News from around the world!
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
Majority of private jets carrying 3 passengers or less, releasing 10 times as much carbon per passenger than a commercial flight.
As a peasant, I don't think reducing my carbon footprint will offset the disgusting (increasing) display of greed from the elites.
Perhaps the greatest scam the rich ever pulled off was convincing the common people that climate change is somehow our fault instead of theirs. A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
But if you and your family stop using plastic straws, turn the heat down in winter, meticulously sort all your recycling and use public transport more for the next decade, you can help Jeff Bezos offset the emissions for his next weekend trip to the Maldives!
Something inside me just died.
Oof
Well yea. If every person reduced their impact by a tonne, that's 65 tonnes of CO2 saved
How many private jets is that?
If every person reduced their impact by a tonne, that's 65 tonnes of CO2 saved
Woah there, not everyone!
We can't expect the wealthy jet owners to participate, we are trying to offset their carbon usage after all, it wouldn't be fair if they had to do it as well..
I'd prefer to reduce climate impact by running over Bezo's head with a tank.
In other words, if all the billionaires just ceased to exist, it would result in the humanity achieving the emission goals?
I mean, that's not strictly necessary either. Chinal allows a good many billionaires to exist, but they are hitting their emissions targets ahead of schedule, cause they don't let the billionaires run the entire show like they do in the USA.
"How to Cook Forty Humans"
It's not neither only the rich nor only the poor, it's all of humanity, and that's not the rich saying that, it's the IPCC. Now the rich (countries) of course have more means to lead the change and their guilt is much higher when they don't.
Source needed!
Well for example, I read the other day that 1 in 10 flights taking off from the UK are private jets.
That’s very interesting.
Majority of private jets carrying 3 passengers or less, releasing 10 times as much carbon per passenger than a commercial flight.
As a peasant, I don't think reducing my carbon footprint will offset the disgusting (increasing) display of greed from the elites.
Hahahahhaha
That’s funny and made me chuckle but it doesn’t substantiate the claim made.
I was being incredibly conservative and generous to the billionaires, considering the carbon footprint of just 125 of them is bigger than the entire nation of France
Well sort of. The source says it’s from their investments, not from their lifestyle.
Unless people have made an active choice to move their savings into an ESG pot, this will be true for everyone, just scaled according to the size of the pot.
Sort of an important mention, yes, but also sort of skewed.
As the article points out 50%-70% of their emissions are due to their investments, meaning those 125 billionaires still have more direct emissions of the size of up to half the country of france.
And I don't think its fair to equate having some little money in the bank, with employing brokers to ensure the exploitation of human labour and planetary resources enables you and your children to live in luxury without ever having to work
The difference is living off of what you work for and needing a bank account vs living off of your capital (meaning other peoples labour)
But the “little money in the bank” is in aggregate making a huge contribution.
So it’s easy to find the people who we want to blame big. But in aggregate we all have a role to play. That’s a harder message to swallow.
The easy solution is to just directly tax carbon emissions and dump the money into methods to reduce emissions (transit, trains, green construction, agricultural controls, etc.)
People don't like taxes though, so this will never happen. An emissions-based tax is possibly the easiest way to disproportionately tax the wealthy.
Yes!!
I’ve long argued that courageous states should radically reform their tax system. Rebase the entire tax system around carbon tax, setting the level to ensure the state has the same income base.
There’s a naturally progressive tax system built into that but we could make it even more progressive by laddering up the rates as the carbon emissions increase.
I don't think this type of policy is possible at the state level. The EU is gearing up for a carbon market on transportation. Carbon tax should come next, if we don't let big money lobbies kill the policy.
We might as well extract the fat from billionaires and burn them as carbon neutral fuel.
Render The Rich.
Any source for the 10x statistic? That seems low
We need both. The elite's footprint is gross and disgusting, but we peasants are far more numerous, so reducing the elite's footprint alone won't do the trick.
the thing is, i will refuse to behave until the bigger misbehavers are held accountable
This kind of reasoning is why we are not making progress. It's much easier to hold others to high standards when you've applied these to yourself first. The same goes for countries: it will be easier to pressure China/India when the West has done their part.
how do you expect people to apply those standards to themselves before they are applied to the biggest sinners? most people don't even buy how bad it is
The West can only "do its part" because we've shipped all our worst industries to China and India.
Doing our part includes reducing our consumption. Where things are produced doesn't matter all that much for this part of the problem.
Global industrial practices and corporations are the biggest offenders, by far.
You know who uses all the shit they make?
Yeah I can recycle and grow my own food and compost and ride my bike and walk places as much as I want. It won’t save as much carbon in my lifetime as even one of these flights.
It’s depressing, but I still do it because I don’t want to be part of the problem and I’ll need to know how to do these things when the world really goes to shit.
How does this compare to other countries?
Edit: piss poor googling lead me to 17% of flights in USA being private.
Private != Jet though, a 172, while still not the most efficient method of travel is much different than a leerjet.
For anyone wondering, a 172 can hold 3 adults including the pilot, cruises at 115mph, and burns about 9 gallons of fuel per hour so it gets 12.8 miles per gallon. A Learjet 45 can hold 11 people, cruises at 510mph, and burns about 200 gallons per hour so it gets 2.2 mpg. A Boeing 787-9 can hold 290 people, cruises at 560mph, burns 2000 gph, and gets 0.28mpg.
The 172 uses 2.63 gallons per person to go 100mi, the Learjet uses 4.06 gallons, and the 787 uses 1.23.
A 2022 Toyota Corolla gets around 40mpg highway and squeezes 5 people inside so it uses 0.5 gallons per person per 100mi.
These are all talking about max capacity too.
The 172 is more likely to be full and the pilot has a good chance of being part of the group instead of just a pilot.
The 787 is likely to be at least 90% full and the crew are a much smaller proportion of the load.
If there are just two people missing from max capacity on the Learjet then that’s making things even more inefficient than the others. And it’s very likely that they will be at least that much under capacity.
Working in that industry, in a jet with seats for 8 non-crew passengers (in ~50% more space than a Lear 45) most flights have 2-4 passengers, 1 is common, 7-8 hardly ever. Also you need the 172 if you want trained pilots in your 787.
A 2022 Toyota Corolla gets around 40mpg highway and squeezes 5 people inside so it uses 0.5 gallons per person per 100mi.
5 people in the Corolla is 2–3 times as many people as are at all likely to be in there. That's a very skewed number.
When using realistic numbers, cars come in at about the same per mile as large commercial airliners. (Flights tend to be far, far longer of course.)
It's also 100LL vs jet-a. It's not really an apples to apples comparison.
Maybe an unpopular take, but I honestly don't think private jets should even exist. When does a private citizen actually need one; if you want to fly in luxury that is what first class on commercial airlines is for, you shouldn't need more than that. I get that people operating in a government capacity might need, but that's not really the same as a private citizen owning one.
Then again, I don't think anyone should be rich enough to be buying private jets to begin with.