tuco wrote:We all have our reasons. Perhaps it sounds offensive that I do not care but why should I? I dunno how to measure them.

felltoearth wrote:

tuco wrote:We all have our reasons. Perhaps it sounds offensive that I do not care but why should I? I dunno how to measure them.

You claim my actions are harming you, yet you don’t know how to measure them. Honest question, how do you know my actions are harming you, then?

tuco wrote:

felltoearth wrote:

tuco wrote:We all have our reasons. Perhaps it sounds offensive that I do not care but why should I? I dunno how to measure them.

You claim my actions are harming you, yet you don’t know how to measure them. Honest question, how do you know my actions are harming you, then?

No, I will highlight what I cannot measure in bold. Reasons. Pollution and consumption are more or less mesurable. You tell me that you run business and live in long distance land like I should care, for your reasons. I do not. I care about your ecological footprint because if everyone lived like you .. People have reasons for everything and nobody can measure them, thus they are irrelevant. What is relevant is a footprint, respectively something as measurable as reasons lets say future impact, as the topic title says.

Reasons for air travel thread .. full of cool stories.

Matt_B wrote:I'd think it fair to note that air travel is a major consumer of fossil fuels, and that - unlike fuel for most other forms of transport - there's very little tax on it. As such, it can be seen as something that is artificially cheap, which is in turn driving over-consumption to the detriment of the environment.

That's not to say that we should necessarily just attempt to fix the problem by driving the price up. While I'd think that I might consider taking the fourteen hour train journey from Sydney to Brisbane, if a flight were ten times the price rather than about the same, that's not an option for all destinations. There are communities that rely upon air transport that are neither particularly wealthy nor in the possession of alternatives. Certainly, here in Australia, only the major cities are served by rail; there are many outback towns where your choice is between flying for an hour or two or a three day trek across unsealed roads that can become impassable after rain.

Keep It Real wrote:I think we can guess what the dude's mentality toward AGW would be: fuck it, lets go bowling.

felltoearth wrote:There are a number of issues that challenge high speed rail in Canada.

I’m not sure about Australia but one of the challenges of high speed rail in Canada are temperature extremes. We can go from -20/25 in the winter to 30/35 in the summer. A two week to one month heat wave in the summer would adversely effect rail speed and travel time. Also temperature stress effects maintenance cycles which is more frequent.

felltoearth wrote:Cost. This cost of high speed rail due to the fact that we would be starting from scratch is enormous. All infrastructure would have to be renewed. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of land would need to be expropriated which would be difficult for about 100 km on either side of most city centres the rails would pass through (most of Southern Ontario is low density development planned around the automobile.) New stations would have to be built to accommodate the increased load. Toronto’s Union Station and Montréal’s central station could not handle the increased passenger load. As a result cost per trip would go way up which leads to the final point...

felltoearth wrote:Attitude of the average voting Canadian. As cost goes so too would the required subsidy to keep the seats full and system running. There is the attitude that travel between cities by air and rail is an elite luxury of city dwellers and shouldn’t be subsidized. Ironically, it’s the same attitude on display here from KIR and tuco, about judgement of other people and how they live, that is preventing a lot of needed public transport infrastructure from being built. We currently have about 250 Billion in public infrastructure backlog in the province that is needed to meet current demand and state of good repair. If a subsidized high speed rail line was added to that price tag it would be untenable to most Ontario voters as it would be seen as a benefit for rich city dwellers.

laklak wrote:Solar powered Zeppelins.