“可飛往任何地方的航班”幾分鐘內就賣光了

“飛往任何地方的航班”幾分鐘內就賣光了

Airlines in Asia are offering "flights to nowhere" to people who just miss the fun of flying. Really. Australian airline Quantas has jumped on the bandwagon, offering a Boeing 787 ride over the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Harbor, and the Uluru monolith. A Quantas spokesperson says it sold out in minutes, one of the fastest sellouts in their history.

亞洲的航空公司正在為那些錯過飛行樂趣的人提供“隨處可去的航班”。真的。澳大利亞航空公司Quantas也加入了這一潮流，提供波音787飛機飛越大堡礁、悉尼港和烏魯魯巨石的服務。Quantas的一位發(fā)言人表示，該產品在幾分鐘內就銷售一空，這是該公司歷史上銷售最快的一次。

Quantas 787 taking off.James D. Morgan/Getty Images

As we have noted many times, flying emits more carbon per person than just about any activity you can do. Many people who care about their carbon footprint twist themselves into knots to justify doing it (I certainly have), pointing out that they are doing important work. Climate scientist Michael Mann writes:

正如我們多次注意到的，飛行所排放的碳比任何你能做的活動都要多。許多關心自己碳足跡的人為了證明自己這么做是合理的(我當然是這樣)，他們指出自己在做重要的工作。氣候科學家邁克爾·曼寫道:

"Unfortunately, sometimes doing science means traveling great distances, and we don’t always have the time to take slower low-carbon options. We have a job to do, after all."

“不幸的是，有時做科學意味著長途跋涉，我們并不總是有時間采取緩慢的低碳選擇。”畢竟，我們還有工作要做。”

But what is the justification for a flight to nowhere? Mark Carter of Flight Free Australia, an organization trying to get Australians to fly less, tells NBC this is nuts, given what has been happening in Australia.

但是，飛到任何地方的理由是什么呢?澳大利亞自由飛行組織的馬克•卡特告訴美國全國廣播公司，考慮到澳大利亞正在發(fā)生的事情，這簡直是瘋了。該組織試圖讓澳大利亞人少坐飛機。

How Bad Is Flying?

飛行有多糟糕?

This might be a good time and place to try and quantify once again how bad flying actually is. Before the pandemic, the aviation industry would claim to be responsible for 2% of global emissions and this was the usually accepted number. According to Parke Wilde of FlyingLess, the International Energy Association estimates direct emissions from burning jet fuel to be 2.83%. Then there is "radiative forcing" which takes it up to 4.9%. Another new study claims the forcing effects are even more significant, concluding that "CO2-warming-equivalent emissions based on global warming potentials (GWP* method) indicate that aviation emissions are currently warming the climate at approximately three times the rate of that associated with aviation CO2 emissions alone." That would put aviation at 8.49%.

這可能是一個很好的時間和地點來再次嘗試量化飛行到底有多糟糕。在大流行之前，航空業(yè)聲稱自己的排放量占全球排放量的2%，這也是通常被接受的數字。據“無飛”組織的帕克·王爾德估計，國際能源協會估計，航空燃料燃燒產生的直接排放為2.83%。然后是“輻射強迫”，使其上升到4.9%。另一項新的研究聲稱，這種強迫效應更為顯著，該研究得出結論稱，“基于全球變暖潛力(GWP*方法)的二氧化碳變暖當量排放表明，目前航空排放導致氣候變暖的速度大約是航空二氧化碳單獨排放速度的三倍。”這將使航空業(yè)占8.49%。

Then of course, there is what The Economist called the Airline Industrial Complex, which prior to the pandemic was pretty big:

當然，還有《經濟學人》所稱的航空工業(yè)復合體，在大流行之前，它的規(guī)模相當大:

"The airline-industrial complex is vast. Last year 4.5bn passengers buckled up for take-off. Over 100,000 commercial flights a day filled the skies. These journeys supported 10m jobs directly, according to the Air Transport Action Group, a trade body: 6m at airports, including staff of shops and cafés, luggage handlers, cooks of in-flight meals and the like; 2.7m airline workers; and 1.2m people in planemaking."

“這個航空工業(yè)聯合體非常龐大。去年，45億乘客為飛機起飛系好安全帶。每天有超過10萬次的商業(yè)航班滿天飛。根據行業(yè)組織航空運輸行動組織的數據，這些旅行直接提供了1000萬個工作崗位:其中600萬個在機場，包括商店和咖啡館的工作人員、行李搬運工、飛機餐廚師等;2.7航空工人;還有120萬人從事飛機制造。”

So a little joyride over the Great Barrier Reef isn't just about the fuel burn, that's just the leading edge of a vast carbon-spewing enterprise. The economist Robert Ayers wrote that “the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services” and no industry on the planet does this as effectively as aviation.

所以，在大堡礁進行一次小兜風并不僅僅是為了燃燒燃料，這只是一項巨大的碳排放事業(yè)的前沿。經濟學家羅伯特·艾爾斯寫道，“從本質上講，經濟體系是一個將能源作為資源提取、加工和轉化為產品和服務中的能源的體系”，在這一點上，世界上沒有哪個行業(yè)比航空業(yè)更有效。

Of course, all of that is on hold now, planes are mostly sitting on the ground, and a few flights to nowhere are not going to make a huge difference. But as activist Anna Hughes of Flight Free UK noted in the Guardian:

當然，所有這一切現在都被擱置了，飛機大多都在地面上，幾次飛往任何地方的航班也不會帶來什么大的改變。但是，自由英國航班的活動家安娜·休斯在《衛(wèi)報》上指出:

“I understand why they are doing it – but it really is insanity – a flight to nowhere is simply emissions for the sake of it. If that’s the society we’ve built, where we’re that addicted to flying, then we have a serious problem.”

“我理解他們這樣做的原因——但這確實是一種瘋狂——隨處可去只不過是為了排放廢氣。如果這就是我們所建立的社會，讓我們如此沉迷于飛行，那么我們就有嚴重的問題了。”