It's true that, overall, air travel isn't a large fraction of our carbon emissions. But that's entirely do to that fact that most people don't fly. Every trip you make across the Atlantic and back takes about 10% of a typical American's yearly carbon emissions. If you're a typical person who doesn't fly then indeed it's not worth worrying about the flying that other people are doing. But if you're someone who flies every year or especially multiple times a year then cutting down is probably one of the most significant things you can do for the environment.
How many of those trips are cuttable? Maybe one or two business trips. And businesses would already rather teleconference these days if the trip is really avoidable. Given how cumbersome and expensive flying is already, I'm not sure there's a huge amount of "waste" in the system to cut at the moment.
As for the occasional personal trip (I assume by # of people though maybe not # of miles flown, the far more common use case, only 12% of passengers are business travel[1]), should we be telling people, "no you're not going to see grandma for christmas"?
I'd imagine a lot of them are cuttable. I have a friend who regularly flies to the US (from the UK) to run conferences. Frankly it's ridiculous that they don't hire someone from the US to so it.
With modern video calling technology, how many business trips are really essential? Some sure, but a lot could be cut, or merged into fewer longer trips.
You're right I think some are overdone. One example is the consultants taking a plane 2x a week (leave early monday, come back thursday eve, often with unconstrained distances). Maybe a bunch of those could be cut, though in that case I think a lot of these business models offer a "premium" service. If you're paying $1M/quarter for a McKinsey contract or for an I-banker or a big 4 accountant you definitely want to see that person physically. Though keep in mind McKinsey is also probably less price sensitive than the average flyer.
Still even with that, I'd like to better understand the economics. If only 12% of trips are business vs pleasure, killing all business trips won't move the needle in the long run. There's some question of how long business trips are, you can be 12% of trips but if they're longer it's worse.
My overall point is that there are a lot of factors in how people chose to travel. It's far from clear that increasing the already quite high price is what's going to deter people unless you tax it massively. In which case we'll effectively return to a situation like the pre-deregulation days where only the rich flew, which may be fine, but should be directly considered.
