Originally Posted by
172_driver
I am divided. While it directly affects my trade, I am sick to the bone of the notion of continuous growth. I am the first to declare war on coal power, fast fashion, upgrading to the latest tech devices every 2 year, huge ship cruises etc. Why should I be any different on "summer holidays".
Just because this would go against current treaties doesn't make it entirely wrong. Slowly dismantle it while the industry becomes genuinely green is a reasonable solution? And yes, I understand every party, every country, has to pull their weight. Still doesn't make it entirely wrong, imo.
I can understand where you are coming from. Allow me nevertheless a different point of view.
Growth has to be seen as more output from less input, whatever that input is: resources, energy, labor, etc... That is called progress, and should never end.
We already see it, the CO2 footprint per individual is already decreasing in Europe.
Nevertheless I agree we need to get rid of fossile energy. It just doesn't make longterm sense to burn stuff as energy source. It is inefficient, polluting, and finite. But it will take time. At least politics are waking up, and new generation nuclear electricity production is coming back.
Now back to aviation: I consider aviation one of the greatest achievements in human history. It is the foundation of globalisation and therefore one of the pillars of worldwide wealth. Therefore I think we should first get rid of fossile energy wherever we have technical means to do so. Heating and aircons don't need to be fossile based. Same goes with individual traffic. Then the whole worldwide electricity production doesn't need to be fossile based either. If we decarbonize in these 3 areas, we are already a huge step further in the CO2 problem.
Aviation is only responsible for 2% of global CO2. Considering aviations value to a modern society, and the technical difficulties to make it CO2-free, I think we should give aviation some slack and focus on the big emitters, where we actually have the technology to get rid of CO2.