Should We Still Fly?

This argument does make sense and makes me wonder what other reasons there are for me to avoid flying if I accept that the impact of CO2 is solvable without excessive additional costs. What comes up is :

• Not trusting the bought compensation. [This does not hold up on reflection: Given some research, I am confident that I would find trustworthy organisations such that I could be confident that the social costs are being addressed]
• The feeling that 'just paying for the costs' is only an excuse and that actually I would be defecting. [This seems to just be caused by my emotions not following the inferential steps needed to realize that 'the harm I inflict' is actually taken care of]
• Signalling to others the willingness of accepting non-trivial inconveniences when it comes to my behaviour affecting climate. [This aspect seems to be the most important. Even though not flying might not actually be a good way of having a positive influence regarding climate change, it *is* a simple and clear signal that I care about my influence on climate change.]

To conclude, I will update towards 'flying can easily be worth the CO2' and keep an eye out for alternative ways of signaling 'this topic is important to me' ('I do not fly' has the convenient properties of being i) easy to understand, ii) fast to transmit and iii) neither trivial nor too radical).

My 2 cents.

Climate is a global problem. Can only be solved by governments - and multiple governments working to solve it.

Any private action is a waste of time. And contributes to the illusion that something has been done. Which has a massive negative value.

There might be social etc effects of private actions.

Solving a global problem by tilting once own nose in some direction is laughable.

The next question is, why aren't people buying the offsetting? I seem to remembering hearing that it was once an option in most ticket purchase processes, but it must have been an unpopular choice, because the option has disappeared and now offsetting is going to be legally mandated, but apparently the legal mandate does not require enough offsetting to be done (past discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XRTiojqqJ3wrFFZAf/can-we-really-prevent-all-warming-for-less-than-10busd-with#EbEWLtgcLQXzHjzCb [LW(p) · GW(p)] )

Has there been any discussions of the carbon costs of saving lives? e.g. you save an estimated 100 lives via AMF donations, how much do you need to donate to CATF to offset that? It might help people balance the causes they care about.

Thanks for doing the math on that! That's really useful information. I was under the impression that flying was a bigger issue than those numbers suggest--I hadn't ever bothered to do the calculation myself.

One reason the low cost of carbon offsets might not make it feel okay to fly is if you're trying to think about what behaviors and habits would still be acceptable in a society that is already functioning carbon-neutrally. My intuition is that as regulations become stricter and greenhouse-gas-reducing projects need less crowdfunding, carbon offset prices will rise until they equal the cost of capturing and sequestering the CO2, which is on the order of several hundred dollars per tonne. So it's hard to imagine a future in which flying is still okay at prices even close to what they are today.