This argument doesn't hold much water. Sure, it might be technically correct for Balinese ecomomy. But lots of people fly lots of places for very capricious reasons. If vacation is the goal, then everyone can go on a trip a bit closer to home without flying. Certain major tourism centers will lose out, but on average, there will be just as many tourists, just in different places.

Air travel is far too cheap, everything else follows from that.

The majority of tourists to Bali are from Australia. Bali is the closest to home they can go without going to NZ (similar to Australia) or staying in country (ignore Papua New Guinea as too dangerous).

Planes make Australia a lot more viable, since it’s such a huge sparsely populated island that even a lot of domestic travel is better in the air. Bali and Indonesia’s various small distributed islands are much more dense, but island hopping by boat alone is also slow and unsuited to a lot of economic development.

Countries like Australia and Indonesia would take huge hits if air travel was a lot more expensive, much more so than America.

So we’ve gone from the idea that air travel wasn’t critical infrastructure, with Bali as the example, to essentially saying “but what if the world was completely different from the way it actually is”. Does that mean you agree that it is critical infrastructure?

> Air travel is far too cheap, everything else follows from that.

This is another outrageous claim. All aviation accounts for about 2% of global emissions.

The people commenting in this thread have chosen tourism, presumably because they think it’s the most frivolous source of aviation emissions. But even this is obviously critical to global economies. On top of that, the proposed solution amounts to complete economic isolationism. An idea I’m honestly surprised to see promoted on HN.

Suggesting that the world could possibly completely different from the way it actually is, and that the foundations of the global economy aren’t necessary isn’t suggesting a solution. It’s just utopian navel gazing.

That 2% figure is dubious, most reputable sources put it at 4%. On top of that the IPCC has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone.

The 2% number is from the IPCC, and carbon emissions from planes have the same climate impact as carbon emissions from any other source (according to the IPCC). But just for the sake of argument, let’s say the number is much higher than that. Let’s say it was 10%, 5x higher than the IPCC claims it is. It still poses a negligible impact to the climate, and has the least ROI or any of the major contributors to carbon emissions. Electricity consumption is by far the biggest contributor, and is by far the easiest to solve. If we were to solve those problems, there’d be no need to even worry about aviation at all. This idea that all carbon emissions are terrible and must be eliminated is entirely counter productive, and entirely impossible.

A special characteristic of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. Scientific studies have shown that these high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact because they trigger a series of chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that have a net warming effect.

This is what the IPCC is referring to when they say the climate impact is two to four times greater than from emissions alone.

This idea that all carbon emissions are terrible and must be eliminated is entirely counter productive, and entirely impossible.

We have left it too late, our only choice now is to do everything we can. There is plenty of air travel which is of marginal economic benefit that we can drop.