洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 13h ago

I don't own a car. I take public transit everywhere, and I do think personal vehicle use has real environmental costs. But I don't think driving is inherently unethical.

I live in Seoul, and the city makes transit easy for me. That's not a virtue. It's a condition I happen to benefit from. Some people live where transit barely exists, or where it doesn't get them to work, school, or care. In those places, driving is not optional.

The same is true of flying. In parts of Europe you can cross borders by train. In island nations, or in places with weak land connections, flying may be the only realistic option. “Just fly less” means very different things in those places.

A lot of what gets called my ethical choices comes from the conditions I live in. That makes me wary of turning structural failures into personal morality. If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves nothing.

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter. It's not an accident that oil companies spent decades popularizing the idea of the personal carbon footprint.

Show threadQuixoticgeek

@hongminhee exactly.

I think flying is excessively demonised. It accounts for less than 2% of emissions. It's like 10% of surface transport. But by going after flying a certain class of eco people can look down both on those who drive up to the private jet terminal in a giant range over, and the people who are going 3 hours away for their one 2 weeks holiday of the year. Without actually tackling any of the far bigger sources of emissions

I wish there was more campaigning for public transport

1:15pmWeb
Show threadPupWrafie12h ago

@quixoticgeek
Its 2% only for co2 and that may sound like a small number but it actually is not. It's like 5-8% of you take into account all factors and gases/effects: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/air_travel_and_climate/flugverkehr_und_klima/climate_impact_air_traffic/

For example condensation trails, which also depend on the flight route, have a much bigger impact than over might expect.

Also, as always, it's not just always about "what is emitted now", but "what was emitted in the past", but this afaik mostly applies to these country comparisons like "uh Germany only accounts for 5% of the global warming" (currently!).

Good source but unfortunately I'm German: https://www.vcd.org/themen/flugverkehr

I actually found https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-flying and https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions that explains this in more detail. The detail one may easily miss: "Most people in the world do not take flights." (like, any!)
@hongminhee

The impact of air travel on our climate - atmosfair

atmosfair
Show threadQuixoticgeek11h ago
@PupWrafie @hongminhee that's still under half of building heat/light/cooling. About a quarter of ground transport. It's on a par with steel and cement. There's a lot more far larger gains to be made before we worry about flying. Esp as for anything across an ocean, we have no viable alternative. And for many continental journeys the alternatives aren't great. I can't run night trains, I can't build high speed rail.
Show threadPupWrafie7h ago

@quixoticgeek @hongminhee yet it's one of the things that can get worse fast "Flying is one of the most carbon-intensive activities — yet it contributes just 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions. How does this add up? Well, almost everyone in the world does not fly. Studies estimate that just 10% of the world flies in most years.1 But as incomes rise, this will change."

See the whole article I quoted.

Show threadQuixoticgeek7h ago

@PupWrafie @hongminhee a lot more of us heat/cool our homes, or own cars, maybe those are areas we should focus on instead ?

And I say this as someone who's made a single flight in 20+ years.