Because of the altitude the emissions are worse than those emitted at sea level.
We have a lot more cars on the road than airplanes in the sky, so reducing their carbon footprint would have a bigger impact. But on an individual basis, flying is one of the most carbon intensive travel options.
However annual carbon footprint of a regular citizen is completely meaningless in the greater scheme of things. Stop shifting the blame onto regular people, we're not going to give up on civilisation just because some monopolies are burning coal and gas.
I'm not, probably the opposite. I'm stating that if you choose to fly a ~5hr flight, you're contributing 11% more carbon than the average person does all year. In other words, by reducing the demand for flying you can have a greater impact on reducing emissions than the average person could.
but if you didn't board that flight, the flight would still happen, and the efficiency just dropped since it carried one less passenger.
Unless you can convince a large amount of passengers to not travel at all (and i meant not travel, rather than switch to a different mode of transport), there is no reducing carbon emissions.
> but if you didn't board that flight, the flight would still happen, and the efficiency just dropped since it carried one less passenger.
At some point, less revenue = less flights. Even dropping demand by 200 people on a route would cause a reduction in flights. It's a long way off from making a huge impact, but individuals can decide how they want to vote with their dollar and every dollar and every reduction counts.
Sure, a huge reduction in carbon emissions will probably come from a technology breakthrough, but we can help accelerate the demand for that tech by reducing demand for current carbon emitting activities.
Ah.. The "tackle the bigger fish first argument" - It's a false one: tackle all the independent paths at once because they are not linked. 2% is huge, its 1/50th of the burden. There are 250 economies worldwide, its larger than several nation states yet nation states are taking action.
You know where I got this? Gen. Groves. During the Manhattan project, asked if they should do one of two choices he said do both. This later paid back when it turned out thermal diffusion could pre enrich the feed for other techniques like the calutron and improve its efficiency.
But there are some actions that can deliver huge gains immediately (e.g., replacing coal plants by almost anything else) for a low cost (both in terms of money and reduced standard of living / reduced growth). Reducing air travel is great, but there are few alternatives and not doing it at all anymore would drastically change modern society.
A carbon tax would make that discussion moot though: It can be adjusted dynamically to follow a defined CO2 reduction schedule, and carbon savings would come from low hanging fruit first, and ultimately affect everything.
You have to weigh multiple costs, though. What's the cost of waiting to find out if the one huge gain is enough, versus the cost of doing them all right now?
It seems like a lot of the small changes with small impacts could actually cause a larger ripple effect which might end up causing the larger changes. Perhaps small changes, once accumulated, could be the key?
Have you come across any lists of what the most carbon emitting things are - on a personal level?
I’m kinda curious what difference different lifestyle choices really make. Eg going vegan for a year vs no flights for a year vs getting green electricity.
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Several scientific studies have shown that when people, especially those living in developed countries but more generally including all countries, wish to reduce their carbon footprint, there are a few key "high-impact" actions they can take such as: having one fewer child (58.6 tonnes), living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight (1.6 tonnes), and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tonnes). These differ significantly from much popular advice for "greening" one's lifestyle, which seem to fall mostly into the "low-impact" category.
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... although I have seen air travel clearly dominate car use in other sources. Obviously it depends on how you use the car and what type it is.
Also, not having children being so impactful seems to assume that emissions are proportional to population, which seems doubtful to me (haven't looked into the original sources though).
So you might think the best single change I could make would be to stop flying. But the same website quotes $8/ton to offset my carbon footprint. So an even better single change would be to donate $100/year to some initiative to upgrade cooking stoves in Africa, or whatever the current best-value project is.
The Effective Altruism answer is probably to take all the energy you’d put into lifestyle changes, and put it instead into earning money to donate to environment lobbyists, so as to change corporate behavior.
