>maybe we should create viable alternatives to jet airline travel and encourage them to use them.

What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive? What if alternatives will only be available after we get a steady supply of biomass driven by clean fusion?

What if "encouraging" doesn't work?

Then what -- keep flying, pumping CO2 and sleepwalking into disaster we all know is happening?

To the contrary, "sacrifice for thee but not for me" is not real leadership. They can't advocate that the work of common people is less important and can therefor be done by Zoom.

To your point, I don't think people take umbrage with creating or advocating for compelling alternatives. But there's a difference between that and playing the blame game.

>Here viable means getting there with comparable travel time and cost but fewer CO2 emissions.

That's the rub. It's rarely comparable travel time except some point to points. Even in Europe. I travel by train within Europe (mostly) whenever I can. But it usually takes longer, costs more, and may involve sleepers on longer routes.

They're supposed to follow Greta's lead and mooch of rich people to sail them around the world.

They're never going to do that. To them, we are ants in their ant farm.

Why fly at all? Why not hold meetings over the internet like other working people? Or organize the conference in Bradford or Blackpool, instead of some tropical paradise, and see how many people are still motivated to fly in?

"refreshing if public figures led by example"

Not just refreshing, but absolutely crucial. If there is a critical shortage of something in 2024 politics, it is integrity and trust. Everyone can hold speeches, but few can do it in a way that doesn't make them instant hypocrites.

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> $100 a ton is a round number close to estimates of what it costs to capture > carbon from an oil refinery or coal burning power plant

That's a wildly optimistic number, and almost certainly too low for the carbon sources yoU're naming. Equinor estimated over 600USD for gas burners at an LNG plant, under almost ideal conditions (existing nearby storage site, company with lots of experience): https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...

I think that's just it. Politicians are just going to play both sides whenever they can so we can't expect them to be different.

But blaming oil companies for providing for consumer demand while they also propping up modern Western economies is kind of pointless. Oil companies have even signaled a willingness to divest from their products. Investment in new exploration was at an all time low until the current administration actively encouraged the industry to expand.

It's crazy to think that people are campaigning against natural gas when there are still so many worse energy sources in the world.

Germany is reactivating lignite coal plants, for goodness sakes.

Wanting a holiday in Italy is a compelling reason (for consumers). My point is that it's more rational to fly somewhere than to spend much longer traveling by slower methods. If you want to take a vacation on a different continent, trying to go there and back by ship will consume all your available time.

The existence of air travel is its own incentive; every time someone looks up and sees a plane in the sky, it's a reminder that they could fly somewhere. Flight advertising is just about market share, ie which airline will you choose for the flight you already want to take.

Are diplomats actually a meaningful fraction of air travel? I would assume leisure travel accounts for magnitudes more travelers and airplanes

> There is no compelling reason to fly to Bali from the Hague each year.

I know the feeling, but you do not need to travel to the opposite side of the planet to enjoy nice weather.

Travel ads and air travel ads are not the same thing. If you put up a billboard showing some cool/interesting place, people will be fractionally more inclined to go there - although as I said above, I think people mostly think of places they want to go and then use advertising to help choose who to give money to to achieve that end.

Ads for airlines aren't encouraging people to fly so much as inviting them to choose one carrier over another. If you have X people going from Den Haag to Neu Amsterdam and there are multiple airlines serving that route, then airlines have to compete on price, comfort, customer service, etc. Nobody looks at an airline advert and then tries to think of a place to go in order to enjoy flying on a plane.

Airline advertising is about market share, planes in the sky are their own best advertising for going-to-other-places.

An airline's ad is mostly trying to get your business away from the competing airlines, not to increase overall passenger flight (afaik). The main effect if that's right seems like it'll be to protect established firms at the expense of new entrants.

There is harm in reducing consumption as money will be allocated elsewhere: someone will lose, someone else might gain.

These graphs are misleading because they overestimate the "relevant emissions" of the global south countries.

What I mean is that it is possible to emit some CO2 and it will just get absorbed and transformed back to O2 via natural processes in a sustainable fashion. So really from a country's emissions you should subtract off this number in some per capita fashion to get the actually relevant or excess emissions.

If you do that I think you will find that a good number of countries have never emitted any excess emissions at all, and more than half have barely emitted anything of consequence. The blame on US, Europe, Canada, Australia will be even bigger than the ~70% shown on this chart.

> Climate change didn't start today, so it makes no sense to blame whoever happens to be today's top polluter as the culprits

Blame isn't helpful, period. Industrialised nations industrialised by polluting. But CO2 in the air is orders of magnitude more difficult to recover than carbon unburnt.

Most CO2 was emitted by the industrialised world. Most CO2 we can prevent from being emitted will come from India and China.

There is no good guy bad guy here, just places with a higher or lower return on action.

>United States and Europe, by far the world's largest polluters since the industrial revolution

Not just that. US and Europe got into the position of prosperity and hegemony we are enjoying right now thanks to industrial revolution which emitted all that CO2 in the first place.

The problem with cumulative data is that you can't justify your wrongdoing just because someone else did it too.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

The EU and USA are both shrinking, unlike China and India which are growing.

We should all be cutting.

The other part that I actually don't like about any of these metrics is that they don't take land-mass and population into account.

Ideally you'd measure CO2 emissions per capita per square km/mile and compare that.

Who is growing and who is shrinking? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

You are both right. It is both worth calling out historical polluters and also making sure we push back on creating more polluting energy sources.

I would agree that the flying has become "unreasonably" cheap given the negative externalities, but if we are talking about traveling over distances of >500 km, the alternatives are rarely compelling -- unless you are lucky enough have a direct high-speed-rail connection to your destination.

Not to mention what's China doing with its CO2 emissions: making laptops, phones, cheap toys for USA and Europe...

> A nice 300% tax on air travel and suddenly you don't need to go to New Zeeland for a weekend anymore. And ad and tax-exemption for air travel is the opposite of it.

NZ just raised their tourist tax...

https://onemileatatime.com/news/new-zealand-tourist-tax/