I posted on Deep Adaptation that I have a deep suspicion that the airline companies are systematically undercutting the train companies in Europe.
Also posted my frustration that airline tickets seem to be getting unnaturally cheap, all the while planetary resources are being depleted and it would seem more appropriate for them to be getting more expensive.
This is my original post which you can look up if you join the DA group (and then you can follow the comments.):
#rant How are airline ticket prices so cheap? Seems like the prices are totally backwards in keeping with planetary situation; ecological limitations. I’m thinking it must be some predatory pricing or something. It’s hard to listen to people talk about how they’re going here and there all over the place and how cheap the tickets are. Very sickening.
I feel the same about all this trashy consumer junk that’s sold online. How can it be that it is getting cheaper??? < horror, crying, and anger emojis.>
It’s really sickening. In the 1980s, when I had what I considered my fair lifetime allotment of Europe travel (a five-week trip around England, Wales, and Scotland, including 2-week stay in London), trains were the main mode of transport in UK and continental Europe.
Flying was practically unheard of, at least as far as I had understood. Now it seems totally reversed.
I have become convinced that the airlines have deliberately undercut the trains.
Glad I got that experience before all this stuff started happening.
Full disclosure: I said I considered my England Scotland Wales trip to be my fair lifetime allotment. However, before I thought this way, I had other trips.
In 2004, I went on a group tour to Spain with one of my aunts.
And in 1998, I went on a work-related trip to Sheffield England. And while over there, we took the ferry across to Rotterdam and toured around the Netherlands by train and bus.
That was just my Europe travel. Between 1990 and 2004, I also did three back-and-forth trips to Japan from the USA, for work. (Including my five-year stay living in Tokyo.)
Wish I had known then what I know now. Glad I got the experiences but I would have happily curtailed it for planetary reasons.
In 2017, when i wrote my book, I did retroactively purchase triple carbon offsets for every single air trip that I can remember taking in my adult life, before I quit flying. But carbon offsets are by no means a perfect mitigative remedy.
Response to a comment from someone in the group who continues to take multiple transcontinental flights (and does not feel bad about it, feeling that industry and so on have contributed so much more):
I wish we could control what government or large companies do, but we cannot. And, we can’t invent a time machine to make our past selves more aware, but we do have the current awareness of what we know now.
I might feel more guilt because I am a Boomer, and furthermore a USA citizen. And therefore am part of the demographics that has contributed most to destroying the planet. Just by our willful obliviousness, if nothing else.
My heart goes out to you & other people who are living on separate continents from their families; this is a widespread artifact of our modern age.
What is your long-term plan, as far as possibly living within low-footprint ground-transport distance of your family? (When I was really young and going through the wild times, I thought maybe I was willing to never see my family again. But it turned out not to be the case so I’m glad I did not end up staying in Japan and have to face that dilemma.)
I try not to beat myself up for what I did in the past — same as you, we only know what we know at the time, but I cannot allow myself that same behavior moving forward.
And, there is a hard reality that at some point airline travel is going to become not an option. So it behooves us everyday people to reduce our vulnerability as far as being intercontinentally far away from our families. Unless we are willing to possibly not see our families again in this lifetime.