Private jets are awful for the climate. It’s time to tax the rich who fly in them | US Senator Edward J Markey
Private jets are awful for the climate. It’s time to tax the rich who fly in them | US Senator Edward J Markey
Private flights pollute up to 14 times more than commercial ones – yet are taxed less. Let’s change that
Holy shit, somebody is actually pointing their finger at the right people!
I can't believe he's not talking about drinking straws or plastic bags or some other laughable distraction.
51That's Markey for you.
10Kind of.
I mean, yes, this is good, but it's still small potatoes compared to the fact that we need UNPRECEDENTED industry-wide EMERGENCY action, starting like 20 years ago.
We're in the throws of mass-extinction. We are predicting a BILLION climate refugees. And every horrible prediction is coming true way earlier than expected.
Mass media isn't screaming about it every night, so we trick ourselves into believing it must be a manageable situation. But it simply isn't. We aren't just headed for a cliff. We've already fallen off it. We just haven't noticed because we haven't started bouncing off the sharp rocks yet.
7I don't think anyone has ever talked about drinking straws or plastic bags as having a meaningful effect on carbon emissions. Reducing their use does reduce the amount of plastic that winds up in landfills and the wilderness, which is the actual point of those proposals.
From some quick data I found, aviation is responsible for 2.5% of carbon emissions. In the US, about 17% of flights are private. Probably a fair number of those are hobbiests, but even if you take that number at face value, you could summarily execute all people who take private jets, and you'd reduce carbon emissions by about 0.425 percent. I'm skeptical that that is going to really make a massive difference in the grand scheme of things.
6
Carbon tax. We needed it 20 years ago but even more now. Ironically a Republican idea that has been ignored for years.
23Right. There's no reason why private jets shouldn't be paying to offset 100% of their emissions. For cars it's a different story because it's a tax on the poor for something they need. Private jets are purely luxuries, only used by the wealthy, and have a viable alternative.
9I'm 100% in favor.
My preferred solution is to tax carbon, and redistribute it as a tax credit/stimulus evenly to the population. I like that better than treating it as normal income so it stays focused on being a Piguovian Tax and not repurposed as a general revenue source.
But honestly, I'm in favor of pretty much any carbon tax initiative.
3
We've sort of gone beyond the taxation phase, in my humble opinion. The world is on fire. It's really time for more drastic moves and we can't afford to keep coddling the wealthy.
13This is the best summary I could come up with:
At the moment, billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are getting a bargain, paying less in taxes each year to fly private and contribute more pollution than millions of drivers combined on the roads below.
For the sake of our environment, it is time to ground these fat cats and make them pay their fair share, so that we can invest in building the energy-efficient and clean public transportation that our economy and communities across the country desperately need.
We cannot continue to ask frontline communities – disproportionately low-income, rural, immigrant, Black and brown Americans who are bearing the weight of the climate crisis – to subsidize billionaires jet-setting the globe.
The revenue generated by the Fatcat Act would be transferred to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund and a newly created federal Clean Communities Trust Fund to support air monitoring for environmental justice communities and long-term investments in clean, affordable public transportation across the country – including passenger rail and bus routes near commercial airports.
If Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless Wall Street hedge fund managers want to fly private jets, the least they can do is pay their fair share in taxes to compensate for the damage to our environment and the wear on our infrastructure.
It’s unconscionable that they be allowed to continue to pay pennies on the dollar to pollute our environment as Americans suffer through the hottest days in an estimated 125,000 years.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
13Yeah, but tell me how I need to drive my Prius to the grocery store less.
12her response is insanely tone-deaf too lol
"Well, no one can be perfect". 100% true, but everyone can choose to not fly in a private plane lol
7
I will be contacting my representatives about this
4Frequent flyer tax plz
2Yes, tax them to the bone.
1Did someone say that my million dollar plane will cost another million dollars to operate? Oh noes, I can't...LOL - it's just money; I found 2 millions by raising the price of my apartments by $100 a month. Enjoy your new rent, proles!
1Guess we should just do nothing then.
3
tax the living shit out of them
1Skip the tax go straight to execution
-1No....taxing them doesnt get rid of them. Rich people have plenty of money to pay fees/fines/penalties. That being said, there is no reason for overly draconian measures either. This climate thing is a tad oversold. Sensible, affordable solutions that dont wreck our way of life can work. Nothing more than that.
-8