1% of people cause half of global aviation emissions

Tax carbon, and you’ll influence all industries broadly and fairly, rather than taking on the venal task of searching out who doesn’t deserve or make good use of their emissions, according to us. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensclimatelobby.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensclimatelobby.org&#x2F;</a>

The 1% figure sounds insane, but remember that &quot;11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018&quot;. In other words, about 10% of the flyers cause half of aviation emissions.

I don&#x27;t think this is a 1% problem, the problem is simply that aviation produces a lot of emissions, or put another way, we should expect 1% of people (or some equally small fraction of the population) do 50% of most things.<p>As for tackling the emissions problem, why can&#x27;t we introduce an emissions tax on the aviation industry to fund investment into carbon capture technologies to offset emissions? It seems to me the costs of carbon capture could quite easily be passed onto the consumer in this case given I know so many people who buy flights just because they&#x27;re cheap.

Would be interesting to know how many of those frequent fliers work at large consulting companies. Besides &quot;CEO-types&quot; those are the only people I know that take two flights per week.<p>I really can&#x27;t imagine that most of those frequent fliers are people that take a flight every week to go on a vacation &quot;just because it&#x27;s cheap&quot; like the article says.

&gt; Airlines [...] benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused.<p>That&#x27;s a very weird phrasing to use, designed to cause shock and outrage for something that - if I&#x27;m deciphering the phrase properly - means &quot;They burnt fuel without paying for the emissions&quot;, which as far as I know is something nobody does.

Passenger aircraft also carry freight, and there are also various freight airlines, but it&#x27;s strange that there is no mention of that in the article.<p>In truth, we may be also responsible for aviation emissions even if we are not flying; simply by clicking the &quot;Order&quot; buttom on some faraway e-commerce site, or posting something via airmail...

Man, you know we&#x27;re doomed to face the climate apocalypse when a simple thread about emissions is this divisive.

This isn&#x27;t surprising and borderline clickbaity. The article is about 1% of the world&#x27;s population, not 1% of the people who flies. Most people who are in a first-world country and make an average living is in the top %1, when compared to the world&#x27;s pop. So few people on the internet realized, they are the 1%.

If we must truly progress to a world where flights become a luxurious rarity, what will happen to economies transformed by tourism, I wonder.

High speed trains are a good alternative (for domestic travel)

Aviation accounts for 1.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions [0]. If we&#x27;re going to take a sober look at where to focus our efforts, this:<p><i>&quot;Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18&quot;</i><p>Should be:<p><i>&quot;Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic. Aviation&#x27;s contribution to global CO2 emissions rose from 1.3% to 1.9% from 2013-18&quot;</i><p>But the latter doesn&#x27;t attract clicks so much. Transportation overall accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. That&#x27;s the story that matters.<p>There&#x27;s certainly a point here about wealthy nations and wealthy people being responsible for a lion&#x27;s share of the problem, but really, everyone knows that. This article, and indeed the linked paper [2] gloss over the relative size of the aviation problem.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;co2-emissions-from-aviation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;co2-emissions-from-aviation</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;ghgemissions&#x2F;sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;ghgemissions&#x2F;sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0959378020307779" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S095937802...</a>

I’m probably in the top 2%, averaging 2 US-EU flights and 6 domestic US flights per year.<p>I hated every minute of it, and in some ways I feel like the pandemic saved me from the gluttony of in person meetings.<p>The pandemic offered many of us an opportunity to use the technology we have and avoid unnecessary travel. Is zoom&#x2F;g-meet a replacement for in person meetings? No. But is it good enough and worth the savings on time and damage to the environment? Hell yes.

I bet that nefarious group is &quot;airline pilots&quot;.

Quite remarkable the impact that even a small percentage of the population has on the environment.<p>This is why it&#x27;s so important to prompt cultural changes and encourage people to think about their impact beforehand, rather than in a reactionary sense.

Hasn&#x27;t the last 8-9 months proven that the world goes &#x27;round, money is made, innovation happens, vacations are had, with most people flying very little?<p>I now have close to 100 percent of my meetings online, and for me it has been far more efficient than meeting up physically.

Meta: Not sure if the photo of the KLM planes was retouched. The way the colors are in it, I initially thought it was one of those photos that&#x27;s regressed to black and white with just a few elements in color.<p>Looks really cool, IMO.

&quot;yeet the rich.&quot;

Not the Guardian’s most enlightened piece.

These are, to a large extent, the same people lecturing the rest of us about global warming.

...and other common, unsurprising results from the power law distribution

This question is actually pretty complex. If the plane is flying it doesn’t matter if people are on it or not.<p>I might actually argue that frequent flyers are flying to hubs and on flights that haven’t been canceled in 2020.<p>Regardless, you can’t just make assumptions like the one in the article. Flying frequently is not the same as driving frequently. Your car doesn’t take off whether you’re in the car or not, but a plane does.

The title of the article should be &quot;1% of people cause 1.25% of the total global CO2 emissions&quot;, considering that aviation accounts for 2.5% of CO2 emissions globally.

Articles like this are almost infuriating, in most cases it&#x27;s lazy journalism highlighting a problem or grievance from an angle or statistic some journalist finds &quot;interesting&quot; without giving any thought to a reasonable solution.<p>The only solutions I&#x27;ve seen are &quot;everyone should travel less&quot; basically making the proposition that poor people don&#x27;t deserve air travel or making grandiose claims about building huge high speed rail networks. The rail networks bit is ironic since building them wouldn&#x27;t solve any energy production or distribution carbon emissions and would likely just take money that should be spent on research into promising renewable sources.