[LurkingPenguin]

500 people going round-trip to any destination they want one time is a drop in the bucket. Pre-pandemic, do you have any idea how many business travelers would hop on planes every single day, sometimes to travel just a few hundred miles (i.e. SFO to LAX)?

[rsj_hn]

> sometimes to travel just a few hundred miles (i.e. SFO to LAX)?

Nothing wrong with flying from LA to SF.

Driving 400 miles gets old pretty quick. Depending on how heavy your foot is, that's ~6 hours of driving, and along one of the most boring stretches of road (I-5) imaginable. You will also need to stop and take breaks. And if you take PCH, it's 8 hours of winding road. Do that once for fun, but not twice.

In terms of cost, a one way ticket LA to SF or vice-versa is $39. You can get those at short notice. Assuming 30 mpg at whatever high speed you will be traveling, driving the 400 miles will cost you ~13 gallons, so if gas is $3 per gallon, there's no price difference between flying and driving. And in CA, gas is $4.50 now, so you'd be crazy to drive, as that trip will cost you $60 just in terms of gas.

Your time is also valuable. If you get to the airport an a hour head, then it's 1 hour at airport, 1 hour flight, 30 min getting out of plane and picking up luggage. Let's say at most 3 hours travel time, enter SFO to exit LAX.

You can buy a business class ticket for $80. Do yourself a favor and get the business class seat and watch a movie or take a nap. You will be first to board and exit, saving time.

If you value safety, flying is much safer.

[crubier]

Some figures to keep in mind, since CO2 is absent from your calculations:

Flying from SFO to LAX and back costs 0.2 Tons of CO2. That’s more than a month of your CO2 quota if we want to limit climate change to +1.5C. CO2 budget should be 2 Tons per year to reach that goal. Currently, emissions are 15 Tons per year per capita in the US.

[mFixman]

A one-way flight from SFO to LAX releases 153kg of CO2 to the athmosphere [1].

A one-way road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a car with 30 MPG efficiency releases 135kg of CO2 to the athmosphere [2].

The only way out of this is to tax petrol high enough to convince people to take the bus.

[1] https://curb6.com/footprint/flights/los-angeles-lax/san-fran...

[2] https://www.distance-cities.com/distance-los-angeles-ca-to-s...

[rsj_hn]

> That’s more than a month of your CO2 quota if we want to limit climate change to +1.5C.

Fortunately, I don't have a CO2 quota, nor are we going to meet any of these targets, nor is there popular support for imposing quotas.

But if you prefer to drive to LA, that's perfectly fine with me.

[crubier]

You won’t have a CO2 quota don’t worry, your little comfort will be fine.

But easy oil will run out eventually anyway. Your children (if you have any) will live on an overheating planet, with mass climate migrations, and very high priced oil, even for things as basic as fertilizers.

[rsj_hn]

I am not really worried about peak oil, and if I was, I'm not sure how driving to LA would really improve that situation.

People have been worrying about Peak Oil since the 70s, and none of these dire predictions have come to pass. You would think at some point they would give up on the collapse narratives, but for a minority of people these doomsday predictions have a strong appeal. Here I include both "climate collapse" as well as oil collapse, population collapse, and any other collapse narrative in the bucket. I think we lost something when we no longer have monastaries in which people whip themselves, because it clearly meets a deep psychological need.

New technologies come online to replace old tech in terms of fossil fuel extraction, more efficient uses of fossil fuels, and replacement forms of energy as we run out. Big progress is being made in all three areas at the same time, and oil remains remarkably cheap in inflation-adjusted terms. That's not to say that 100 years from now we will keep digging fuels up from the ground and burning them. Who knows what will power the future? But something will power it.

The planes will keep flying, and they will be cheaper and more frequent than today, just as some unhappy people will keep insisting that the sky is falling. The future is one of energy abundance, and constantly improving transportation technology.

[crubier]

I don’t disagree with you on future energy abundance. I too am an optimist. Renewables and Nuclear are a thing.

All I’m saying is that if we continue at this rate of carbon emissions, even only 10years, nevermind 30years (the time to develop and scale zero emissions planes, which has barely started) the planet will definitely see changes that won’t be nice. We are talking “Areas hosting 1B people today will see unsurvivable wet-bulb temperatures more than 100 days each year”. Mass migrations won’t be pretty.

The choice we are facing for the next 20 years is: Prepare your low carbon energy transition HARD, or prepare some damn solid walls around your country.

[dTal]

I fear that waiting until oil is too expensive to use, is effectively waiting until all the oil has been dug up and put in the atmosphere. It's the non-answer. That way lies climate disaster.

I am disturbed by the shoulder-shrugging attitude to mass environmental devastation.

[rsj_hn]

I am disturbed by the hysteria and alarmism. People have been predicting "climate disaster" for 40 years now, along with population disaster, and many other disasters. I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population, and most important for you, neither is China, which is opening 120 new coal plants just this year. Yet for some reason I'm supposed to be terrified of flying from SFO to LAX and pretend that there is some sort of existential crisis.

But don't worry, this will allow you to keep warning of collapse, just around the corner, for the next forty years as well. And the forty after that.

[tuatoru]

Read it again: the idea that a present that emits carbon is a good thing is what needs to change.

And yes, I do know how many plane trips there were. That doesn't make it right, just like that fact that a lot of people smoke doesn't make that right.

[LurkingPenguin]

> the idea that a present that emits carbon is a good thing is what needs to change.

There are very few human activities that don't directly or indirectly "emit carbon".

Like it or not, civilization is not going back to the horse and buggy. At least willingly.