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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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More than just France. I went to Ireland this summer, and I have been several times before. In a country that is normally cloudy and rainy, it was sunny and bright. It didn't rain for the 10 days I was there. That sounds nice, but everything was dried up, it was sad. What is normally a drive through the lush and green countryside, was a drive through the brown and dry midlands. Not seeing those rolling hills of emerald green really bummed me out.
Although snow in winter in Ireland is rare, it used to be much colder. Over 15 years ago, my mates and I would walk in mornings to school and we would slip on frozen footpaths during winter. Now, the winters just tend to be warmer with more rain. Roads don't really get frozen anymore apart from the rare snow events that happen every couple of years. The north gets more snow but anecdotally it is getting lesser and lesser over the years.
Same in a lot of the UK, it straight up does not snow in the winter where it used to in the place I grew up. I live in Wales now and it's scary seeing such a wet country so dried out, it's not natural.
how did you get there?
I flew to Ireland so my relatives could meet my children for the first time. I make that trip maybe once every 3 to 4 years.
If your response to climate change is to shame ordinary people for occasionally getting on an airplane while billionaires take private jets, oil companies fight renewable energy, and massive corporations produce pollution on a scale no individual could dream of matching, then you're aiming your anger in the wrong direction.
My "once every few years" flight is a rounding error. Telling regular people they shouldn't travel, see family, or enjoy their lives because corporations and the ultra rich have spent decades wrecking the climate isn't environmentalism. It's just shifting responsibility onto the people with the least power to fix the problem.
Or in short: I motorboated your fucking mom across the ocean.
You probably are in the 10% - anyone earning over $55,000
You feel entitled to an "occasional flight" so i assume your overall behavior leads to emissions typical for this group. You use 9 times you share.
A roundtrip flight from London to Dublin alone is already 25% of you yearly CO2 budget. From New York to Dublin its 80%.
But sure, the billionaires....
Remember this on your next flight, look down at the once green now brown wasteland and then at your children. It was you doing this.
Tell me more about how if we all live in tents, that will offset the pollution from the data centers being built. Maybe if I walk my kids to daycare on the days it rains (I already walk them in good weather), the government will invest in green energy. Defending billionaires? Son, you must be lost.
Best way to travel, tbh.
the people doing the occasional flight and driving to work in their car are the same assholes voting for politicians who enable billionaires to own private jets and fly themselves.
While this is Ireland, look across the sea at the UK, in a sane world those ass hats flying occasionally and driving their car to work would all be voting Green, to both move the Overton window and to tax billionaires, ban then fron using private jets, make transport more environmentally friendly and lower emissions. Similarly Canada, Germany, France, NZ, Australia and on and on
We do know who is to blame, every voter in a democracy not voting to move the Overton Window to environmentally sustainable politcans.
Shame on them for perpetuating the orthodoxy and enabling the destruction of the biosphere and shame on people for not calling them out on it, the outcome of which is the inevitable collapse of civilisation.
I don't recall mentioning how I voted, so that's a wild assumption.
And if the standard is that you're not allowed to criticize an economic system unless you've completely removed yourself from modern society, then nobody is allowed to criticize anything. I assume you didn't mine the silica, manufacture the chips, build the device, or construct the network you're using to post this comment.
Participating in a system because it's the system we currently live in isn't the same thing as endorsing every consequence of that system.
Let me know when you're living off the land detached from society completely. I'll make sure to send you a post card.
In the womb of a beast that blights fire upon the countryside as it beats a million tiny wings, so fast they boil the air itself
Why do you ask?
oh, that was visual and colourful
Commercial airliners are only about half as efficient as other kinds of mass transit (busses, trains) in terms of fuel/mile/person, this isn't the gotcha you think it is.
where did you get those numbers? i call bullshit
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint:
Seems to check out compared to the average bus ride, though. And long distance busses are popular in a lot of countries (including Britain), because they're often much cheaper than long distance trains.
That was my first reaction but then I thought about it a bit longer and realized that it's not reasonable to compare a local bus ride that stops and starts every other junction, with a transatlantic flight.
The long distance buses are listed there at 27g, which is a shade over 1/10th of a domestic flight.
Huh, you're right. I was looking at "Bus (average)", thinking the regular local bus was represented by "Bus (local London)".
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10311
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability-indicators/carbon-footprint-factsheet
I suspect "domestic flights" in the UK are pretty different than the US (a brief search indicates the average flight is around 4 times longer in the US, and planes are far more efficient during the middle of their flight compared to the ends, but average passengers per flight is a little harder to find for both countries to properly figure that out)
Thank you for the reply. "Your" numbers are not in fuel/mile/person but in energy/mile/person. So an electric train is much better carbon emission wise than it suggests. I was aware that flights and ICE cars are equal-ish per distance, but the takeaway from this should be to not fly or ICE-drive long distances and not that flying is ok.
Flying is really bad and billionaires as well as common people alike should not be allowed to do it. I do not understand why we still have to discuss this.
The first one is measuring BTUs and converting but the UMich information is straight carbon emissions per passenger mile and planes are only ~30% worse than commuter rail in the US by that metric. It's really not the apocalypse you're making it out to be.