Global flying demand has been increasing[0] year-on-year and is estimated to continue increasing[1] into the foreseeable future, partly due to flying subsidies provided by many countries[2] to encourage tourism, etc. If you are alluding to a problem of people flying too often, I would work towards eliminating these subsidies first.
.... which inevitably turns flying / vacationing far abroad back into something exclusively for upper class people, which is easy to advocate for when you work in the tech salary bubble.
If we're gonna slash subsidies and introduce carbon tax on flights, it needs to hit corporate and expensive tickets as hard as possible whilst sheltering cheaper tickets as much as possible.
There's so many things HN proposes should be taxed / excised extra: cars, flights, gas, soda, alcohol, meat, rare metals in devices, batteries, electricity consumption etc etc.
They aren't bad ideas (hell, I agree fully with the sentiment of most of said ideas) but it's so easy to be blind to the fact that you'd basically be turning daily life into a two caste system where only the rich are allowed vices.
Hmm - if you have super rich you have inequality be definition - don't know why you are focusing on flying - what about super yachts or effective immunity to prosecution?
If you don't like inequality then there are other ways to deal with that - rather than using it as an excuse to keep flying.
I do however agree that a frequent flyer tax would be a good start, though be aware that a lot of airline routes are effectively funded by business class seats, so you might find flight frequencies dropping - but that's the point right?
> Is it not already primarily upper-class people vacationing far abroad?
I don’t think of someone who makes $400k+ a year working as a software developer as necessarily upper class. In my view, upper class means someone who is financially independent and can afford to not work for money for a year or longer without a change of lifestyle.
Only on HN will you find someone seriously arguing that a salary of over 400K USD a year does not make you upper class. Sure, you can't afford to stop working for the rest of your life, but with a salary like that you're only a few years away from being able to if you wanted.
No amount of salary makes you upper class when the class boundary is defined by having passive income sufficient to meet all expenses.
A salary of 2x expenses will put you in the upper class within 22 years (with average market returns), and passive income will fully replace the salary within another 8 years, but until then, that's still middle class.
Basically, if you can afford to invest 1/6 or more of your income, you can make it to upper class within your lifetime, and still have time left to enjoy it.
I make $20k-$30k/year, and though I don't fly very often, I do enjoy traveling and seeing new places. I have flown to quite a number of destinations and I'm definitely not upper class. I would fly still more if ticket prices continue coming down, though I'll want window seats.
> Only on HN will you find someone seriously arguing that a salary of over 400K USD a year does not make you upper class. Sure, you can't afford to stop working for the rest of your life, but with a salary like that you're only a few years away from being able to if you wanted.
Sorry but I think we need to be real. We are not the middle class. We are poor working class people. Most of the 10% is squarely the middle class. I'd imagine a big chunk of the 1% is middle class because one medical crisis could likely bankrupt them. Look at the wealth distribution graph.
400k a year is not "poor working class" by any definition of the word. The median salary in America is 45,000. "Poor working class" is significantly below that. 400k is upper middle class, and if you've not managed to save up for a rainy day on those kinds of wages, it really is your own fault. Actually poor people manage it.
People from the Bay Area really need to get out more. Source: I come from the actual poor working class.
I'm all for fighting inequalities but the way you frame this argument is frankly obscene to me. The average salary in the US is about $60k/year. Worldwide average is hard to establish precisely due to the many factors to consider but it must be around $10k to $20k.
Saying that you're part of "poor working class people" when you earn in a year what a significant number of your compatriots wouldn't earn in a decade is a ridiculous thing to say.
I commend you for being outraged at the insane inequalities in our civilization and I largely share your concerns but you really need to work on framing that better IMO.
> In my view, upper class means someone who is financially independent and can afford to not work for money for a year or longer without a change of lifestyle.
Someone making $400k/year should easily accrue the savings to do that.
If they're not after a year, they need to re-evaluate spending habits.
I guess the question is: if it got more expensive, would that mainly result in people no longer being able to vacation abroad, or just not doing it because they don't think it's worth the money, even though they can afford it?
If it's primarily $400k+ software developers who currently vacation abroad, then that wouldn't be that strong of an argument against removing the tax incentives.
I am not opposed to a more progressive income tax. In fact, I firmly support higher income taxes on everyone. I could never run for political office in the US because how will I ever walk up to a constituent and say "I want to drastically increase your taxes?" and at the same time walk up to public sector employees and say, "I want to take away your benefits".
Yes, we need to address climate change. However, I think we also need to encourage travel so we can facilitate movement of people and ideas across the world. Not everyone who travels will change the world but I'm sure it can't hurt.
> There's so many things HN proposes should be taxed
I think you got my statement backward. I was advocating for the removal of taxes, since AFAIK subsidies generally utilize tax money. Maybe as you suggest, "hit corporate and expensive tickets hard" to subsidize the flying for the poor (economy) classes (which I'm assuming already happens).
> whilst sheltering cheaper tickets as much as possible.
I'm sorry, why? I don't see being able to travel across the world at high environmental cost to be some god given right. It's not sustainable, especially as use of long-distance travel continues to grow with no end in sight. Make it expensive for everybody, instead of subsidizing it for whatever group you have a bias for.
I still can't wrap my head around the prominence of this idea that the only way to solve our problems as a species is to live worse lives and to be more disconnected from others.
Whether "it" is international travel, point-to-point personal transportation, or whatever, make it sustainable for everybody, instead of criticizing it for whatever group you have a bias against.
There is talk of a "Frequent Flier" tax that could be used to address this.
Currently 70% of the flights are made by 15% of the population (1). If you start adding increasing taxes on each additional flight you take, it would rapidly curtail a lot of the travel I'd expect.
I am sure a lot of us in Europe (and perhaps USA? Not sure if it is as prevalent) in the past have been guilty of taking a "weekend break" somewhere that is a 1 or 2 hr flight away where the tickets usually cost something like £30-40 return on Easyjet or Ryanair (and often cheaper than a taxi to get to the airport!)
E.g. after 2 flights a year, start adding £50 per flight (so 3rd is +£50, 4th +£100, 5th +£150 etc etc). Suddenly your £30 return flight from London to Lisbon/Rome/Dublin/Barcelona/Berlin etc is no longer so absurdly cheap. Put all the proceeds from the tax into decarbonisation and fast intercity rail.
That would soon make people (myself included) think twice about taking "frivolous" city-breaks every month or so where you fly out after work on a Friday and come home again Sunday night ready to be back at your desk on Monday morning.
The problem I always see with using taxation to solve problems (to prevent too many people from doing X), is that you're filtering by socioeconomic status. You're making it so that only the richer people can do it, and the poorer people are screwed once again. It's a simple fix from an institutional point of view, and it might "solve" the problem, but it just feels wrong to me. Not that I have a better solution though...
Welcome to the real world. Besides, how many poor people are flying multiple times per year anyway? I don't have the numbers, but I would bet that this tax would be paid overwhelmingly by businesses on behalf of their employees who travel for work.
And that tax would be absorbed unnoticed in the businesses' expense again right next to the reciepts for over-priced steak dinners and strip clubs. The whole reason airlines can get away with charging so much for business class is because businesses don't generally give a shit if their sales personal are charging them for in-flight champagne when they go to close a billion dollar contract. The truth is that you'll have to be more strategic than randomly throwing a tax at the problem if you want to change the behavior of entities who already dump hundreds of thousands on maintaing a private jet fleet so that a C-level doesn't have to wait in line at security.
You could have a revenue-neutral carbon tax, where each person gets a share of the tax proceeds, and then lower income people get paid on net when they don't consume carbon
In the US, we would probably drive our own cars anywhere within a 250 km (150 mi) radius, which costs about $170 in fuel and vehicle maintenance, and takes about 2 hours each way.
Tax flying in the EU, and people will likely take more trains. Try it in the US, and you're just pushing people back into their cars.
Airliner aircraft burn more fuel closer to the ground, at takeoff and landing, and less fuel at cruising altitude, where the air resistance is less. On shorter trips, the proportion of the trip spent at lower altitudes is greater. Some flights might not reach optimal cruising altitude at all.
One can adjust the flight profile for maximum fuel efficiency, but this tends to be uncomfortable for the passengers and crew, and it takes longer to reach the destination. Most US passenger airlines don't do that, but military and cargo carriers will.
That aside, some portion of the fuel is spent continuously keeping the weight of the aircraft aloft, and with ground vehicles, the equivalent expenditure is the rolling resistance of the tires. Furthermore, an airliner plane tends to carry all the fuel it needs for the entire flight on takeoff, which translates to additional weight, whereas the ground vehicle can refuel enroute at a truck stop or gas station. Some aircraft can refuel in flight, but another plane has to carry it up there and maneuver it into place. A train on electrified rails need not carry any fuel at all.
So to some extent, it depends on the ground vehicle and the aircraft. In a contest between an ultralight or powered paraglider and a heavy pickup truck towing an RV trailer up in the Rocky Mountains, the flyer might have a lower footprint. But for a trip over flat ground, such as Chicago to Indianapolis or Cincinnati to Cleveland, in a medium-sized hybrid ICE+battery sedan, driving at or below the posted speed limits on US Interstate or Autobahn-like restricted access divided highways, I think the car will win against anything other than a solar-powered lighter-than-air craft.
I haven't done the bar napkin math, so I could be wrong.
AFAIU currently kerosene is very lightly taxed, if at all. If there is taxation of fuel or fuel-based payments for airlines, it will be reflected on ticket prices more than currently.
So the airlines can claw some of that back by introducing more efficient planes. But they will be expensive to develop and build, which is again reflected in ticket prices.
So here are the numbers for New York to Paris. I used a 737 Max 7 for this since the max range is right about the same distance so the math is easy and the 737 Max is a fairly efficient plane but an A321 neo would be similar. Albeit a 737 or A321 neo are not planes that you would fly New York to Paris in.
So it is looking like jet fuel is around $2 a gallon for airlines right now.[1] A 737 Max takes a total of 6,820 gallons.[2] Since the flight from New York to Paris would be almost the max range we can assume all of it would be burned to transport the 172 passengers.
So ($2 * 6820 Gallons) / 172 People = $79 per person in fuel.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I wouldn't trust Ryanair's suggestion of how much to pay to offset their CO2 emissions, or that they'd use that fee effectively.
I don’t think that was his point. He is saying you can neither assume that this fee is enough to offset the carbon, nor that Ryanair will spend it appropriately. Just because it says carbon offset doesn’t mean all of the carbon is offset.
If the true price were actually that low, it would be easy to solve.
a) Flying is basically the only practical option for long-distance travel (edit: by which I mean humans travelling to be at a destination, not cargo/goods).
b) Travel is a hugely important good for society (debatable, but consider: experience of diverse cultures, being able to visit friends / have relationships, generation of economic value by skill sharing / conferences / etc).
I would argue that anything that increases the amount people are flying / lowers barriers to travel is a good thing.
Obviously if we can lower carbon emissions from airlines then we should, but I'd much rather curtail ANY other industry that produces huge amounts of emissions before trying to cut down on human travel.
It is the most practical long-distance option. But we should be able to give up things that are bad, even if they're practical (like asbestos – an amazing material, but it causes cancer to those who have to work with it).
Traveling is nice. I'd argue that most flying done nowadays does not increase cultural understanding. Hitchhiking or slow and uncomfortable means of transportation do increase cultural understanding, because they force people to share something. Modern traveling technologies offer a chance to travel half the globe while staying in a safe bubble. By the way here's an interesting phenomenon that you can notice when people talk about their travels. Stories always revolve around technical issues. Flight was cancelled, they had to take a cramped bus through the mountain, something was broken in the hotel, they got delayed when crossing a border. Traveling is often a game of moving around in unusual and adverse circumstances, and somehow making it work in the end.
Climate change is currently hurting economies, and the trend is worsening. Something that contributes to climate change is bad for the economy.
Having friends far from home is a bad choice. I've done it myself and it does have something attractive. But it makes life more difficult and these friends won't be there when you need them, simply because it's not practical. Of course it might sound great to say that someone flew thousands of kilometers to visit you. It sounds great because it's a huge waste, like showering a loved one with flowers.
So Jevons paradox is garbage, it's neither true nor is there evidence it would be applicable here even if it was true.
Moving on.... you're playing with words, they are talking about specific flights.
At to a global level it might be a 15% reduction or maybe 18% for these specific flight routes. But they make no claim to know that figure. It's hard to know. They just are presenting facts.
And for the 2% or 5% or whatever difference to the 20%, that's people making flights that couldn't before. That's people exploring the world. That has amazing value as well. It's not just 'less than 20%'
It's impossible to tell from that argument whether total usage of the resource will be higher or lower than in the alternative universe where efficiency never increased. Usage will go up, but it might not go up enough to completely offset the efficiency gains.
> So my understanding of Jevon's Paradox is that when efficiency increases so price decreases. When price goes down then usage goes up.
No, it's the usage of the resource made efficient will be more than before, not the product.
The reason people believe it, other than annoying blogs saying it's true, is we can see as efficiencies increase price goes down and we will use the product more, so it mind hacks people about the resource
But it's really hard to ever intuitively see if the resource gets used more.
I think the original idea seems legit, it's just never been reproduced that I've ever seen. I've never seen a legit example of Jevon's Paradox outside of the original idea.
