That is some high-level authoritarian nonsense right there. Should there also be limits on how many KM's a person can drive a year? How many often the BBQ in their backyard?
What is the penalty for exceeding said limit in your fantasy?
edit
Just out of curiosity I took what seems to be the "average" of the reported number of billionaires in America as 800, and the average yearly CO2 from flying via the linked article at a high point of also say 800 tons (which is likely high but easy math). That works out to 640000 tons of CO2 from all the billionaires flying around in a year.
Another quick search on how much CO2 is produced in the USA per year came out as 5.2 billion metric tons.
That means these flights are accounting for 0.0123076923% of the USA's CO2 production ... or put another way it's a rounding error.
I'm just saying there should be a "regulation". A couple of years ago, everybody accepted the fact that people all should have 3 shots of vaccination to have a flight. Everybody got opposed to it. But got the shots eventually.
I'm not the guy who has the golden law that will change the world. I'm just proposing that CO2 emission is a big problem and some of the people are exploiting it.
>A couple of years ago, everybody accepted the fact that people all should have 3 shots of vaccination to have a flight. Everybody got opposed to it. But got the shots eventually.
Which if you look back it logically now with all the evidence, we have in hindsight was an overreach that did very little good.
>I'm not the guy who has the golden law that will change the world. I'm just proposing that CO2 emission is a big problem and some of the people are exploiting it.
Which I get - however the problem with your comment (and much of the internet as a whole) is that people see a complex problem and toss out a twitter sized "obvious solution" to it without any actual thought behind it, this then causes all kinds of noise with very little signal and furthers divides. Just by replying to you some other person suggested I was "triggered" and must be on said list... That's the problem.
Not sure why you're so deeply triggered by this; is your name on that list of top consumers that you would be personally affected?
Your comment comes across as yet another average joe randomly defending billionaires wrecking the world while we take the consequences of it. Meanwhile yet another daily disaster in nature, 100s of dolphins are dead today from record temperatures https://www.insider.com/dolphins-dead-brazil-amazon-lake-rec...
>Not sure why you're so deeply triggered by this; is your name on that list that you would be personally affected?
Your only response to someone finding this a gross overreach is to try and strawman them by suggesting I'm personally on the list?
I'm not defending billionaires any more than I'm defending an average person. Going down the road suggested (putting yearly or lifetime caps on how much CO2 you can produce) is frankly terrifying.
Tax the hell out of the fuel, charge larger landing fees, etc etc are all better options than having some sort of invisible countdown over everyone's head that for CO2 emissions.
Maybe the disconnect here is a misunderstanding of how much wealth billionaires have. We could increase fuel tax by 1000x, increase landing fees by 1000x, and this would not even begin to give billionaires pause on waste and excess flying.
The average person will be priced out by taxes and increased fees far long before any mega wealthy person will even feel it as a stiff breeze against their accounts.
Or maybe the disconnect is on the other side of the coin, let's say every billionaire on that list did zero flights next year - how much of a reduction in the US CO2 emissions does that actually result in. Does it equate in any meaningful (statistically) way or does it just make people like yourself "feel" better?
> Your comment comes across as yet another average joe randomly defending billionaires wrecking the world while we take the consequences of it.
This is so painfully, hilariously wrong that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You could vaporize all billionaires in the world and it wouldn’t make any detectable difference to climate change.
In the same way that vaporizing vicious dictators--subtracting how many people they personally killed by their own hands--would have no detectable difference to global murder rate.
This specific idea of limiting CO2 is being taken a bit too out of context of the broader point. Sanctions against Russia hasn't stopped the murder, any more than limiting individual CO2 consumption would stop climate change. Yet both are correct actions because they are steps in the direction of fixing larger issues.
These rules would not effect the truely rich. It would turn into a burden or inconvenience for the masses while the elite have loopholes or ways around the system.
Instead of this petty, divisive and hostile nonsense, how about we just acknowledge that our civilization is fundamentally based on energy use, and work towards making all our energy use carbon-neutral?
Our planet receives enough harnessable solar energy to allow every single human being an energy allocation far in excess of a typical American.
There's absolutely no need to be hostile towards other people's energy use. Advocate for fundamental change, not petty ineffectual bullshit.
> Our planet receives enough harnessable solar energy to allow every single human being an energy allocation far in excess of a typical American.
Yes, but is it currently being harvested? Do we have a plausible path towards that future?
> There's absolutely no need to be hostile towards other people's energy use.
No, but there's a dire need to properly account for the externalities of everybody's CO2 emissions if we want to be able to plausibly call our economy market-based.
The ability to restrict something doesn't imply it's ideal to restrict that thing. Some people should use more CO2, just like some people should go to space, or some people should be lawyer.
The idea that some people will use more of a resource than another doesn't imply it's ideal to have no limit whatsoever on its usage either though; there might be some amount of CO2 that's unreasonable for a single person to use, just like having different professions being useful doesn't mean that every possible profession (like murder for hire) should be allowed.
Sure, but it's important to put that in the context of the vast majority of the world's population who never fly, me who flies maybe three times a year, and people who flight weekly or more for the purpose of entertainment or a luxury lifestyle.
Make it progressively more expensive to fly more miles to moderate the excesses; offer tax breaks where it is beneficial for the entire community.
This can be adapted into different scenarios or use cases. At least it could be the first action into the CO2 emission problem that everybody is complaining about but nobody really does a thing. Well, also maybe we can let Kim Kardashian to have Zoom calls rather than taking flights.
I think it could make sense: scientists are probably able to compute a total quantity of CO2 that we can emit worldwide to achieve some climatic goals (like not being f* too badly too quickly). Then divide this total by number of inhabitant of this world and limit yearly individual emissions to that.
Then you don't have to track for everyone, just target those who are ostensibly breaking the limit.
"Sorry, the president of country X cant come to UN and discuss a ceasefire because he already ysed up all his emissions so the war has to keep going until the next CO2 reset"
There are multiple ways to travel. You can have a bike to commute into work rather than taking your car. This is not a freedom limitation. It is just a different perspective. Greta Thunberg travels everywhere freely by keeping emission in mind.
Just tax externalities and let people pay for the privilege. Banning things - literally using the force of the state to prevent traveling too often by plane or banning cars or making everyone ride bikes - is only a green fantasy, and a terrible authoritarian unworkable one.
Private jet owners won't be the targets of such laws: luxury car are excluded from the future oil engine ban in the EU, and private jets aren't subjected to the recent law forbidding short distance domestic airlines in France.
That kind of ideas is parroted by people would be the first to suffer, while the "elite" will of course be exempted to comply. This is yet another power grab for the happy few.
What is the penalty for exceeding said limit in your fantasy?
edit
Just out of curiosity I took what seems to be the "average" of the reported number of billionaires in America as 800, and the average yearly CO2 from flying via the linked article at a high point of also say 800 tons (which is likely high but easy math). That works out to 640000 tons of CO2 from all the billionaires flying around in a year.
Another quick search on how much CO2 is produced in the USA per year came out as 5.2 billion metric tons.
That means these flights are accounting for 0.0123076923% of the USA's CO2 production ... or put another way it's a rounding error.