A society that takes climate change seriously will replace international air travel with passenger ships featuring high-speed satellite internet and spacious work areas. Little-known fact, ocean travel is 3x more energy-efficient than even rail.
People value their time. There is a reason we replaced modes of travel that require days or weeks of travel time with modes of travel that only require hours. Society and culture has been heavily optimized around the fact that it doesn't take weeks to get to where you are trying to go. The world is global and distances are long.
Few people want to be stuck on a passenger ship for weeks at a time, their objective is not to be sitting on a ship. It would make international travel completely infeasible for all but a minority. No one would be able to do simple things like visit family if it required a month or more of round-trip transit time.
Society is organized around individuals and groups working in mutual self interest. If you go against this principle to find your solution you risk backlash to your (perceived or real) tyranny.
Society is not organized around individuals and groups working in mutual self-interest. Society is organized around the interests of the wealthy. Indeed, only people who are quite well-off manage to take international flights. Immigrants I know are happy if they manage to travel back and meet their families once every 3-5 years.
These aren't luxuries, business and society is global now. Unwinding a century of globalization would impoverish many regions of the world. It isn't a mere inconvenience, it would be undoing a vast amount of economic development and progress. People aren't going to be receptive to sacrificing any hope of prosperity for them and theirs.
An argument of "but climate change" is tone deaf and not very compelling when it is you getting thrown under the bus for the Greater Good. Economic realities can't be ignored when they are inconvenient.
Unsurprising that someone who, from their bio, "splits their time between Seattle and London" is against this idea.
The economic effects of climate change will be more catastrophic than making it take longer to move internationally, something that very very few people actually have a need to do.
Nice non sequitur and evasion of an inconvenient point. I travel internationally because it is necessary, not because I particularly want to. Rather more business than you may imagine cannot be done remotely. Nonetheless, my carbon footprint is significantly lower than the average American.
Addressing climate change in anything more than a performative way will require massive increases in global industrialization, not less. Impactful eco-friendly infrastructure isn't going to build itself. Needlessly making this slower and more difficult than necessary just lends credence to the idea that climate change activists aren't serious about addressing the problem.
The promotion of non-serious solutions to climate change make it much more difficult to get by in from average people for supporting credible and substantive solutions. Which isn't helpful if the objective is to constructively address climate change.
It isn't a "non sequitur" to point out you're part of a very small class of people taking multiple international flights a year. That isn't what that term means! Anything you view as "necessary" is very unlikely to be so in the face of existential concerns. But of course, anything that derails your lifestyle just isn't serious.
There's no society on earth taking climate change as seriously as warranted if the worst projections are to be believed.
And there's no precedent for the level of global cooperation -- which would have to transcend nation-level political realities -- required for meaningful change.
I'm long on humanity. But not because I think we're all going to wake up and fix the climate in a coordinated manner.
The trouble with zeppelins is that unloading is difficult. Every lb of weight removed from the Zeppelin is another lb of lift that has to be offset. So you have to do things like pump water into the zeppelin as people or cargo disembark. Ships also face this problem to an extent (unloaded ships are unstable) but they are sitting inside a functionally infinite pool of water they can pump in & out.
Hmmm, running some rough calculations the passenger load probably wouldn't exceed about 50 tons for 500 people. Which is very doable to do with a tether. So maybe you're right! Solar-powered passenger airships could be the future. It's cargo airships I'm thinking of that really have these drawbacks.
And for a cargo zeppelin, swapping out full shipping containers for weighted ballast shipping containers seems pretty easy. Though I seriously doubt cargo zeppelins make any sense at all.
