Flying on such a huge scale is a relatively recent occurrence, very little of it is critical, the world isn't going to end because you can't holiday in Bali.
Airports are a part of every country’s critical infrastructure.
> the world isn't going to end because you can't holiday in Bali
Perhaps not. But the Balinese economy would simply collapse. I’m sure the Balinese economy is of critical importance to the ~4 million people who live there. What you’ve chosen as a contrived example doesn’t even illustrate your point.
My thinking doesn’t have anything to do with it, it’s simply a fact that 80% of Bali’s economy is tourism. An industry specifically promoted by the Indonesian government as a long standing policy.
“But, what if tourism wasn’t critical to the Balinese economy, what if they had instead spend the last 50 years developing a different industry” you might say. Well, who knows. But they didn’t, and the criticality of air travel to Bali is not up for any meaningful debate.
This argument doesn't hold much water. Sure, it might be technically correct for Balinese ecomomy. But lots of people fly lots of places for very capricious reasons. If vacation is the goal, then everyone can go on a trip a bit closer to home without flying. Certain major tourism centers will lose out, but on average, there will be just as many tourists, just in different places.
Air travel is far too cheap, everything else follows from that.
The majority of tourists to Bali are from Australia. Bali is the closest to home they can go without going to NZ (similar to Australia) or staying in country (ignore Papua New Guinea as too dangerous).
Planes make Australia a lot more viable, since it’s such a huge sparsely populated island that even a lot of domestic travel is better in the air. Bali and Indonesia’s various small distributed islands are much more dense, but island hopping by boat alone is also slow and unsuited to a lot of economic development.
Countries like Australia and Indonesia would take huge hits if air travel was a lot more expensive, much more so than America.
So we’ve gone from the idea that air travel wasn’t critical infrastructure, with Bali as the example, to essentially saying “but what if the world was completely different from the way it actually is”. Does that mean you agree that it is critical infrastructure?
> Air travel is far too cheap, everything else follows from that.
This is another outrageous claim. All aviation accounts for about 2% of global emissions.
The people commenting in this thread have chosen tourism, presumably because they think it’s the most frivolous source of aviation emissions. But even this is obviously critical to global economies. On top of that, the proposed solution amounts to complete economic isolationism. An idea I’m honestly surprised to see promoted on HN.
Suggesting that the world could possibly completely different from the way it actually is, and that the foundations of the global economy aren’t necessary isn’t suggesting a solution. It’s just utopian navel gazing.
That 2% figure is dubious, most reputable sources put it at 4%. On top of that the IPCC has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone.
The 2% number is from the IPCC, and carbon emissions from planes have the same climate impact as carbon emissions from any other source (according to the IPCC). But just for the sake of argument, let’s say the number is much higher than that. Let’s say it was 10%, 5x higher than the IPCC claims it is. It still poses a negligible impact to the climate, and has the least ROI or any of the major contributors to carbon emissions. Electricity consumption is by far the biggest contributor, and is by far the easiest to solve. If we were to solve those problems, there’d be no need to even worry about aviation at all. This idea that all carbon emissions are terrible and must be eliminated is entirely counter productive, and entirely impossible.
A special characteristic of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. Scientific studies have shown that these high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact because they trigger a series of chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that have a net warming effect.
This is what the IPCC is referring to when they say the climate impact is two to four times greater than from emissions alone.
This idea that all carbon emissions are terrible and must be eliminated is entirely counter productive, and entirely impossible.
We have left it too late, our only choice now is to do everything we can. There is plenty of air travel which is of marginal economic benefit that we can drop.
Bali's largest city is at 4m elevation. The oceans are rising and the coral reefs around the island are dying. Bali has no economic future if we don't stop global warming.
Where’s the model that predicts a 4m sea level rise? Even the most outlandish predictions don’t come close to that.
But in any case, that’s largely irrelevant to my point. This argument presupposes that the only way to prevent catastrophic man-made climate change is to put an end to air travel. That’s such an outrageous thing to claim that you can’t simply act like it’s something that’s obvious true, and that everybody should already believe.
You don't need to have the city completely under water to make it effectively uninhabitable. It's sufficient if it floods regularly during storms. Global sea levels are expected to rise 0.5-1m at just 2° of warming. We're on an emissions trajectory that will cause much more severe warming.
We don't have to completely stop global air travel, but we have to make it significantly more expensive. The price to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere again is not trivial. Long distance tourism will suffer from this.
Denpasar does flood regularly during storms. It always has.
But that aside, all aviation accounts for about 2% of global emissions, with tourism only being a portions of that. What is your basis for claiming that the only way to avoid catastrophic man-made climate change is to significantly reduce air travel? There are so many more ways to reduce emissions, with much higher ROIs, and much less economic impact. Electricity generation and land transport are so much easier to make renewable. The idea that the future of the world depends on reducing air travel is simply laughable.
We need to become completely carbon neutral in twenty years (at most!). Air travel shouldn't be our top priority, by far, but we need to address it too. Globally it has a small impact because almost nobody can afford it. But for a person in an industrialized nation the relative impact is quite big. When I travel from Germany to SF for example, I roughly double my climate impact for that year.
2% of CO2 emissions and growing. The impact is higher though. It's too difficult to trawl through the original literature on mobile; Wikipedia: The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5 percent of anthropogenic climate change, a figure which includes both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects.
Aviationis growing rapidly, and it's effect on global warming is bigger than just the CO2 emissions due to other effects in atmosphere (2.5 is a commonly used weighing factor).
Combined with the fact that the global warming pie is made up of many small slices makes it one of the most significant slices of the pie.
> makes it one of the most significant slices of the pie
Which significant slice of the pie is it on this graph [0]? It’s a tiny slither of the transport one. Most of that graph is just electricity generation split into different categories.
You can call a lot of things "critical infrastructure" but it doesn't mean we can't phase out many of those those things in an orderly fashion. It just means dependencies we've added to our life, many of which are very recent.
We have to make compromises, unless we prefer to lose the global warming battle. Humanity's benefits from cheap air travel are much less than losses from unchecked climate change.
This argument has absolutely no basis in economics. There is currently a particular demand for air travel. If you want to reduce that demand, you can only do one of the following things:
1. Create a competing product that people prefer over air travel.
2. Artificially increase the price through taxation.
3. Artificially decrease supply through regulation.
There’s nothing on the horizon for option 1, and since we live in a democracy, democratic mechanisms are the only means you have for 2 or 3, unless you wanted to resort to something like terrorism.
Your presupposition that we can’t have cheap air travel while avoiding catastrophic man-made climate change is in no way obviously true, and your suggested solution is a utopian fantasy.
Your argument presupposes that we let the free market run its course, but it's widely agreed that co2 emission controls will have to involve regulation or market steeting such as emissions trading.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that the most significant reductions in emissions have been generated by free market activity. You haven’t proposed gentle market steering and incentive creation, you quite literally suggested the “phasing out” of air travel.
> the most significant reductions in emissions have been generated by free market activity
Not sure what you mean, globally there are no reductions in emissions. And you would have to phase out a lot more than just air travel. Personal cars too and overall reduce consumption like ten fold or more, basically destroy this whole capitalism-driven consumerist way of life.
That’s only true if you pretend growth isn’t occurring. Every Mwh of renewable energy consumed is one less Mwh oh fossile fuels that would have been burned, and the market is producing more and more of those every year.
This anti-capitalism stuff seems completely irrelevant too. Every economy is based on consumption, even socialist ones. The only reason the USSR didn’t have as many car owners as the USA is because their economy was in a permanent state of crisis. Market forces don’t go away when you implement socialism.
There is growth in emissions globally. Because forced consumption of non-economical renewable energy doesn't actually work due to the same market forces you speak about. It just makes some rich people richer and others poorer. Resulting in more demand for cheaper products and services that subsequently create more demand for cheaper energy from places where there is no forced consumption of non-economical renewable energy.
> Every economy is based on consumption
I'm talking about buying a tesla level of consumerism, that's not everyone in every economy, but relatively few and they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
