Today was a fasting day.
Sasha was on her way from Toulouse to Mexico today via London and New York (which is the shortest route) when she was confronted with the down side of ultra low cost flights. As she was about to get on to the flight from London to New York there was an announcement to say that as the company had just gone bust all flight were cancelled. The combination of capitalism and the internet allows us to find amazingly cheap deals on all sorts of goods and services but this can have negative aspects. In my lifetime passenger numbers have gone from 100 Million to 4 Billion per year. If (or when) the rest of the world flew as much as the US does today that would be 30 billion flights (that's a lot of CO2 released in the atmosphere). As always with these kind of issues I find myself confronted with a limited number of realistic solutions:
Sasha was on her way from Toulouse to Mexico today via London and New York (which is the shortest route) when she was confronted with the down side of ultra low cost flights. As she was about to get on to the flight from London to New York there was an announcement to say that as the company had just gone bust all flight were cancelled. The combination of capitalism and the internet allows us to find amazingly cheap deals on all sorts of goods and services but this can have negative aspects. In my lifetime passenger numbers have gone from 100 Million to 4 Billion per year. If (or when) the rest of the world flew as much as the US does today that would be 30 billion flights (that's a lot of CO2 released in the atmosphere). As always with these kind of issues I find myself confronted with a limited number of realistic solutions:
- Introduce regulation to make flights much more expensive which would limit the number of people who could fly on them. (Not very democratic or fair to people with limited means)
- Introduce worldwide rationing of airline tickets with a lottery system for allocating tickets.
- Hope that technology will solve the pollution problem (clean planes, faster boats, tele-transportation).
I can't see other options. But would happy to listen to outside the box thinking.
PS: The travel agency managed to get Sasha on a different plane which means she lost a few hours but will still make her destination with all required stops and at no extra cost!
PS: The travel agency managed to get Sasha on a different plane which means she lost a few hours but will still make her destination with all required stops and at no extra cost!
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