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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I'm all for taxing and regulating the hell out of these totally unneeded luxuries, but air travel is 2% of global emissions, and private jets are 2% of that. They are a pure luxury, and so are a good target for emissions reduction, but this would be just one of hundreds of similarly-sized initiatives needed to move the needle at this point. It's also not a "soft target" since we'd have to take something away from the rich that they like, which costs a lot of time and political capital that then can't be used elsewhere, perhaps to greater impact.
Political capital is more like muscle than a one-shot battery: it gets stronger when you use it in ways that have public support.
Point well taken, but I'd say getting the US Congress to agree to things that inconvenience the rich might be an exception. I really wish we could get the ball rolling on that in a self-sustaining, self-amplifying way that compounded to larger and larger changes and more and more public support. But that just isn't how my government has worked in my lifetime in my experience.