Air Travel Emissions

No, this is a proposal to make people feel good. Most transportation emissions are from cars, not planes. It is fairly pointless to limit air travel if you actually want to achieve something. It doesn’t matter if you do something worse, like travel by boat. As long as people see less planes in the sky, they’re happy. And their happiness is all that matters for those who want to maintain the status quo.

Not a terrible idea. Four seems low, and I have no idea how they arrived at that exact number, but in principle plane travel is one of the most inexpensive and time-efficient ways an average person can release tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I mean, we ban drinking straws and fret about the environmental cost of electric cars, but really the biggest impact on the environment an average person could have would be to fly less.

People fly all the time, that's also bad for the environment. Don't do it...

per passenger-mile, flying is much less polluting than driving a car, even after you account for the fact that pollution in the stratosphere is more damaging. If getting rid of air travel results in more people driving across the country, that makes the greenhouse worse.In terms of absolute consumption, yes it would be great if people stopped spending so much on things that are damaging the environment... but it would be FAR better to instead spend money on renewable energy and electric cars

Why be especially drastic on air travel when its 2% of carbon emissions, per Huffpost?

One decent flight is more than pretty much everything else combined, people forget this far too much. Most of the people that try to offset their footprint are the same damn people that feel the need to fly around the world every couple of years.For lack of a more credible source,http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/sep/09/car

Sacrificing 10% of your life to air travel, plus massive fuel waste, doesn't sound nice

Indeed, commercial aviation is only something like 3% of overall carbon dioxide emissions globally. If you want to make a personal difference you would be an order of magnitude more effective if you stop commuting in a non-electric car or gave up consuming meat when dining in restaurants. Expecting individual action to fix this (or worse, blaming individual actions for it) isn't going to work though. Individual consumption is not the majority source of emissions, and it's a bit of a cl

I recall an article comparing CO2 emissions of private jets verses commercial airlines a couple of years back. A bunch of assumptions were made, but the rough figure was five times higher per passenger mile. When you consider that people who use private jets are likely flying more than those who use commercial airlines, and that individuals are being asked to make sacrifices for the sake of reducing CO2 emissions, then yes it is consequential.

Considering the need to lower our carbon footprint and the massive amount of fuel spent in subsonic air travel, this seems wrongish.