“飞往任何地方的航班”几分钟内就卖光了

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.

亚洲的航空公司正在为那些错过飞行乐趣的人提供“随处可去的航班”。真的。澳大利亚航空公司Quantas也加入了这一潮流，提供波音787飞机飞越大堡礁、悉尼港和乌鲁鲁巨石的服务。Quantas的一位发言人表示，该产品在几分钟内就销售一空，这是该公司历史上销售最快的一次。

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:

正如我们多次注意到的，飞行所排放的碳比任何你能做的活动都要多。许多关心自己碳足迹的人为了证明自己这么做是合理的(我当然是这样)，他们指出自己在做重要的工作。气候科学家迈克尔·曼写道:

"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，有时做科学意味着长途跋涉，我们并不总是有时间采取缓慢的低碳选择。”毕竟，我们还有工作要做。”

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，飞到任何地方的理由是什么呢?澳大利亚自由飞行组织的马克•卡特告诉美国全国广播公司，考虑到澳大利亚正在发生的事情，这简直是疯了。该组织试图让澳大利亚人少坐飞机。

How Bad Is Flying?

飞行有多糟糕?

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%.

这可能是一个很好的时间和地点来再次尝试量化飞行到底有多糟糕。在大流行之前，航空业声称自己的排放量占全球排放量的2%，这也是通常被接受的数字。据“无飞”组织的帕克·王尔德估计，国际能源协会估计，航空燃料燃烧产生的直接排放为2.83%。然后是“辐射强迫”，使其上升到4.9%。另一项新的研究声称，这种强迫效应更为显著，该研究得出结论称，“基于全球变暖潜力(GWP*方法)的二氧化碳变暖当量排放表明，目前航空排放导致气候变暖的速度大约是航空二氧化碳单独排放速度的三倍。”这将使航空业占8.49%。

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

当然，还有《经济学人》所称的航空工业复合体，在大流行之前，它的规模相当大:

"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."

“这个航空工业联合体非常庞大。去年，45亿乘客为飞机起飞系好安全带。每天有超过10万次的商业航班满天飞。根据行业组织航空运输行动组织的数据，这些旅行直接提供了1000万个工作岗位:其中600万个在机场，包括商店和咖啡馆的工作人员、行李搬运工、飞机餐厨师等;2.7航空工人;还有120万人从事飞机制造。”

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，在大堡礁进行一次小兜风并不仅仅是为了燃烧燃料，这只是一项巨大的碳排放事业的前沿。经济学家罗伯特·艾尔斯写道，“从本质上讲，经济体系是一个将能源作为资源提取、加工和转化为产品和服务中的能源的体系”，在这一点上，世界上没有哪个行业比航空业更有效。

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:

当然，所有这一切现在都被搁置了，飞机大多都在地面上，几次飞往任何地方的航班也不会带来什么大的改变。但是，自由英国航班的活动家安娜·休斯在《卫报》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.”

“我理解他们这样做的原因——但这确实是一种疯狂——随处可去只不过是为了排放废气。如果这就是我们所建立的社会，让我们如此沉迷于飞行，那么我们就有严重的问题了。”