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.