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525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

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Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#61

Post by fuzzbazz »

phatfish wrote: post #35
tristor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All aviation, altogether, private jets inclusive, is less than 3% of world emissions. Getting people fired up about rich people using private jets is just a distraction from the truth in the same way that paper straws are. The reality is that a small handful of industries generate the majority of pollution, and they have no meaningful regulatory pressure to stop, and that even that mostly pales in comparison to the e…

Why dismiss it as a distraction? Every positive action is a step in the right direction to help keep the planet in a liveable condition. I'm happy if restricting single use plastic like plastic straws helps even a small amount to reduce plastic pollution. If i can put up with a soggy straw after 15 mins in a drink, the ultra rich can fly 1st class more often.

> PFAS were found in the majority of the straws tested and were most common in those made from paper and bamboo, found the study, published in Food Additives & Contaminants. [1]

I would prefer not to consume this with my drink [2].

Not every seemingly positive action is actually positive. Second order effects must be always considered.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-08-paper-straws-environment-plast...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#62

Post by jtriangle »

Lots of comments in that thread more or less saying "The drive back to LA would be the same time as the flight"...

These people have never left Vegas on a Sunday and it shows. That drive is 4 hours, without traffic. With traffic it's an easy 7, I've heard of it being as high as 13. So yeah, if you've got a jet, and the money to fly it, I'd say that you can probably justify using it here, it's like half the time.

Though, even flying commercial would save almost the same amount of time, you might pick up an extra hour, much more waiting around, but, beats being stuck in the middle of BFE in traffic.

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#63

Post by saintfire »

baggy_trough wrote: post #22
avgcorrection wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people cause climate change by architecting society (just look around). Their private jets don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

What does that mean?

I would assume by making decisions that push people towards technologies or lifestyles that have massive negative externalities but high profits (e.g. Car culture, unrepairable technology) or lobby for businesses/laws that are net negative for society (e.g. Oil & Gas, Pollution regulations for farming, energy and manufacturing).

The private jet attention I think is perfectly valid but is akin to blaming people for their "carbon footprint" when much of that footprint is a choice made on your behalf by not providing/burying alternatives and subsidizing polluters.

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#64

Post by jjtheblunt »

autoexec wrote: post #57
jjtheblunt wrote: post #41

I'm wondering if this stat is calculated correctly, because there's not room for 525 private jets to be sitting around at once there, let alone in the giant airplane parking lots in Arizona.

a random redditor who didn't link to a source said that they could accommodate 475 parked jets, and that the others flew in from other airports to drop off/pick up their passenger and immediately left

yeah i was going to say pick ups staged at other airports would be possible. i saw the random reddit stuff too but still...it's got to be, if that is a count of departures, that they left off the arrivals that didn't stay.

i mean that's like O'Hare raised to the ATL exponent, as stated.

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#65

Post by alephxyz »

kiba wrote: post #20
tristor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All aviation, altogether, private jets inclusive, is less than 3% of world emissions. Getting people fired up about rich people using private jets is just a distraction from the truth in the same way that paper straws are. The reality is that a small handful of industries generate the majority of pollution, and they have no meaningful regulatory pressure to stop, and that even that mostly pales in comparison to the e…

I rather that aviation contributes 1.5% instead of 3%. Of course, industries that pollute more should work harder to reduce their pollution. Rather than banning private jet, we could ask that private jet uses only carbon neutral fuels, since they could afford it. However, it might cause rich people to pollute more by using their cars instead of flying, so there's a balancing act.

> However, it might cause rich people to pollute more by using their cars instead of flying, so there's a balancing act.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel is ~$1/liter vs ~$.5 for regular fuel. For a "big" Global 7500 that burns 2kL/hr the markup is $1k/hr on a plane that usually costs $15-20k/hr to rent.

Doesn't seem like a big markup for people who care about their public image.

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#66

Post by xscott »

tristor wrote: post #4
andy_ppp wrote: post #3

Anyone else think banning private jets would be generally a much better thing for climate? I find it pretty shocking the rich are allowed to pollute the way they do.

All aviation, altogether, private jets inclusive, is less than 3% of world emissions. Getting people fired up about rich people using private jets is just a distraction from the truth in the same way that paper straws are. The reality is that a small handful of industries generate the majority of pollution, and they have no meaningful regulatory pressure to stop, and that even that mostly pales in comparison to the e…

> The reality is that a small handful of industries generate the majority of pollution

You can pick your pie chart, and they'll all be a bit different based on the categories they choose. I like this one from 2016 because, even though it's 8 years old, it seems to have all the sectors:

https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

If you want to get to zero emissions, you have to replace or remove all of these:

    Iron and Steel:            7.2%
    Road Transport:           11.9%
    Aviation Transport:        1.7%
    Commercial Buildings:      6.6%
    Residential Buildings:    10.9%
    Cement:                    3.0%
Those are all small percentages. There's really no one thing you can eliminate to solve the majority of the problem.

If you went by broader strokes, let's say you get rid of:

    ALL of Industry:          29.4%
    ALL of Transportation:    16.2%
    ALL energy for buildings: 17.5%
    ALL agriculture:          18.4%
So at that point, we're basically back in the stone age and the various waste categories will be zero too. But then you'd have 8 billion people huddling around fire pits, which isn't zero emission either.

If anyone is inclined to find another pie chart to contradict this one, make sure it's not focused on the emissions in just one tiny sector. We can say that everyone should have electric cars because ICEs are 99% of vehicle emissions, but fixing 99% of 11.9% of the total problem isn't going to solve the total problem.

There isn't a silver bullet for this.

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#67

Post by timeon »

DangerousPie wrote: post #43
phatfish wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dismiss it as a distraction? Every positive action is a step in the right direction to help keep the planet in a liveable condition. I'm happy if restricting single use plastic like plastic straws helps even a small amount to reduce plastic pollution. If i can put up with a soggy straw after 15 mins in a drink, the ultra rich can fly 1st class more often.

You wouldn't have to put up with a soggy straw if we tackled the real problems instead.

I don't as I do not us straws at all. Point of banning plastic ones was not to create paper ones.

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#68

Post by ginko »

jtriangle wrote: post #62

Lots of comments in that thread more or less saying "The drive back to LA would be the same time as the flight"... These people have never left Vegas on a Sunday and it shows. That drive is 4 hours, without traffic. With traffic it's an easy 7, I've heard of it being as high as 13. So yeah, if you've got a jet, and the money to fly it, I'd say that you can probably justify using it here, it's like half the time. Thou…

If they wanted to travel to/from LA in style they could have also done this:

https://www.amtrak.com/charter-your-private-train

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#69

Post by wang_li »

maxglute wrote: post #34
tristor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All aviation, altogether, private jets inclusive, is less than 3% of world emissions. Getting people fired up about rich people using private jets is just a distraction from the truth in the same way that paper straws are. The reality is that a small handful of industries generate the majority of pollution, and they have no meaningful regulatory pressure to stop, and that even that mostly pales in comparison to the e…

Nigeria, with 210m people, share of global emissions is 0.23%. Indonesia 270m 1.5% Pakistan 210m 0.9% Brazil 210m 1.2% Bangladesh 160m 0.4% Thats the 5 most populous countries after india, prc, us.

[flagged]

Re: 525 Private jets departed Las Vegas after the Super Bowl ended

#70

Post by jdminhbg »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #14
probably_wrong wrote: post #2

The title is missing a "525" at the beginning - this was probably auto-removed but in this case I'd argue it should be brought back.

It's the perfect symbol of Hacker News and Silicon Valley culture, overconfidence in using technology to automate something but making it worse in the big picture.

This is the perfect example of a middlebrow dismissal. Something fails in one instance, and it results in a confident dismissal of the entire system.
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