Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.
The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.
There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.
They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.
Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.
They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.
A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.
Plenty of industries have gone bankrupt over the years. They are not always bailed out, or at least not bailed out successfully. Some examples in the US: the textile industry, the furniture industry, and the slave trade. Coal is headed in the same direction because market forces (the cost of coal and pressure from environmentalists and by extension everyday consumers) are working against it.
Yes, there is no alternative to planes… some of the time. Everybody has a flight they have to catch every once in a while. But some people fly twenty times a year for pleasure, some people maybe only once a year. If you have a wedding or funeral invitation on the other side of the U.S., yeah you pretty much have to take a plane. But if you’re planning a vacation or travel to a couple states over, you absolutely do have the choice to just not fly.
Covid did not indicate a floor to air travel. As I already said, it was a situation where airlines had the choice between saving money in the short term (by stopping flights) or breaking their contracts with airports and losing money in the long term once traffic resumed. If the drop-off in travel had simply been due to permanent reduced demand for flying in general—due to, for example, people taking fewer long-distance flights for vacations due to increased concern over carbon emissions—they would have simply given up on those routes and reduced the number of flights permanently.
I was not talking about freight rail, I was talking about passenger rail. Lots of passenger rail companies went bankrupt - no consolidation, just your company went out of business because nobody wanted to take the train. I do know some sketchy shit went on to drive the nail into the coffin and lead to Amtrak but the long decline before that was due to the market forces of people having cars and wanting to use them.
Finally, yes I agree that there is no true “alternative” to airlines, nor is there a true “alternative” to consuming electricity. But, you can still choose to reduce your consumption of those things.