That and because climate.
For those that fly, it’s one of the largest chunks of their carbon footprint. But because most people don’t fly, it emits just 2% to 3% of global emissions.
We can demonstrate the inequality of flying with a simple calculation. Let’s say everyone in the world took one return short-haul trip per year. We’ll go from London to Madrid. This would emit around 0.5 tonnes per person. For 8 billion people, this would be 4 billion tonnes of CO2.
If everyone took a long-haul return trip from London to San Fransisco, emissions would be 22 billion tonnes of CO2 from flying alone.
In reality, global aviation emits around one billion tonnes. That’s because most people in the world don’t fly. They can’t afford it.
How much does aviation contribute to climate change? How will this change in the future? (sustainabilitybynumbers.com)
Besides climate we have a new reason to ban air travel – it is “inequitable”.
The solutions proposed, so far, mostly are:
- Ban all air travel from 2030-2050, wiping out the entire aviation industry and all collected expertise, crashing academic programs in aeronautical engineering. It would take many decades to recover but some experts insist we must do this.
- Demand everyone pay carbon offsets (which many say are scams and graft and corruption).
- Make air travel so expensive that only the very rich and elite can travel. One proposal is a sliding scale tax – first fight is tax free, but thereafter, taxes increase dramatically on each flight. A 3 hop flight would count as 3 flights so one’s flight taxes would rise very rapidly, making air travel prohibitive.
- Limit air travel to 2 flights per lifetime.
All this to reduce carbon emissions by 2-3% which would have no impact on global weather.
