this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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All air travel should have fuel and emissions tax. Normalize them to commercial airliners. That'll incentivize larger, more efficient plane designs. It'll also punish private jets. Also charge a fee for any planes not at least X% full. Also give discounts and waive fees for planes over X size that service under-served airports.
A bunch of regulations like this should make private planes prohibitively expensive, like 10-20x their current cost. But that's a lot of legislation that huge corporations and billionaires would oppose.
Planes are already pretty fuel efficient per passenger. And larger planes are unlikely, because this would mean all runways they want to use must be extended so the can start and land there.
Commercial planes with high occupancy got somewhat efficient (until you compare to other modes of transportation), but private jets with 1 ego on board are incredibly fuel inefficient.
It’s a very big ego though, so of course it needs a lot of fuel.
how much fuel would it take to burn the ego to the ground?
Carbon emissions per km:-
Domestic flight: 240 g
Eurostar (train): 4 g
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-footprint-travel-mode
That's domestic flights in the UK which are stupidly short. Short and long haul flights are at 150g which is already less than ICE cars at ~170 and not far above the average bus at 100g. Though obviously no where near electrified rail.
Eh.... They're similar to cars for a similar distance. But, that still means gobs of CO2 emitted if you're traveling from NY to LA, which would be a massive trip in a car.