puzzle that are a relatively minor part of the problem.
I don’t know about electric planes but I do know that “choose to stop flying” isn’t the solution to climate change. These kinds of things only work as laws. And air travel is actually useful. It’s not like cigarettes or things where there is a reasonable alternative.
this is the siren song of solutionism - no one needs to change their behavior, because we can innovate our way out of the problem.
(I'm reminded of a ballot measure here in Seattle several years ago, about funding expansions to our light rail system - a lot of the opposition I heard about it was that we'll have self-driving cars real soon now and so it's pointless to invest in "legacy" transit systems like light rail...)
there's much more to it than whether or not electric planes are available. the airline industry moves glacially slow when it comes to buying new planes. for example:
if you look at this list, there are several dozen 737-200 aircraft still in active service. that model was introduced in 1968 and produced until 1988, making all of those planes somewhere between 35 and 55 years old.
same goes for the 737 Classic (-300/400/500 models), which was produced from 1984 to 2000 and several hundred of which are still in active service.
so even if Boeing held a press conference tomorrow and said "surprise! we've got an all-electric 737!" you'd be looking at decades before the entire worldwide 737 fleet had been upgraded.
or for example, Admiral Cloudberg's most recent article was about a DHC-3 Otter seaplane that was manufactured in 1967, and was involved in a fatal accident last year.
it was carrying only 10 people, including the pilot, so it's easy to dismiss that flight as being marginal. but, 9 passengers is the same size as the Eviation Alice, one of the first all-electric aircraft suitable for use by airlines. if they're able to stick to their schedule, they'll start deliveries of aircraft in 2027.
This strikes me as the sort of thing where government incentives can have a large impact. Give airlines that upgrade (or maybe retrofit old planes, if that turns out to be possible) tax breaks for doing so and the upgrade cycle will likely accelerate dramatically.
the list price of a single 737 is about $100 million. Southwest Airlines alone has about 800 of them.
how many billions of dollars would be necessary to achieve a meaningful impact with that policy?
and what's the opportunity cost? what else could that money be spent on, besides handouts to airlines?
we should be taxing the fuck out of carbon. then, if an airline wants a tax break, they can convert to electric aircraft of their own accord.
selective tax credits are usually pointless and reward lobbying more than actually beneficial behavior. for example, there's a $7500 tax credit for an electric car vs. a proposed $1500 tax credit for electric bikes that's been perpetually stalled in Congress. the automotive industry has much better lobbyists than the bicycle industry does.
Electric planes exist - and are getting better and better. Within the next 10 years you will see them become somewhat common I suspect on smaller trafficked regional routes. I don't think in my lifetime I'm going to see a mass adoption of say transatlantic or transcontinental flights - but things like air taxis or even possibly getting to the point where it can replicate what a Dash 8 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8) would be missioned for is likely in the very near future.
This seems overly optimistic. The range problem hasn’t been solved and may never be solved. This isn’t a design problem or a cost-reduction problem, it’s a physics and chemistry problem.
There are niches where you don’t need a lot of range like flight instruction, but it isn’t why most people fly.
I’m more optimistic about making jet fuel in a way that absorbs carbon.
Air Canada and United Airlines have placed purchase orders for about 30 ES-30 aircraft each. It's a 30-seater that can fly 200+ km pure electric or 800 km in hybrid... perfect for small commuter flights.
https://heartaerospace.com/
Electric helicopters are coming along as well which again for small commutes or things like police / traffic reporters / etc can all make an impact.
As you mentioned flight instruction is already using them (and that will certainly grow) but isn't a high volume due to fewer and fewer flight schools operating each year.
Yes, but I’d consider those to be other niches. Most flights people make aren’t like that. It’s far more common to make a 200km journey by car.
There are specialized uses for airplanes that make such short flights and for helicopters, though. For short flights to and from an island, an electric airplane can make sense.
I know tons of people who regularly fly between say Toronto and Ottawa (~400km), Toronto and Montreal (~550km), NYC to Washington DC (~380km), LA to Vegas (~400km), LA to SanFran (~450km), and that's just the high traffic low distance flights - you look at small regional places (especially remote places in the north) these sorts of planes are great for replacing the missions done there.
I agree pure 200km flights might be more niche - but we are already doing half the distances I mentioned above (and more than that easily if you do hybrid), in 10 years I'd be shocked if it isn't solved.
Hybrid versus pure electric seem very different. I posted an article by people who did the math.
The problem, in my view, is that aviation fuel is generally not taxed, or where it is, it's far less so than automotive fuel or even train fuel. Governments, broadly speaking, communicate their intentions through taxes. And what many governments are saying is that you absolutely should fly. Well, what they're actually trying to say is "please vote for us again next election" and since cheap air travel is popular, they likely won't change their stance until the pressure on them changes towards "reduce emissions" as the priority.
I hate the idea that flying should become a rich people privilege again, but waiting until people voluntarily inconvenience themselves by skipping air travel and taking vacations in closer locations or with slower means of transportation is obviously just waiting for climate change to arrive in full force without taking action.
Said another way, I don't mean to nullify personal responsibility. People can absolutely make meaningful decisions in their day to day life that impact the climate, and they do. More and more people reduce meat consumption, don't own cars and install heat pumps in their homes without being pushed by taxes and laws. But I'm a fan of systemic responses to systemic problems, and in market economies the best way to motivate people to find ways around harmful behavior is to make it expensive - or to make the better alternatives cheaper.
As long as the airline industry is obscenely subsidised, rail and other options will remain a hard option to commit to. One study compared a route that was €13 by plane but €384 by rail.
Individual responsibility is real, but this one is in the hands of governments and legislators.
The study: https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/ticket-prices-planes-vs-trains-europe-wide-analysis
The knowledge in this thread and the discourse around emissions and aviation are frankly abysmal.
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector It’s right here. We have bigger fish to fry by orders of magnitude than going after aviation as some weird scapegoat and personal choice virtue signal.
A good chunk of aviation is for leisure, so at the margin, reducing that kind of inessential aviation sounds to me like a reasonable strategy to reduce emissions without causing too much pain. Moreover, this reduction is directly actionable by individuals.
Which other sectors would you recommend people to focus on instead of aviation, or in addition to aviation?
But unless its collective, we're talking about truly small numbers here. In terms of things people can directly do with no other cooperation, sure, this is pretty high up there, but again its a small number. We basically can't make a dent in this problem without collective concerted action.
So how do we solve the collective action problem? How do we bring about political change?
You can say that about every climate problem.
The way we bring about political change honestly starts with conversations about sustainability, as here. It continues with changes in personal preferences and behavior, as well as outreach to representatives. A democratically elected government has little incentive to do things that none of its constituents want or care about.
There has been a lot of research about the effects of peer influence in the adoption of green technology such as solar panels and electric vehicles. It is not exclusively an economic phenomenon; humans are incredibly social. When people do something, others observe it; sometimes mimic it. That matters.
This is tricky because there are costs associated with reducing leisure travel.
Point in case, as someone living in the US I like to visit Japan periodically for vacation because on top of enjoying the country, it serves as a much needed hard forced disconnect from all of the stressors at home with both geographical and time zone boundaries keeping them at bay. I’d be hard pressed to find that anywhere within driving distance of home short of renting a cabin in the woods (which can be nice in its own way, but comes with a lot of things one doesn’t always want to deal with). If you eliminate driving things look even more bleak.
Is this a luxury that few people have access to? Absolutely, but if at all possible I’d like to see more people be able to benefit from experiences like that rather than fewer.
I agree that leisure is nice. But the benefit of leisure is definitely less than that of say, drinking water.
The question here is, do the benefits outweigh the cost to the environment?
A very rough calculation:
This is a very primitive model, and I picked some of these numbers arbitrarily, so they are probably somewhat inaccurate. But I assume that most people wouldn't pay anything close to two years of their life for a mental health break. (This does not include the dollar cost of the trip, by the way.)
If a person wouldn't pay two years of their own life for this, is it justifiable for them to distribute the cost to everyone else?
I think you might be surprised. A lot, maybe even some majority, of people optimize for being able to continue functioning now, even if that costs them something down the road. That’s an entire subject on its own though.
Either way, when I think about being confined to my locality, it’s hard to not feel depressed. I think change of scenery is a bigger need for psychological wellbeing than is popularly thought, particularly with chronic stress being at all-time highs, and I believe it’s worthwhile to both find sustainable ways for people to travel globally and in the interim, find other ways to cut carbon output to compensate.
There is no reason we cannot research multiple ways to decrease emissions. And there is certainly no reason we cannot discuss it.
While there is some overlap, each broad emissions category is really its own set of technological problems; agriculture is a pretty different beast than transportation. Aircraft make up a significant portion of transportation-related emissions (by most accounts, around 8%). That is not trivial. In absolute terms, most emissions are from automobiles (especially heavy trucks, for shipping)—though this is a short-sighted metric to focus on by itself. In per-capita terms, aircraft are the most highly polluting per vehicle mile traveled, especially for short-haul flights.
Because the air travel industry is expected to grow significantly in the coming decades, this per-capita metric is essential. Mathematically, a given amount of absolute growth in a sector with particularly high per-capita emissions (like air) is worse than a corresponding amount of growth in any less polluting sector (like rail). It is foolish not to consider ways to reduce air travel emissions.
It’s also worth noting that carbon-reducing automobile technology is becoming very common, both in vehicles and in the public consciousness. The research (and public perception of sustainability) is just so far behind for airplanes, in practice; but such research is intermingled with use-cases in other sectors within transportation, so solving aircraft emissions solves many other problems too, potentially including EV range and use for heavy-duty trucks (and, in the case of batteries, perhaps large-scale grid energy storage; though requirements differ).
There is also more to air pollution than greenhouse gas emissions. The localized pollution caused by toxic air pollutants from burning jet fuel is not to be overlooked. This is a statistically significant contributor to cancer and other fatal diseases.
I don't think that's right, though.
Aviation is basically entirely focused on designing the next generation of engines to run on SAF right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel#Sustainable_aviation_fuels)
Automotive is not going to benefit from this.
The key research themes there are downsizing as a fleet wide emissions strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_EcoBoost_engine / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_downsizing), and of course, EV Powertrains.
Have you go any evidence of this?
On the contrary, the efficiency and engine development technologies are generally more advanced in Aviation powertrains simply because the unit cost is higher and more sophisticated technologies can be used, than can be stuffed in a car engine bay. The state of aviation emissions are generally not for lack of research.
While electrification is a hot topic,(https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/low-carbon-aviation/hybrid-and-electric-flight) the energy density of batteries is basically an order of magnitude off making it feasible even for short city hop flights.
My remarks there mostly refer to batteries, which have been the topic of discussion on a few other threads about aviation emissions this week. I’m aware that this is probably not the ideal solution for wide-body airplanes (unless some magical lightweight battery can be developed). I should not say that research is not happening—just that proportionally more is needed. Implementation of net-zero solutions in aviation is nonexistent, for reasons you know. Aircraft have requirements that ground transportation does not.
By contrast there are numerous (nominally) net-zero automobiles on the market, mostly BEV/electric, and hydrogen, across various vehicle classes—including light sedans, city buses, and shipping trucks. This is simply not the case for any remotely large airplane. One of these sectors will go “carbon-neutral,” or close, far before the other. For that reason, it is important for public awareness to include aviation’s unique technical problems. Additional research now—as opposed to in 25 years—will have a greater effect on reducing cumulative emissions.
Engineering techniques or concepts used to optimize engines for, say, sustainable biofuels or even just highly efficient uses of jet fuel have plenty of applications in other sectors—potentially also automotive, ocean shipping, rocketry, perhaps. Not because Tesla is going to start putting literal biofuel jet engines into their cars, but because there is always cross-pollination with related technologies on a finer scale. A breakthrough in hydrogen applications in aviation could very well have benefit to the Japanese auto market, a country whose electric grid is structurally unsuited for EVs.
You obviously have more technical knowledge about aviation powertrains than I do. I appreciate the links you’ve provided. I just take issue with your sentiment that caring about aviation emissions is somehow pointless.
I don't know, I find it kind of odd that everyone from this article who's either stopped flying or reduced their flying, had flown ridiculous amounts of miles that stopping to fly isn't going to do anything, right?
Sure, you're not flying any more but that the same time you used to fly 150,000 miles a year. That's more than me, my mother, and my grandmother will fly in our entire lifetimes.
Uh, could you clarify? It seems like getting frequent flyers to stop, or even just to cut the amount of flying they do in half, will do more than getting someone to cut back who didn’t fly much to begin with.
I'd imagine it just slightly rubs the wrong way that giving up flying is being framed as the ethical thing we should all be doing by someone who has already traveled the world.
Yes it's most effective for the frequent flyers to stop flying, and a travel opinion piece is definitely going to reach more of that audience than non-flyers so the article is targeted correctly. But to an extent it is pulling up the ladder behind you after you've already gotten your fill. She does a good job at mostly talking about it as a personal choice, but is necessarily also trying to convince others to follow her lead.
I mostly agree with her but I can understand how a tagline like "Most of us can’t imagine not flying" can make people (who due to financials, responsibilities, or otherwise, don't have to imagine it) have a gut reaction and get defensive. She does acknowledges her privilege at the end, but it's reasonable to assume that a non-flying reader isn't going to read the entire essay all the way to the end.
The same powerlessness and size disparity we feel towards the amount of pollution corporations release is just as overwhelming when looking at individuals who similarly dwarf our output. I can understand how being told in essence, "if you finally get enough money and time to do what we've been doing for years without repercussions or judgement, you now have an ethical responsibility not to do it" can cause class tensions even if everyone involved is acting in good faith.
I shouldn't have posted that comment at 2am local time, wasn't a completely thought out comment.
What I really meant was the article was pointing to all these examples of people who flew a lot and then stopped. To me, it came across too "patting myself on the back because I no longer fly." Sure, pat yourself on the back all day but you flew more miles in your last year of flying (150k miles). So, good job for ending your destruction after you've caused more destruction in one year than entire families will in their lifetimes.
Seems to me that talk is cheap and encouraging the right behavior in the future is more important than making them feel bad about what they did. There's only so much one article can do. (Also, an article about "don't do what I did" will be seen as hypocritical.)
Regarding the inequality issues, you could say a similar thing about common American lifestyles versus people in third-world countries just now getting cars and air conditioning.
There are schemes that effectively pay poorer countries to do things good for the climate. A money transfer can be seen as a fine or payment for bad behavior. But I see the material changes from changing incentives as more important than how they're described.
The airline industry has managed to evade a whole lot of criticism about emissions, largely because a) there are no viable alternatives and b) its used by the people who are most likely to be hurt by restricting flights, ie. those with disposable income and business people, government employees.
But one look at a live shot of flight tracker online: https://www.flightradar24.com/39.09,-43.68/3
and you soon realize that blaming little old me in my 20 yr old Toyota for polluting the atmosphere is asinine. There are literally MILLIONS of litres of diesel (jet fuel) being burned at 30,000 ft every day and blanketing our cloak of pollutants, but somehow, its Joe Blow who is supposed to abandon his affordable little Toyota for an expensive EV to "save the planet" Its time the airline industry took responsibility.
Well, it’s more complicated than that. Per capita per KM, the average short haul and long haul flight in economy produces less emissions than a solo drive - a long haul economy flight on average produces 150g of carbon per km per person, whereas the average gas car produces 192g per km. Of course, carpooling would help that figure for the car, but that is to say, even accounting for the large amount of energy needed to fly, the benefits from cramming a bunch of people into a small area is so great that driving alone can be worse.
It’s like when people scoff at a prepackaged salad that was grown in South America and packaged in Thailand. Your car ride to the grocery store produced more emissions than the salad did traveling across the world - economies of scale make shipping very efficient, on a per capita basis.
It is possible for both of these things to be true at once.
Ironically I do a fair amount of flying (around 10-20 flight segments per year).
This article brought me back to a long read I read back in 2020 by the Guardian, The end of tourism?
A lot of comments here bemoan that in many instances it's just not feasible to stop travel when concerning transoceanic or other long distance flights. Others have pointed out that flying is not such a huge carbon impact when compared to industrial output, etc. Both of these are true but overlook mass travel's devastating ecological, economical, and cultural impact.
Many places on earth are being ravaged by the social-media induced mass tourism craze of the last two decades. The feet of tourists are literally destroying eco systems, their hands destroying cultural relics, and their whims destroying local economies when they decide that that location is no longer the Instagram hot spot - or, god forbid, a worldwide pandemic destroys many of these economies' only source of income. Then there are the more well known locations like Venice and Bali, two in a long line of tourist locales whose local culture is nearly extinct due to hoards or the jet set.
The Guardian article points out that many of these places are being forced to start quota systems or charging taxes and fees to both reduce the number of travelers visiting while keeping the money flowing in, delicately threading a needle that would see the physical impact of tourism reduced while keeping economic support up. No easy feet. And here is the questions posed that if tourism must get more expensive to protect the locales being touristed, does that mean that exotic tourism should be viewed as it once was - a luxury not available to the masses?
I hate to think of travel as a privilege, surely it's a human right to visit, learn from, and enjoy other cultures, but seeing the impact of cheap flights, Airbnb, and the Instagram effect has me really reflecting on that same question. While travel should not be a privilege maybe it should be much more costly, a domain for those who can afford it. That means that some will no longer to see the "exotic" in person, some will have to save to take that big trip every 3-5 years, if the reality is that tourism is destroying large parts of the world then maybe some will just have to do without.
Lotteries, quota systems, etc., I can find no real solution to this conundrum other than good old fashioned capitalism. Governments will need to make travel more expensive and that's just going to shut out a lot of people, it's sad and surely much is lost without the cultural exchange but what else can be done? As a child it was more common for families to take a big trip a state over and see the "exotic" reality of far away places in traveling exhibits and maybe that's the unfortunate ideal. Taking a big overseas vacation was once a novelty that maybe you did once or twice or in retirement but these days it's all too easy for someone to score a $500 flight, cheap Airbnb accommodation, and thoughtlessly negatively impact another country.
I thoroughly dislike tourism, for all the reasons you've described. Sadly though, I'm not really sure you're suggesting a solution. You can say that international travel is cheap, but that's only if you ignore the opportunity cost, which is at least two days of travel on top of the vacation time away from work and home, and the vast majority of those hypertrafficked areas, like Machu Picchu, Venice, the Louvre, Everest, island nations with tourism economies and delicate ecosystems, are either extremely expensive already or have very long lines. The vast majority of North Americans will never visit Europe or Africa, and as far as I'm aware, someone please correct me if I'm wrong, Europeans are the only demographic that travels much more. How many Indians or Paraguayans will tour the earth?
At this point, it's a very, very slim minority of people doing these things, globally. We're already restricting it to the ultrawealthy, and those of us in rich countries are spoiled.
I‘m not disputing your sentiment and of course I’m writing from the perspective of countries that do have a tourist class - which does extend outside of Europe - but your point does nothing to address real concerns and impacts to these over touristed places. Incomes are relative and to call a middle class Chinese or Westerner who can afford overseas travel ultrawealthy is, in my opinion, a little myopic. I think my comment, which is really just a retelling of the reporting done by the Guardian, does indeed suggest a solution - the only real solution that myself, the author, and the governments of impacted areas can envision. Your comment seems more like arguing on the semantics of what wealth means in a global context while ignoring the real issues presented in the article.
I think you missed my point: that we are already doing that, and we'd have to limit it nearly-explicitly to the ultrawealthy (<0.001%) to come close to limiting these things enough. A few million people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars can do the bulk of the environmental damage, and there will still be regional travel to make up their shortfall. Beyond that, these are the classes of people who control industry and government, and the people we'd be disenfranchising from travel are not likely to give it up easily.
I don't see how the class of people who are happy to spend over a thousand USD equivalent for travel to get to their vacation don't count as remarkably wealthy compared to the billions of people who earn the equivalent of a couple dollars per day. It isn't about labeling, call them "high wage earners" like the World Bank does, that doesn't change that these things are already barred from the vast majority of the population based on price. Saying "just increase the price more!" is less of a solution and closer to the status quo plan.
I understand your critiques clearly but they stop short of offering any solution at all and I think that they're stuck in the incredibly small context of the modern era. Like a lot of other negatives brought on by technological sophistication, maybe fast-mass-travel is not fit for humanity in general and as a people we should find more joy in what's around us. What could you propose that would realistically protect heavily touristed areas?
Increasing the price more by definition cannot be status quo when it's the fact that prices have cratered, allowing more people even from mroe disadvantaged countries to access exotic liesure travel. Just because it cuts out a large swath of humanity again does not detract from the problem. A problem whose only sollution is to...increase the price more. And let me point out: that's not my or the Guardian's solution, that's the solution being used by the very people who are impacted by this the most and who are often largely made up by the classes of people that, i'm assuming, you're sad can't experience travel
May I aks, did you read the complete article?
My critique does not pretend to offer a solution, only that your solution is insufficient. I don't know what you want from me. You say it's the only one, I say it's not good enough anyway. End of story.
I don't really care about what the middle men's solution is. Yes, raise the prices, as the people whose homes are being destroyed, or rather, as the people with power over whose homes are being destroyed, that's their prerogative, but it won't stem the tide.
Assumptions...
I'm mostly sad that we have created such a shit world that people feel like they need to feel dignified, and that we have such myopic interests as a class (the globally wealthy) that we can't just take vacations, you know, a hundred miles away. Just because I think that prices won't fix this issue doesn't mean I'm happy with the problem, nor does it mean I just can't understand the article.
This is a horrible dynamic where every good reason to slow down travel, whether you're increasing prices or putting a lottery quota in place, is more than countered by immediate demands of the people in these communities. We have these spokespeople in that article, and I don't doubt their sincerity, but I doubt the ubiquity and resilience of their beliefs. Indonesia, compared to some of the nations being destroyed by tourism, is an enormously efficient state. I just don't have faith that the short-term needs of an economy entirely dependent on tourism won't overpower the long-term ones, or that the amount of money that a tiny fragment of a sliver of a percent of the population can garner to feed their whims won't act akin to an infinite weight on their side of the bargaining table.
I recently heard of ammonia ICEs. Are they really a good alternative to gas ICEs? Theoretically I understand they emit no carbon dioxide, just water and nitrogen. But is the fuel produced in a low carbon process? And then my next question would be whether we could run jets off of ammonia.
Sustainable aviation fuels have a long way to go in whatever format or fuel you hear about. They have promise but density, toxicity, and compatibility are all issues that need solving. For example inside the engines the fuel is used as a coolant to stop parts of it melting at operating temperature, this is fine with kerosene but potentially not fine with SAFs as some degrade when preheated like that.