In Bavaria, they're dirt cheap, at least for the regional trains. For 25 Euros cash, you can go anywhere in Bavaria all you want, for 24 hours, in as many trips as you want. Of course, this doesn't really compete with airlines, as this is for inter-city trips within the state, and no two cities in Bavaria are that far apart.

But to say there's no "low-cost railway" is plainly false. Bavaria has probably one of the best train systems in the entire world, and it's not expensive by any means.

Yes, sorry, I had something like "getting from Berlin to Brussels at low cost" in mind. There is no way to do it with railway, only with a plane.

If I just want to travel in the same Bundesland where I am, there are plenty of cheap options, that's true.

How low cost do you want low cost to be, and how annoying are you prepared for it to be? I just picked (fairly arbitrarily) Monday 19th August, and although Expedia does offer a GBP18 Ryanair flight SXF - BRU you have to accept an 0620 departure time to get that, and of course no checked baggage and you need to include costs of getting to/from the airport. Given the need to arrive at least 1h before departure I would personally not even consider 0620 dep, and all the other flights Expedia suggests cost 90 quid or more. For the train loco2.com has one-way tickets Berlin Hbf -> Bruxelles-Midi from GBP63.50 at reasonable times.

As an American, I can only dream of having convenient train fares of about USD$80 to go between somewhat-distant cities. Berlin to Brussels for GPB63.50 (about $80 right now) sounds downright cheap to me.

Same here, I've been to Brussels quite often (for FOSDEM) and the difference is:

- flying: 120 EUR from Munich, getting up at 4-5, arriving at 9

- train: have to go the day before, have an additional night in the hotel (70 EUR) and THEN the train is more expensive than flying anyway. Maybe not so important if the company pays, but still not fun to argue (depending on the company).

Rubbish. I've travelled Berlin to Brussels (and then London) by train. It was very pleasant.

Sometimes you get a group of loud people around celebrating something, like soccer cup or getting married (especially in the connections with Regionals). Also last year there were often delays and problems in the connections between Mannheim or Frankfurt; I wouldn’t just call someone’s comment rubbish.

For every ride like that, you could get a teenaged school class flying in your plane.

While you're technically right, the MUC-BRU flight is 90% businesspeople in suits on the smallest regular plane I've ever used, I can't imaging TXL-BRU being different.

I.e. the chance of it having a school class in it is like winning the lottery ;)

25€ is not dirt cheap, unless you're planning on taking 4+ trips on a single day. In Belgium, a prepaid ticket for 10 rides, each from/to any station in the country, costs just 75€ (valid for one year).

As an American, 25 Euros is absolutely dirt cheap. We can't travel between nearby cities for anywhere near that cheap here.

The 75 Euro deal sounds really cheap too.

According to the Amtrak site, you can go from NYC to Washington DC for $53. That's more expensive, but not tremendously so.

I've looked for fares like that and never see them at convenient times. At 4AM 3 months from now, sure. That's not convenient.

I tried planning out a weekend trip from DC (where I live) to NYC on Amtrak, and I couldn't make it work. The goal was to travel to NYC without flying, and without having to take time off from work (I work normal 9-5ish, flex hours). The only way to get fares cheaper than by airline is to take the train at 5AM or so. But the train station is downtown; I can't get downtown in time to catch the train by Metro (subway), because the Metro doesn't run that early. So I'd have to take a Lyft/Uber, which is expensive. If I go at a more convenient hour, the rates shoot way up, so it's more expensive than flying.

Sure, I could take a day or two off from work, but that defeats the point. If I wanted to travel between Frankfurt and Munich on a weekend without taking time off from work, or between Tokyo and Osaka, I could do it more cheaply and easily than DC-NYC.

I guess the issue is more for intercountry rail travel.

Also pretty pointless in terms of business travel:

I've hardly ever had any customers not in Munich or in the Nuremberg (area) that weren't so far away from the station that you'd need a taxi, so you can drive anyway. Especially for conferences. Usually Munich or Nuremberg.

The regular Deutsche Bahn prices are very expensive but the special prices are often rather cheap. A further 25% less for BahnCard 25 owners. I take a lot of cheap train rides that way.

https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_angebotssuche.r...

Low cost rail might exist one day in relation to the cost of flying where the carbon cost is added to the plane ticket.

My problem with economic solutions like carbon tax is that as it alleviates the carbon footprint, it reinforces economic inequality. Mobility will become something reserved to the rich people again.

I hope we will find a better one, e.g. online conferences or putting a tax specifically on business travel on behalf of medium to large sized companies.

Technically mobility is limited to the rich right now - all of us are "environmentally rich," blissfully jetting about in environment-destroying airplanes while enjoying a relatively clean Earth.

Our offspring will be Earth-poor, suffering the consequences of our frivolous "spending."

In my mind a carbon tax is a wealth transfer from the present to the future. I think it's a good solution because we aren't exacting fair price for our activities. I read a great book once in which future generations sued the shoes off their elders for not paying fair price for their climate-changing activities.

Wealth inequality should be addressed. We shouldn't hamstring other solutions just because it also is a problem - we can work on them in parallel. I appreciate you bringing it up though, it is a good thing to be aware of.

To offset the CO2 on a US-to-Europe round trip flight would add around $500 per ticket. As the efficiency of airplanes and CO2 concentrators improve, that should drop.

That seems reasonable to me and while it will make flying to Europe too expensive for some, it wouldn't make traveling to Europe something only the rich can afford.

For a typical family flying from middle America to Orlando, it would probably mean one less day at Disney.

Does this exist: a simple carbon impact calculator paired with a place to buy offsets? maybe one that just pulls all your receipts from your email?

The Tyndall Travel Tracker has a fairly simple carbon calculator (https://travel.tyndall.ac.uk/); with respect to offsetting there is an ongoing debate currently about how best to achieve this. It is thought that offsetting carbon alone is quite a grey area at present (e.g., trees planted today will offset over 25 years but the damage is done in the now, also many offsetting schemes are...scammy) - we are currently discussing strategies to offset with more than carbon, including development activities as well as biodiversity protection; the problems can be quite linked.

My personal hope is to liaise with some of the best researchers in the world regarding offsetting and have an approved offsetting scheme, which can be applied anywhere, that updates based on the current best understanding; we would then bring this capability into a newly built travel tracker (it's closer to a prototype atm).

Please let me know if this is something you'd find interesting.

> there is an ongoing debate currently about how best to achieve this

My comment was based on the cost to directly pull CO2 out of the air at industrial quantities, not indirect methods like planting trees.

We do have experts regarding things like BECCS also; the goal is to have a multi-pronged approach maximising for efficacy.

There are many calculators that offer a way to donate trees:

https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new

https://www.clevel.co.uk/flight-carbon-calculator/

https://trees.org/carboncalculator/

Those are fake feel good offset, it price a Paris-NYC round trip with 2.2 tCO2eq at 52€, but the only serious future project of durable carbon capture that I know price it at 600$ the tCO2eq, this would be a 1320$ offset.

The last time I read about this, CO2 sequestration was $100-$200 per metric ton:

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2018/06/team-provides-firs...

Their future target price, not the current one.

It's not business travel that's the problem, it's burning fuel that's the problem. If the 1% are the only people who can fly, that's a lot less fuel being burned. Heavily taxing 10% of fliers (who can easily afford it) is a no-op when it comes to reducing the buring of fuel. Now you have exactly the same amount of fuel being burned, and a tax yielding revenue that if anything motivates the recipients of that tax to encourage more flying.

If you massively raise prices for everyone to fly, less fuel gets burned, and the people burning the fuel are paying into a pool that ideally would be used to alleviate inequality on any other front.

If you want to tax the rich, just tax the rich based on them being rich; don't greenwash it.

> If the 1% are the only people who can fly, that's a lot less fuel being burned.

I agree. The question is who are these 1% of people. Carbon tax means that they are the richest 1%. I hope our society has enough imagination to consider other options.

I haven't heard of any carbon offset program that results in only the richest 1% being able to fly.

Targeting airlines might be the wrong place. Perhaps the fuel vendors are the ones that should bear the cost of removing all of the CO2 that's going to end up in the air from every bit of fuel they sell.

Climate change reinforces economic inequality as well. Developing nations are going to be the hardest hit by it.

What if these taxes were weighed disproportionately? If you are broke you don’t get taxed at all, but if you net 1k a day then you just got a $50 carbon tax added to your fare.

Might also be progressive on the flight frequency as well. Like first flight in year is cheap, second one is more expensive etc., and also progressive on the income. So that everyone gets approximately the same amount of flights they can afford in a year.

I made that a lot in Germany and it is worth if you value also the quality of the travel.

There are regular offers between capitals and big cities across countries, travels I did from Stuttgart: Stuttgart-Paris 40€, Copenhagen-Stuttgart 80€ (the train got in a Ferry and then the travel continued until Hamburg!), Stuttgart Amsterdam 80€. Sometimes traveling to far places like Spain must go over Paris, and each country has their own train network with more or less adaptation.

The quality of the public train got worse in Germany during the last 10 years and it is not an infrastructure thought to be run as a business with profits, but it is still one of the best transportation services for long distance.

The only problems with the train is visiting remote areas where it is necessary doing to or three train changes, which increases the chance of delays.

What? Of course there is low cost train travel. It is garbage, but it exists.

https://www.flixtrain.com/

However, if you want to go Hamburg-Munich on an ICE (better than flying imo IF (!) everything works) and you do not have purchased a "BahnCard" and you do not book far in advance then it is very expensive.

2nd class ICE ride on that track in 2 weeks is 153€, flex, one way. For that money you get a return flight.

If you can be 100% sure to make it to one exact train you can go for ca. 50€. [1] Risk of failing to catch that train is pretty high though.

[1] https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/dn?revia=yes&exi...

You are comparing a flexible train ticket against an inflexible plane ticket.

The flexible plane ticket is probably 3-10x the price, depending on the airline.

So you have a moral question: Is it more important that you save a few euros, or that future generations and people in poor countries (who, let's be honest, will bear the brunt of climate change) will suffer?

No, that's not the moral question I have. I personally have a choice between a few (about a hundred normally) euros and a little emissions. The society as a whole has a choice between a lot of euros and a lot of emissions. And also reducing people's mobility, where rich people are affected the least.