Exactly. It's not like if you couldn't fly from Los Angeles to New York once a month - you would just drive by yourself - and produce the same amount of carbon.

You wouldn't produce any carbon, because you'd likely never make the trip!

Yes, this is why dealing with air is so tricky in economic terms, because "uninducing demand" does have more intrinsic downsides. Car -> rail is a mere political problem, once you get there it "unlocks" more travel so it is clearly economically good.

I guess thank god for 9/11 boosting security theater. Don't like all the other patriot act garbage, but the degree to which air travel is so awful really helps here.

After 9/11 air travel plateaued for 3–4 years, then afterward rebounded to the original trend line (i.e. massively expanded, and continues to expand).

It doesn’t seem that all of the unpleasant security theater is enough to significantly deter people from flying.

No one its own, but I think it would make a difference had we avoid hsr alternative.

So your preferred solution is to restrict the allowed travel radius of people, a bit like with medieval serfs?

Restrictions may not be needed. Remove subsidies and price in externalties.

Most people dont realise that aircraft industry and fsrming use special fuel and pay no tax on it. While it makes sence that we sibsidiae cost of food, it is less clear why we subsidise airlines

> While it makes sence that we sibsidiae cost of food

That's already a thorny subject given that most governments also subsidize food sources that are vastly inefficient and resource-intensive even in cases where reasonable alternatives exist. Meat/dairy producers are still the primary recipients of subsidies in the US and many other countries, at least in Europe.

This number distinguishes between fruit/vegetables and other products, although the article apparently suggests that the use of corn/soy in meat production makes this figure more relevant:

> According to recent studies, the U.S. government spends up to $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, with less than one percent of that sum allocated to aiding the production of fruits and vegetables.

https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...

If intentions are the same then these still can be seen restrictions on mobility.

Maybe encourage more high speed rail instead?

What a rhetoric device.

Is your preferred solution to let people die in droves to a mass extinction ?

My preferred solution is buttloads of nuclear, carbon neutral solutions to liquid fuel (e.g. pulling CH4 out of atmosphere with Sabatier) and general carbon capture.

While producing clean energy would be great, a significant share of our travel issues is related to land use.

Ok, but... airplanes use the least land?

Much like the difference in land use with or without cars is not simply roads and parkings, but also the horizontal development of cities rather than vertical, the land use involved by planes is not simply the airstrips. Among others, it is also all the land developed specifically for vacation in remote places. If you look at [1] for instance, this area would simply not be developed if planes were not a thing.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@21.1715988,-86.8077681,1041m/da...

What is wrong with vacations in remote places?

What mass extinction? From climate change? Has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that because I’ve never seen that as a scientific claim.

We are currently going through a well-documented extinction[1]. It's not recent in human terms, but it's been accelerating recently, with industrialization.

Climate change is not the only, nor the major cause in the current extinction, but it contributes. In a way, this is unfortunate: it would be easier to have only one problem.

The relevant body for scientific information is not the IPCC, but the IPBES [2]. Like the IPCC, it releases reports summarizing the situation and its causes [3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Science-Poli...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Bi...

I don’t think it’s necessarily the commenter’s solution but it does seem to be the one the world is going all in on.

It's hard to take something away from people once they have already had it. Yet if we had never discovered flight then we wouldn't spend much time lamenting the lack of air travel. Instead we would get on with life within the limitations we have just like we do for other constraints.

Nobody in this thread has suggested that.

Someone has now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725760

True, but when you start comparing denominators in absolute terms you would also conclude that not traveling at all is the far superior choice. And also, that anything emitter (say, a gas grill) that’s unrelated to travel has infinite emissions per kilometer.

And if we use your co2 per mile approach we can all conclude that a rocket is the way to travel.

People judge these things in terms of how much co2 is emitted by industry, companies, individuals etc. The particular mechanism of emissions is not that relevant. Air ambulance flights are treated differently to private jets carrying bankers.

Why is further travel, per se, the problem?