“You have fuel efficiency improvements on the order of 1% per year, and flights are increasing 6%,” says Rutherford, “It's not even close.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-how-to-cut-your-carbon-emissions-when-flying

straight up we need to fly less overall, so think of all the things that help reduce people flying and we need to do that

but you’re right, i need to head back to see the family at christmas, look at my options

Real hyperloop, not the Musk bullshit. Scaled up pneumatic tube systems operating at orbital speeds (7 km/s).

Most of the planes in that screenshot were over land.

By far most planes in that screenshot are over land. You're right, when you have to cross an ocean to get somewhere there isn't really any alternative, but for all those over land they could've constructed and rode high speed railways instead. Countries like China and Japan show they can be proper alternatives, and there is no reason to use anything else for those distances.

Apply a worldwide carbon tax to all emissions, which gradually increases year by year. Knowing that flying will become a less and less viable business model over time, governments and investors will begin on alternative investments in infrastructure and novel technologies.

For overland travel: trains.

For across oceans: probably also trains, possibly in tunnels.

Benefits to this approach:

• Actually reduces carbon emissions instead of moving them around.
• Doesn't tell the individual to stop flying or eating steak. Leaves it up to them to decide which carbon emissions they value most.
• Doesn't pretend to be omniscient and perscribe solutions. Instead lets everyone in the world solve the problem creatively.
• Creates a market incentive to accellerate the production of alternative technologies.

Most likely what would happen is that high speed rail would see a big boom immediately as governments looked for ways to reduce intra-country transit costs. Overseas flights, which are quite a bit rarer, would probably stay stable for several years (though with a fair amount of griping about the increased cost of flying). However, as time went on we would also expect to see overseas flights drop significantly. Businesses would prefer teleconferencing to sending delegates overseas for small matters. People would vacation overseas less frequently, instead staying on their own continents. Possibly there is a new industry - high speed sailing cruise ships - which would transport people across oceans at slower speeds for their vacations. Someone might invent better forms of carbon-neutral energy storage to make air travel more feasible again. Otherwise, nations start building undersea tunnels to connect rail lines across oceans.

I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance, unless that’s only the us where we don’t believe in trains. There was an article a year or so back, where France started to actually ban regional flights for a few routes with good rail service. That’s where we need to be going.

Between high speed rail, and Zoom, we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half while making travel better, and we can cut the least efficient flights since they spend proportionally more time climbing to altitude vs cruising

Even in the US, we have Acela and it’s arguably the best way to travel a few routes like BOS—>NYC, for the last two decades. Aside from connections, why do we still have hourly shuttles flying that route? Looking at the entire Acela service area, you probably have hundreds of daily regional flights. Most of those need to go

Edit: and this is part of my argument that California High Speed Rail is worth much higher funding to complete at pretty much any cost