It’s like fixing a leaky pipe by adding sponges. Sure, they’ll soak up the water and are cheap, but eventually you will run out of space for new sponges and have to pay for a plumber.
I'm all for building wooden houses. But I can also imagine the amount of work (=> energy consumption) needed to convert theses trees we need to plant to "offset emissions" as new houses.
Transport the workers, feed the machines to chop the trees, the machines to transport the wood, to run the lumber-mill, to transport to the construction site etc. Unfortunately for now we still have: feeding machines => energy consumption => emissions
We can argue that this energy would have been needed anyway to build new houses. However I find it dangerous to couple a carbon reduction strategy to a substantial amount of an activity involving machines (construction). Are we going to need the amount of houses at the scale of the amount of trees we need to plant? In all parts of the world concerned (we don't want to move trees across the world anymore..)?
What's to say it wont be slashed and burnt to make room for agriculture? What's to say the surplus of timber wont decrease the price and cause less trees to be planted elsewhere?
The way to sequester carbon with trees is to cut them down when they're grown, and bury them somewhere where there's no air and no one will touch them for thousands of years, or otherwise store them in perpetuity while preventing decay or burning.
It's not impossible that we could grow a huge number of trees, and bury the resulting wood in a mountain-side to offset burning coal - but the amount of wood we'd need to bury might be prohibitively large.
(We've buried much worse things than wood :) ).
I don't think there are many trans-Pacific flights with just 100 people on board.
The last flight I took on Singapore Air was around 350 people. So the tax would be about $30 per person. Certainly not enough to prevent people from flying.
Emirates has A380's with 615 people on board. That's just $17 per passenger.
That’s fine. The point isn’t the dictate what people do. It’s to offset their negative externalities.
The issue with offsetting is that it's not actually enough. The idea is basically to help less developed economies grow in a more sustainable way.
But we could delete the entire developing world and still be emitting too much, so capture and/or reduction are necessary, yes.
Planting trees (and removing the carbon they capture from the carbon cycle, e.g. by turning them into biochar) probably doesn't scale to the amount of carbon we release.
I don't see how that follows. On the assumption that we don't have infinite taxes in general, every $1 raised via a tax on emissions from flying can be put in to offsetting, capture, or research which wouldn't otherwise.
> That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.
It's unclear to me what you mean by this. I think you mean that it would likely reduce demand? Sure, bonus.
That’s very...optimistic of you. I wish I had the same trust in these systems.
Regardless I highly doubt there will be a global movement to kill air travel any time soon, there’s no world gov to implement this mass tax so it will have to be a few very brave souls who do it while trying to convince everyone it won’t result in a massive brain and money drain which will be multiple x bigger than the tax “return”. Not to mention lost productivity.
Asia and the US (I’m assuming EU would be the first) will suddenly sound like a far better place to live and do business, then there will be a ton of disincentives to follow suit.
Remember when France was going to do their millionaire tax? That didn’t last long once the consequences became apparent and they could be dismissed with campaign slogans.
Airlines already apply "fuel surcharges" as part of their ticketing.
Adding a, for example, EU-wide tax on outbound flights based on the distance of origin/destination, would be one way of implementing.
Getting international agreement on, for example, having it apply only to outbound flights, would mean that is not a tax on imports, that could be considered a tariff.
The income could then be spent on subsidizing the other costs of decarbonization.
If you start your argument with an extremified and overly emotional premise, then sure, you can make just about any point you want.
On the other hand, if a tree can be planted to capture 1 ton of carbon for 50 cents each, then a flight from NY to Sydney can be offset with $130.[1] That's about $1 per person on a 100-person flight.
Some environmentalists claim that the social cost of carbon is $40 per ton of CO2[2]. That comes out to about $10,500 in taxes for a flight from NY to Sydney. That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.
[1] 53 lbs of CO2 per mile of flight, multiplied by 9,929 miles from NY to Sydney, divided by 2000 lbs/ton, times $0.50 of offset costs per ton
[2] https://www.edf.org/true-cost-carbon-pollution