> They're incredibly unpopular because the ultraweathly use massive amounts of fossil fuels and thus lobby very, very hard against them...and make sure the public is often told just how evil they are and how expensive they'd hurt Johnny Everyday Worker, even car ownership, especially in a city (where much of the US populative lives) is not affordable to a large segment of the population.

Eh. It's not Bill Gates and Alice Walton. Sometimes the obvious answer is the real one: It's the fossil fuel industry.

> It's completely insane that we do not tax fuel usage for probably the most energy-intensive way to move people and/or goods and often that movement of people is entirely frivelous.

That one's just the arbitrage problem. Planes move around. If there is an international flight to a country that doesn't tax jet fuel (or taxes it less) then the plane is going to fly into LAX with enough fuel still in the tank to get back to the other jurisdiction and fill up again. Which actually increases fuel consumption because fuel is heavy and they otherwise wouldn't want to do that.

This is the same reason the EU doesn't tax jet fuel.