U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year.
Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge.
In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Global Environmental Change, pointed out.
The report, summarized in The Guardian on November 17th, drew together data to provide a global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. The conclusion reached by the study’s authors, led by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is that a tiny fraction of the global population benefits from the highly subsidized airline industry while the rest of us have to live with and pay for the huge environmental damage caused by their actions.
The authors analysis of the publicly available data points out that somewhere between two to four percent of the world’s population flew internationally in 2018 and only eleven percent of us flew at all. They further point out that roughly one percent of the world’s population emits fifty percent of the CO2 from commercial aviation.
A majority of that highly destructive, and highly subsidized, behavior is done by Americans. Although fifty-three percent of Americans didn’t fly at all in 2018, a certain class of privileged Americans seems to think ultra-mobility is an entitlement. On average, North Americans flew 50 times more kilometers than Africans in 2018.
We Americans do all of our consumption in a big way. Our aviations emissions, for example, are as big as the other ten biggest aviation CO2 emitters in the world. Nobody competes with our mega-emmissions!
The reports’ authors focused especially on the carbon foot print of frequent flier; those who flew 35,000 or more annually. These super-emitters, making up just one-percent of the global population, emit half of the aviation green house gasses.
“If you want to resolve climate change and we need to redesign [aviation], then we should start at the top, where a few ‘super emitters’ contribute massively to global warming,” Gössling said. “The rich have had far too much freedom to design the planet according to their wishes.”
Some favor taxing these elite super emitters. The revenue from the taxes could be used to improve intra-city train and bus transportation.
Gössling supports establishing mandates for the airlines to adapt green aviation fuels by 2050. Of course, money from super emitter taxes could be used to develop such fuels.
In the mean time, while we’re working on policy initiatives, we privileged Americans need to think twice before we fly.
Tim
Central Minnesota Political
By John King In Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis, standing in the lead of a long line of marchers, looked down from the crest of The Edmund Pettus Bridge at the line of police armed with clubs, whips and truncheons and said, “I am going to die here.” Lewis intended to lead the marchers from Selma to the capital Montgomery, to demand access to voting for Black people in Alabama. Sheriff Jim Clark lowered his gas mask and led the deputies, some on horseback and some on foot, into the line of marchers. Under swinging clubs and hooves trampling, Lewis was the first to go down. Women and children were not spared. Choking and blinded by tear gas, they were struck by clubs and truncheons wrapped with barbed wire. Lewis, with a fractured skull and a severe concussion, almost did die. The nearby Good Samaritan Hospital did not have enough beds to care for the injured marchers. A nation watched in horror as news footage of that bloody day appeared on T
Meanwhile, Amtrak languishes running only 3 days per week with a former airline as CEO. He's also determined that no one wants to eat in the dining car anymore (WRONG) and all meals should be boxed. This has already happened before Covid on the trains running east of the Mississippi!!!
ReplyDeleteMN350 is putting a lot of energy into electric vehicles. It should be doing that but advocating for better intra city trains would also seem to be a good project. Perhaps someone has done an analysis of Amtrak emissions or, more generally, global passenger train emissions.
DeleteI do freely admit that I have flown to Europe a couple of times in my life - but it gave me an opportunity to ride the rails over there. We rode the high-speed AVE (pronounced ah-vay, and means "wings") in Spain, the TGV in France, the ICE in Germany, and the amazingly efficient local trains around Freiberg and Basel. Of course, we loved it. But I understand that our national decision in the 1950's to develop the automobile and the airplane was based partly on a narrative that the USA is too big to rely on trains. It only took fifteen years from the beginning of the build-out of the National Defense Highway System for all of the private passenger rail companies to go bankrupt. And then there's Americans' love affair with the automobile....
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments. I'm guilty too!! Mea culpa! Do you have any information on the carbon foot print of train travel? On a separate note; jet travel for short flights (Mpls. to Chicago) is particularly dirty because they've got to get up to 25,000 feet and come right down again. I've been wondering if non-jet aircraft would emit less on these short trips.
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