#1 - C02 emissions account for only about half of the overall GHG emissions impact of air travel. Anytime you see someone specifically isolating just the CO2 emissions you know they are either poorly informed or deliberately misleading you.
#2 - It doesn't actually matter. If something is 2.5% of X or 5% of X and X needs to get to 0 then the distinction is without a difference. Its only the tone of phrasing that makes this sound like a counterpoint, when it is in fact not.
#3 - unlike much of the other 95 percent of emissions airline travel is by far the most uniquely isolated to very wealthy (globally speaking) people. If you believe in any basic notion of "progressive taxation", and you apply that to GHG emissions, then getting rich (again globally relatively rich) people to stop flying or fly less is by far the most blatant outlier to address quickly and early.
And capping total prosperity is nothing at all like progressive taxation.
Whats "hysteria" is trying to turn that into a political/social-beliefs debate about "prosperity" or "hating the rich" instead of a simple numbers analysis.
I didn't say that was hysteria, so why are you pretending I did?
The actual purpose of the Guardian piece is to give its readers more reasons to hate the rich.
According to https://phys.org/news/2019-02-income-attitudes-affect-greenh..., transport related GHG emissions are most strongly correlated to income. So it's convenient to sweep air travel under the rug as a small contributor, when the "rich" are the biggest offenders.
You can tell because it's a "data journalist" who forgot to mention she's writing about 2.4% of emissions.
This is just a bitter journalist training the Guardian-reading climate change freakout crowd to hate the rich.