Are you suggesting there is a causative relationship between flying and having a dispersed family?
People will move far away for their careers regardless but if the cheap long distance transportation exists then people will use it. The people who are working in one city and taking a flight back home every weekend are statistically nonexistent. The people who moved across the country and take a plane back a couple times a year to celebrate as major holiday or something are far more numerous but those people would have still moved without the cheap airfare.
Do you honestly not believe that people take ease of access to their loved ones when deciding where to work? I've had countless conversations with people talking about how they chose jobs to be closer to family. Transportation lets you convert the spatial metric of "closer" to a measure of time and cost instead. If flights double in price, that means seeing family half as often, which can easily make the difference between choosing job A over job B.
People move away primarily for economic benefits. No single mass migration in history of humanity has ever happened "because people wanted to be close to their family".
If you want anecdotes: I know hundreds of people that have moved away from their families and only a few that moved back after being elsewhere. (Literally about half of my graduation year at university have moved away) Most people I know, that moved, see their family back "home" only once or twice per year (summer vacation + winter holidays).
the point is that, when it's affordable and normal to fly great distances on a yearly/monthly basis, it causes people to spread out a lot more. then you end up with a chicken-egg scenario where people "need" cheap flights to see their spread out families, but the cheap flights also enable them to spread out further while still seeing each other.
odds are, you didn't happen to be born in the optimal location for your desired career. if you can get paid $20k more on the other side of the country and a flight home costs $200, you might find it pretty tempting to move. if the flight cost $2000 or you had to drive for three days to get home, it would be a lot less appealing for people who value seeing their family.
I don't understand how it's so hard to see that cheap flights make a big difference at the margin.
In fact - the drastic rise of living costs in economic centers indicates that people will take that move, even if that trip back is several hundred dollars and takes many hours.
I hate NYC and yet I recognise that it's the best location for fast travel to Europe... I travel back home about 2 times per year, though.
But implying that travel accessibility is the primary reason is absurd. If I had a good job offer from a company in LA - I would still take it. Even though my travel time to my mother would double(11 to 22 hours)
This Inc. article describes some of my early results: https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht...
The answer no one wants to hear is that no words can convey what one learns from just committing. I'm in my fifth year and I haven't been able to convey to anyone the mindset shift. It's like trying to describe hearing Beethoven's ninth in Carnegie Hall, except bigger and better. What words can you use?
Depends on your definition of "just existing". I can't claim to live in a way that's very good for the environment, but I do try to limit meat consumption, purchases of new goods etc. Most online calculators for carbon footprints give me a ~8 ton yearly Co2 equivalent. According to [1] a cruise from Southhampton to New York (one way) is ~4.5 tons per person, so that would be a whopping 50% increase for me, and more than double if I did a return trip. That's just the Co2 emissions too, so not factoring in the various ocean-polluting effects (also mentioned in [1]).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/20/cruises.green
Just buy as many carbon offsets or similar as necessary for your existence to come out net positive.
I don't think it's possible for anyone, even a well off individual, to offset what living in 1/4 acre or more lots does to society as a whole, since mass transit is no longer feasible, which means density is less feasible, and it causes a whole chain reaction of extra fuel use.
You can use approximations.
> I don't think it's possible [...] to offset what living in 1/4 acre or more lots does [...]
Sure, dense living has a smaller footprint.
But individuals can still buy enough offsets. It's just going to be more expensive.
You can also get more creative with your offsets. For example, I could try to find two people who are currently living sparsely and convince them with a bit of money to move to a dense neighbourhood. That would more than offset any personal decision to live in a sparse neighbourhood.
(Slatestarcodex had a similar idea about eating meat: just bribe other people to become vegetarian, if you are worried about your net impact but still want to eat tasty, tasty meat.
Obviously, normal well-adjusted humans don't take kindly to trading in such indulgences.)
This is one example of something you can’t offset.
Germany also has both reasonable public transport and good accommodation for private vehicles. You can totally find some people who are on the margin between the two and could be persuaded either way relatively easily.
But even granting that part of your argument, I don't see how you can't offset it? You could either be non-specific and just buy enough carbon offsets. Or if you want to specifically offset public transport use, just bribe some people to move to place with better public transport.
Even the mention of more density or less road for people’s private cars will cause a public outcry that will shut the project down. And it takes years if not decades to construct public transport, so that political will has to run through multiple elections.
My proposal was about changing what people do on the margin. And assuming that we can offset behaviour anywhere on the globe. Ie that you can get more people in Germany on public transport to make up for your sins in America.
(Btw, buses don't need much of a change to the road layout.)
You can do some finance to calculate the present value of the income stream needed to offset the expected impact of all your progeny forever.
We act like eating a little less meat or buying a Tesla is the equivalent of a the Nobel Peace Prize but it’s just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Let’s get real and enjoy this ride while it lasts.
Which to me clearly show the truth of your comment. You can swap out all the plastic bags for cloth bags and buy a Tesla and spend an hour sorting your trash every week, but taking that flight for a honeymoon to Tahiti or living in a suburb and driving everywhere negates all of it and more.
The only realistic and honest way to assess overall impact is put a number on your total consumption. There are a million ways that can be skewed, but averages don't vary as much as you think - as an overall reality check, if you make and spend your $50K salary every year, that is going to be the order of magnitude of your environmental impact. Mostly, someone who consumes $500K worth of stuff is going to have 10x the impact, and someone who consumes $5K will have 1/10th the impact. How you spend it is second order.
This attitude will never catch on, because people feel, innately and through socialization, that misers are bad, "bean counters" are bad, simple but difficult solutions are bad, and focusing on specific actions, symbols, in-groups and out-groups, is what drives normal social activity and fulfillment.
The psychology of "saving the environment" reminds me a lot of dieting for people who struggle with their weight, or budgeting for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It's the total that matters, not the parts, and yet it's very difficult to approach it any way other than piece by piece.
I’d like to think it was this easy, but I don’t believe it is. A Manhattan apartment costs a million dollars or more, but that person can use public transport to get around. Someone in Arkansas lives in a suburb of Little Rock and drives 30 miles to work one way every day in a pickup truck they don’t need and uses fuel costing $1 per gallon or less. And their house cost $200k.
I wouldn’t be able to say the person in Manhattan is causing an order more environmental impact, especially when our world doesn’t price in externalities of fuel use at all for most of the population.
Externalities are a cop-out. There are always externalities, but they're just used as an excuse for special pleading. If you average a large amount of consumption, the amount of oil per dollar, and the externalities of burning it, are going to be fairly consistent. The type of consumption is dwarfed by the amount of consumption; that's the claim I'm making. It's not that the "environmental choice" isn't better all else being equal, but it doesn't make up for hardly any consumption as a percentage. If you're not saving significant money as a percentage with your choices, you're not improving your lifestyle significantly.
I’ve never lived in an apartment bigger than 600 square feet, have never driven a car, don’t fly, eat a plant based diet, and will never have kids. We’re about a generation or two from a total disaster and everybody wants to think tiny insignificant changes are enough. Glad I’ll be be long dead by then.
I fly maybe once a year, avoid red meat, and live in a dense neighborhood. I'm doing more environmental damage than most people and I've made my peace with it.
In the case of contributing to pandemics, flying spreads viruses incredibly effectively. Boats trap a few thousand people at a time. Flights bring the virus to population centers of tens of millions in hours.
For the time being, people associate flying with seeing loved ones and making money, so they associate not flying with never seeing their moms or losing their jobs. Experience shows the opposite. The more people fly, the more dispersed their families, so the less they see loved ones. Flying forces companies to fly people everywhere.
I predict the vitriol people are starting to show for cruises will eventually make it to flying, however hard to conceive today.