Big Surprise

[andrewducker]

I post saying that the government should make the decisions that individuals find hard, but are in our own best interests, and I get multiple comments from people saying "But I don't want things made hard for me."

Not a single week has gone past in the last few months, and not a month in the last 10 years when I haven't read more about the climate of the whole fucking planet going horribly wrong, because we're polluting it.  A large part of that pollution comes from flying machines inefficiently burning up hydrocarbons and releasing great wodges of Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides at high altitude.

Imagine if every time you took a flight you had to grind up a couple of people and put them in the fuel tank.  You can bet that people would still be saying "But I want to see my family a lot."  At the _very_ least, airline fuel should be taxed enough to pay for the planting of trees to soak up the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide - at the moment there's no tax on aircraft fuel at all, making it effectively heavily subsidised compared to all other means of transport.

I'm sorry, but when the whole bloody planet is at stake, maybe we'll all have to make a few sacrifices.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Yep. Given that portions of the Greenland icecap are now moving at 100x their previous rate, climate change could happen shockingly fast. Of course, it the result might not be global warming. The Atlantic conveyor is down by 30% because of the introduction of large amounts of fresh water from melting glaciers, and one of the leading theories for the cause of the little ice age (I love wikipedia) is that melting ice shut it off. Another minor cooling like this would produce massive famines.

I'm against long-term solutions being limiting actions, but until we have planes (or at least some form of air travel, perhaps airships) that are fuel efficient and low-pollution, then air travel needs to be reduced.