Flying is a bit unique in that there aren't really viable alternatives. It also accounts for a fairly small portion of emissions. Land transport (cars and trucks), power generation, and heating are where the big wins exist with viable alternatives.
Per person, it is reliably the single most polluting thing you will do. The reason it accounts for a "small proportion" of emissions is that most people in the world do not fly at all. Indeed, a tiny (<1% IIRC) elite of the world's population account for most of the world's flight kilometers. Flying is an absolutely unscalable form of transport in a world of 8 billion people.
It only represents a small portion of emissions because so few people fly. For the people that do fly it represents a large portion of their emissions.
It’s also the activity least likely to be decarbonised.
Of course there are alternatives, I haven’t flown on a plane since 2001.
For transport you're right. I think the parent your referring to was specifically saying there's no alternative way to power a plane. That's my assumption at least.
I was saying a bit of both. megablast is correct that there are alternatives, but I'd maybe quibble with "viable". For example you can get from Stockholm to Umeå with a 1 hour flight or a 6-8 hour train journey, is the train a viable alternative? For aviation there aren't alternative fuels and on many journeys even the alternative transport options aren't in the same ballpark.
Calling it a “1 hour flight” is a bit misleading when comparing transport options. The relevant number is door-to-door travel time.
Once you include getting out of Stockholm to the airport, security, boarding, the flight itself, possible baggage collection, and the trip into Umeå, I would be surprised if the total were much below 4 hours. Comparable German domestic flights such as Hamburg–Munich usually took me around 4–4.5 hours in practice in the past when traveling for work before the pandemic.
That makes the train a 6–8 hour alternative to a roughly 4-hour flight journey. Whether that is viable depends on the traveller, but it is certainly more competitive than “1 hour versus 8 hours” suggests.
I admit that for me, living about an hour north of the Hamburg main station but only 15 minutes from the airport, the plance for a business trip in Munich can still be a viable (albeit seldom taken) option. More often than not, if time permits, I take the train, work on the train. But as said - there still are situations, that make flying such a distance viable (to me).
I just wanted to point out, that it is not as clear cut as 1 hour vs. 6 to 8 hours.
In the UK I could get from Central London to Central Glasgow in 4.5 hours on the train. The same trip on a flight, it takes an hour to get the airport (assuming it's not one of the budget airlines pretending Essex or Bedfordshire is London...), I need to be there 2 hours before (maybe less is you are brave and Security isn't messed up) the flight takes an hour and then I have to get out of the airport and find my way from Paisley back to Glasgow Central.
Of course there are a lot of variables, if instead I leave from my house the aircraft would actually be faster, mostly due to the extra time it takes to get to Central London and from Waterloo to Euston.
In reality we usually drive in about 6-8 hours because, as a family of 4 traveling, it's considerably cheaper even before you take into account having transport on the other end.
I'd say that 4-6 hours is often the cut-off point for total travel time city-to-city -- provided that the train is fast.
I and a friend once started at Stockholm Central station to Malmö Central Station at the same time. I boarded a bullet train; he took the bus to the airport ...
We arrived at the same time six hours later.
I've been looking at travel in Japan recently. Between Hiroshima and Tokyo, the bullet train (fast Shinkansen) and flight are both about four hours.
A bullet train is much more comfortable than flight within these limits because there are so fewer steps: no travel to/from airport, fewer tickets to book and often no check-in or security checkpoint.
Yeah fair, having experienced Japanese trains I fully agree about the comfort. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't build high speed rail and try to shift more travel to trains instead of aviation either to be clear. I love trains and I especially love Shinkansen style trains, but aviation still has a big edge in big parts of the world and on some journey lengths.
Even if some high speed rail existed in the US, do you think it is practical to go from California to Maine? If you are going 2,500 miles on a train that is going 150 miles an hour it would take you 16 hours assuming there are no stops. Obviously there are going to be stops so your trip is going to be an entire day.
I think a lot of people do not understand just how massive the US is.
You are correct, most people who were trying to get from California to Maine or the reverse for the purpose of getting there would probably prefer to fly. Unless a ticket were significantly cheaper than air travel almost everyone doing the full trip has at least one train enthusiast in their party who is doing it because they want to do it.
The thing is, a high speed corridor enabling that trip would, as you note, involve many stops of which each pairing represents another potential flight that the same train might replace. Many of those pairings will be short enough flights that a proper high speed rail corridor would easily compete with if not destroy the short-haul flight offerings.
To use your example, it looks like there are currently two flights between California and Maine, both run weekly by United between PWM and either LAX or SFO flying east on Saturday mornings and returning west on Sunday morning. A hypothetical high speed rail corridor connecting coast-to-coast between either of those city pairs might not replace a lot of flights across the whole country but one train running along that full route might have replaced one from Portland to Buffalo, another from Boston to Columbus, another from Cleveland to St. Louis, et cetera.
The person I was responding to was saying that Europe and Asia have alternatives so it is wrong to say that flying has no viable alternatives. I was pointing out that some routes in the US are just not viable.
Sure some routes could have viable alternatives, but others just do not.
For short trips. Most plane trips are at a distance where there isn't a viable alternative. Sure there are some nice trains that can handle the more common trips, but airplanes really shine for much longer trips.
And planes go to more places than trains do. You want to add a new destination? Go through a few years of planning and construction for a couple thousand feet of tarmac, and people can go there using existing planes. Best of all, you don't need a large passenger base to justify the expense.
For rail? You're looking at an order of magnitude more for planning and construction, all new infrastructure, all new rail stock. It will take a much larger passenger base to justify the expense and effort.
Airplanes don't just shine for longer trips. There have been some interesting developments with commuter airplanes that are either all electric or hybrid with a 200-plus-mile range. If they are as energy efficient as they promise to be, we could see a resurgence in municipal airports for transportation between regional centers where rail is either unavailable or excessively expensive.
OTOH, there's a lot of stuff that is far more feasibly moved on the Earth's surface rather than in flight. So some sort of surface-level infrastructure will be required: highways, railroads, canals, rivers, oceans.
Some of those are amenable to high-speed variants, some less so. And once you've established transport corridors, much of the hard part (rights-of-way acquisition) is accomplished, so that adding a high-speed route becomes far more tractable.
For the most part, actual construction costs are fairly modest, modulo bridges and tunnels, both of which can of course be quite expensive.
Good points. I think that running rail parallel to highways, especially if the rail can travel twice to three times as fast as road traffic, is a good plan.
I think increasing the viability of travel between smaller airports is a good thing for those times when you don't want to spend a lot of time traveling or waiting for a transit vehicle. If the equivalent of micromobility air travel comes to fruition, you'll see two- or three-person vehicles that get up and go when someone wants a ride. Another benefit could be the airport-to-airport delivery of packages with different-sized drone craft and autonomous navigation.
if people prefer flying even if alternatives exist, like what's going on in Europe and Asia, then the alternatives aren't good enough -- price, convenience, availability, comfort, whatever reasons.
There are plenty of alternatives. Most importantly: traveling locally. Nobody needs to visit 30 countries by 30 years old or whatever dumb social media excuses they have.
Air travel is a very recent modern invention(1960s, at least for everyday folk) and people act like flying around the world is a right.
Modern capitalism is an excess machine and it'll feed us constant excuses for why our reasons are valid. Air travel is a great example. Travel and tourism are seen as "musts" by people nowadays. It's insane how destructive and unnecessary it is. It's wild how entitled everyone is nowadays. I'll happily take down votes for calling out the insane excess that we have nowadays. We're killing ourselves one funco pop at a time and we all deserve that funco pop according to the latest excuse(won't someone blame the rich!!!)
Even if you are correct, in practice there's no way to put this particularly genie back in the bottle. It's the same as trying to argue that we should solve our energy problems by asking people to consume less energy. Outside of some climate dictatorship, it's not happening.
Also, on travel, I think there's a lot to be said for the value of travel and being exposed to other cultures and societies. "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness[..]" and all that.
I believe climate dictatorship will come already this century if our decarbonisation efforts stay as weak as they are. It won't be under that name though. One sufficient policy would be to price everything in money + co2 equivalent currency. Every person in a country gets a certain co2 currency budget per year. Pretty simple actually (yeah yeah, the small print will still be long but the gist is simple).
> One sufficient policy would be to price everything in money + co2 equivalent currency. Every person in a country gets a certain co2 currency budget per year. Pretty simple actually (yeah yeah, the small print will still be long but the gist is simple).
Just having a carbon tax, that accurately prices the cost of carbon, is enough. It's one of the few taxes that has broad support among economists. However in a democracy like the US I don't see how it ever gets implemented and even if it does, it will get ripped up 2-4 years later.
> People who complain about aviation do more harm than good.
I find this a bit hard to swallow. It speaks to a sense of impunity wrt emissions for a demographic that very arguably drives much of the rest of the way energy is consumed. It is one of many choice this demographic has the privelage of making, in contrast to much of the rest of the population.
Have you ever met a coal or oil exec who was shy about flying? If anything, the latter would no doubt lobby hard against efforts to reign in flights, as it's directly tied to the interests of their industry.
Hard to tell what you're specifically bothered by - is it a focus on emissions that aren't specifically fossil fuels burned for electricity, or "shame, shame garbage", as you put it?
In either case, I think we can be expected to walk and chew gum; to see every source of emissions as its own individual problem (scaled to proportion, ofc) AND recognize that they inevitably feed into each other. To do less is counterproductive, IMO.
Except this isn't happening. Oil is subsidised (and not just by the constant action for the last 50 years to keep oil flowing from the middle east), and has been for decades. Even coal is subsidised in the US
Renewables are increasingly banned in the US.
I agree the nonsense about the tree botherers saying "we need to be vegetarian and use no more than 1kWh a day of energy" are twats that do more harm than good, but the US specifically has an agenda against renewable energy, presumably because it's not the subscription model that the US loves. You buy your solar panel and it works for decades. You buy a gallon of gas and you're back the next day to buy it again.
And above all too quickly. Per kilometer, flying is roughly as polluting as driving, but nobody would think to drive across a continent to go to the beach.
Yes they would. That's why we get massive queues for alpine crossings during European holidays – German and Dutch tourists trying to get to the beaches in Italy.
Track utilisation is limited by a number of factors, including headways, much of which is governed by stopping distance.
I believe a general minimum practical headway allows about 10--12 trainsets per hour on a given track. At 400 passengers/trainset, that's roughly 4,000 to 4,800 passengers/hour, per track.
That compares with about 1,500 vehicles/hour per highway lane, or about 2,550 passengers/hour at the U.S. average of 1.7 passengers/vehicle.
I've seen some suggestion that headways could be reduced to 3--4 minutes, or 15--20 trainsets/hour. I know that some urban rapid transit systems (e.g., BART in San Francisco) achieve this, but only on a small section of the system (Colma to Oakland, transiting downtown SF, IIRC). Train speeds there peak at 70 MPH, and I believe are much slower for most of this portion of track.
Yes, let's make things more expensive, cause we experts know best. That poor guy that needs to attend a family funeral, he's a loser that should stay home. Inflation for the Win!
Ideally making polluting activities more expensive would go hand in hand with reducing inequality - so people could still afford needs like going to a funeral. A great example of this is Canada's Carbon Fee & Dividend system.
Does he really "need" it though ? For thousands of years people didn't travel shi fast to attend funerals (they only did it locally), where they less happy about it ?
and according to the article the last record was 200k planes per day on june 29 2025, while july 23rd had more than 280k - so while efficiency may be going up (how many of those 280k planes are in the modern 100-120mpg range?) total flights are as well. Result: total emissions are steadily increasing.
I think the way airline tickets are priced is a big factor, and needs to change.
It is often cheaper to take a connecting flight to an airport and flying from there than to start from that airport.
That disincentivises taking a low-carbon-emission train to the airport and experiencing more of (and spending more in) the city near the airport than just its airport.
Often, for longer flights, the more stops, the cheaper the total ticket gets. Planes consume more fuel at take-off and landing, making the the carbon footprint increase with these cheaper tickets. And the more you fly, the more points you get that could pay for more flights.
It should be the other way around: air-travel carbon tax should be progressive. You should pay more each time if you fly more often. That would reduce the number of flights in total while still allowing everyone to take that "trip of a life-time".
But the bureaucrats and NGO employees who tell the rest of how to live will still be able to take unlimited flights to climate change conferences, right?
I guess if you are really serious about saving the planet from airplanes, you could start a network of similar-feeling folks and begin randomly bombing enough flights to terrify the world into not flying.
Give yourself an edgy name, like the Children of Kali, to make it stick.
Honestly, if you think the stakes are that high then you implicate yourself with anything but fully committed action. Anything less, and you just seem preachy and screechy.
PS: It's a book called The Ministry of the Future. Try reading once in a while. Whoosh.
I recently read Days of Rage about the various groups committing political violence during the 60s and 70s. Weatherman, Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, etc.
I don't know if there was really a 'message' more than just reporting what 'happened'. But, I have to say I came away with the idea that that kind of political violence is futile. Non-violent political action seemed to have MUCH more beneficial action than any bomb. (of course it wasn't as clear-cut between non-violent groups and revolutionary groups at the time)
Maybe thats only because I just read the ONE book.
The general impression from talking to people who live then (I was a baby in the 1970s so I knew/know a fair number). The violent groups were looked on as weird or kids who needed to grow up - they were ignored for the most part other than cheering on what the police did.
There is a reason Rosa Parks was chosen to start the bus boycott - she comes off as "just like me" to the average person. Thus when she couldn't take it anymore the rest of America didn't write her off.
A famous paper argued that, from 1960 to 2006, nonviolent resistance was twice as likely as violent resistance to achieve its goal: it's a paper that most activists I've ever met had heard of. The reasons are largely the perception of violent resistance by the bystanders, meaning the population.
However, there have been a number of criticisms to the paper about data coding, methodology, and interpretation/motivated reasoning. Recently, the author has also acknowledged that governments have adapted since 2006: her data says nonviolent resistance is still more effective, but that the success rate has cratered.
I tried to find some of the criticisms, but it's recent, so all AI generated, so I won't link before reading, but the criticisms I'm aware of I think are robust. All this to say, the idea that nonviolent resistance is more effective is comfortable and feels better, and there is a paper that says so, but your examples and those of a child comment are not about resistance to armed colonial oppression and it's not enough to form a blanket opinion about violent resistance.
Different periods have seen different modes of action.
There was a tremendous amount of violence in the labour movement from the late 18th through mid-20th centuries, including numerous armed conflicts. This was perpetrated by both sides, though my sense is that capital was somewhat more prone to exacting violence on labour than vice versa.
The ANTIFA movement of the 1930s--1940s was a worldwide violent struggle, which ultimately proved effective. Nonviolent movements (say, the White Rose resistance in Germany) proved utterly ineffectual. It's useful to remember Gandhi's observation that ahimsa is predicated on an opponent with a conscience which can be shamed. That wasn't the case against Nazi Germany.
Civil rights, across multiple jurisdictions, has seen both violent and non-violent movements. The US civil rights movement of the 1960s is often seen as offering White America a choice between MLK's non-violent movement and the far more radical path pursued by the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and others.
That is a terrible way to get the necessary support for climate action and would be actively harmful to the cause.
This argument has been made so often and in so much detail that I’m surprised to still see people suggest climate terrorism in, presumably, good faith.
For what it is worth: in the novel, the point of bombing planes is not to get popular support for climate action, but to make it risky enough that people just stop taking planes.