Even someone who takes a 20 hour flight to take photos for Instagram is having a unique life experience. They are going to have experiences worth telling stories about. Certainly more than the person who doesn't leave the house.

A 20 hour flight emit twice the amount of carbon that the sustainable YEARLY PER CAPITA amount.

There’s no way of framing this as not incredibly selfish.

A 20 hour flight produces ~3 tonnes of CO2. This is ON TOP of the CO2 used up for living.

But yes, I agree, the vast majority of CO2 is produced by corporations who don’t pay for the externalities they create.

I’m sorry I offended you. Do you have a better term for someone using several hundred percent more than their allotment of a resource?

Just get a pair of those Apple VR goggles.

Is it the same? No. Is the difference worth destroying the planet? Hell no.

I say this as someone who owns and enjoys my Quest 2 VR headset, in part to watch 3D videos of nature scenes and walks in various places. I just also know it isn’t without an environmental cost of its own.

I found myself trying to see their viewpoint, trying to be critical of my own experiences as a traveler and I kept failing to do so. What a horrible narrative they're embracing.

About par for the course for the New Yorker, in my experience

The most obvious example of this in context of travel are these huge cruise ships. No one is really doing anything wrong with that, as such, but craptons of tourists descending on your comparatively little city or town can become quite disruptive (as I've experienced first-hand as a resident).

There's quite a few problems like this, from small to large. Humans don't seem very good at taking "collective responsibility" for these sort of things, "because I'm doing nothing wrong", which is true, but also not.

At a higher level I think the issue is overpopulation combined with ease of travel. We cause too much damage.

I saw it stand at 0 (i.e. 1 downvote) shortly after I posted it; I don't know if it went lower than that, but probably not. A single person downvoting something shortly after it was posted can make something appear "as if it's downvoted", but more often than not it's just a single person. I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

Certainly, there are many who rely on the "rudeness" of the travelers for their livelihood. New Orleans comes to mind, when I say that people who live there may not appreciate the tourists, but know that many of the things they do appreciate (dining, arts, etc) would not be there, but for the tourist. Luckily, the peak influx can be avoided while enjoying the fruits the rest of the time.

I'm just making these numbers up because I don't have a good way to estimate them, could also be ">50%" instead of ">15%". But that's what it comes down to.

I think COVID really highlighted the contrast; first it was a slow increase that you don't really notice directly, then suddenly none, and then suddenly a huge spike again. e.g. Edinburgh roughly doubled the number of tourists from 2012 to 2019[1] which, in spite of being a fairly large change, you probably don't really notice when spread out over a 7 year period.

[1]: visits to Edinburgh castle is probably a reasonable proxy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/586822/edinburgh-castle-...

Because you included the word "egregiously" I suppose technically you are right, but only on a technicality. A small "wrong" at the individual level becomes "egregiously" wrong at the population level.

- one person eating food in the streets in Japan isn't egregious, every tourist doing it is.

- one person being loud in a church in Italy isn't egregious, all of them is.

- one person touching some old Australian rock art isn't, every tourist doing it is.

When you consider your actions as a tourist, you have to consider a million people doing the same. Anything else is being a bad tourist.

For example "eating in the street is rude" is one of those things that's just a foreign concept to many people outside Japan. I just so happen to know about this from a YouTube video I once watched, but if it wasn't for that I could see myself doing it. Hell, even with that I could see myself just forgetting because it's such an alien concept to me that this is considered rude.

But "I'm only a tourist, it's ok" leads to the egregious "tourists are bad" concept.