Flying commercial flights is similar to taking a bus in the air. Hopefully most Americans can fly private within the next 30 years. Cheap energy is the unlock! Let’s have an exciting future!

🇧🇷🇺🇸-  Book: Making Things Think: https://holloway.com/mtt. Investor in Wander, Carry, Footprint, Merkle Manufactory (Farcaster), Dynamic, Paragraph.

Flight is heavily subsidized.
Pound for pound traveling by bus is way more efficient

Subsidized how? I mean I have my own opinion as to how it’s subsidized, but I’m not sure it’s what you have in mind.

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

It's not just an opinion

https://simpleflying.com/aviation-fuel-taxation-guide/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-awards-nearly-1-billion-airports-infrastructure-grants-2023-02-27/

Right. US airports are (mostly) public utilities, so they are funded by the municipalities or states. Airlines do pay to use them (passenger and landing charges). So airports are not subsidized - they are publicly-funded infrastructure, whose usage then actually gets charged to users. #1

Jet fuel is a better example, though it’s only an indirect subsidy and only to the extent that some places don’t tax it the way they do tax other petroleum derivatives. #2

My own bigger picture take is that aviation is subsidized in the sense that only 10–15% of all humans fly, but 100% of humanity bears the cost of its negative externalities, in the form of GHG emissions and contrails (to which the sector contributes about ~3–4%). #3

If we were to factor those externalities back into the price of air tickets, it would be a $150–200 surcharge per ton of CO2.

That to me is the most important subsidy – we’re essentially asking all non-fliers and their children (as well as ours) to subsidize our tickets. #4

The embrace is not universal though. The “flight shaming” movement is very strong in northern Europe, and gaining strength in continental Europe. It’s still fairly inexistent in Asia. Not sure about the Americas

That's right, it's rather strange we emburse flying while simultaneously claiming we gotta get carbon down

In this particular example: negligible. The US (where this union consideration exists) is only ~10% of all airline flights. Non-flight ops (incl. parking/taxiing) is less than 10% of emissions. And staying on ground power could maybe save 10% of pre-departure fuel burn. So, probably on the ROM of 0.1%, give or take. #1

Be interested to know how much of that is driven by policy? Ex: you disconnect the sky bridge and switch to engine power ASAP because the union says they need to start the pilot clock. If they stayed hooked up until it was actually time to depart, you could rely on more efficient energy from the ground source.