You know, the growing focus by environmentalists on air travel is beginning to annoy me. Sure, improving awareness is always a good thing. But air travel is quite simply not something that's subject to particularly flexible demand. You either need to fly somewhere or you don't. Harassing people at the airport isn't going to change that. It's not like you can up and bike to Scotland. Sure, in Europe and the eastern seaboard of the US, you can potentially take a train instead, but a lot of times (particularly in Asia, where they said most of the growth is coming from) flying is your only logistically viable option.
It's a very different issue from other kinds of pollution. In cars, for instance, you can quite easily forego the gas-guzzling SUV you were going to buy for a car that runs on half to a third of the fuel and yet gets you where you're going just as well. As for factories, additional filtering and treatment technologies exist but may be more expensive. Alternative energy sources exist to polluting power generation technologies like coal and oil burning. Point being, there are viable alternatives out there.
For planes, that's not true. The profit crunch on airlines has pushed airline manufacturers to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of their planes (since fuel is a major cost for the airline). The 777's engines are significantly more efficient than, say, the 747's engines. It's not like somebody out there is being lazy or cheap and not bothering to improve the efficiency of the airlines. They're about as efficient as they're going to get, and there are already incentives there to squeeze whatever efficiency the engineers can muster out of them.
So...what the fuck? What is it these douchebags want? There's nothing in this particular pollution ecosystem that can really change. Moreover, it's just not that big a relative source of pollution. You're whining about 3.5%?! Even if it is growing faster than other sources, and even if we can scale back the other sources much faster than air travel, how long before it even comes close to being a significant contributor (say, 40%)? Decades? Assuming current global economic and technological trends continue for that long (not bloody likely)?
Go do something more useful with your time and stop patronizing air travelers. That's the TSA's job.
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Not to mention that the average American flies something like 2 flight segments a year. Have fund cutting that down.
"Well, Jimmy, either we don't fly to see grandma this year or we can fly there and never come back home. Which will it be?"
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