Legitimate question: what's the logical term for this argument? Those flights would have happened without Vitalik on them, so the carbon footpring is not really attributable to him.
Other situations seem similar (ie, "why should I go vote? my vote doesn't really matter?") they really aren't: yes, I shouldn't throw trash in the park, because if we all did we'd be screwed--but we can't all fly every 2 weeks.
If you've taken 360 flights as just one passenger, that's about the same as taking one flight all by yourself.
As an approximately 1% contributor to each flight, you do actually make a difference. Flights get cancelled and route schedules do change based on usage. And also there is a marginal addition to fuel consumption for each additional added cargo/passenger.
If I was in a position to take that many flights I think I'd do something to try to offset it a little (idk, donate a solar installation to a school or buy an acre of land and plant a bunch of trees or something along those lines).
Huh? Individual actions do matter. The fact that he got on these flights contributes to the overall demand on flights, and has certainly had an impact on how many flights need to exist. The argument that not all people can fly every 2 weeks is nonsensical.
Individual actions matter when they have some direct impact (even if small), or if they are a subset of a broader collective action.
So me running my car matters. I'm directly putting CO2 in the air, even if my contribution is small.
By "are a subset of a broader collective action" I mean as follows: if all members of a given class/collective stopped doing an act, would there be an impact? If all voters stopped voting, or if all families stopped flying, or if all grocery shoppers stopped buying meat, then yes, elections would break, and flights would decline, and meat would stop being sold. Even though my vote doesn't matter, and my family's ticket doesn't matter, and no, Purdue isn't going to stop factory farming chicked because I went vegan.
In Vitalik's case--and I don't mean him specifically, but using him as a stand-in for a broader class of questions--, two things are true:
1. There's no direct result between him getting on a plane and the flight existing. His impact on flight demand isn't small, it's zero, because flights existing are non-linear. Those flights were going to be there anyway.
2. He is sui-generis. He's not a vacationing family or a a travelling salesman. There's no collective problem of "man, excentric genius crypto billionaires fly commercial too much." That just isn't a problem. If Vitalik, or all Vitaliks stopped flying, nothing would actually change. Whereas if all families stopped flying, or all business travellers—or whatever other class the vast, vast majority of flyers belong to—stopped travelling, then yes, there would be an impact.
I guess you could say "ha! 'excentric genius crypto billionaires' isn't a collective! the right collective VB belongs to is 'people', and if all people stopped flying then there would certainly be an impact!". And that's certainly an argument, but I think both sides are arguable.
And lastly, I'm not actually arguing that he should fly: I'm asking 'what do you call this logical problem, where we want to condemn someone for doing a thing that doesn't actually matter at all except symbolically?
Values below one should not be reinterpreted as zero simply because your computations are more comfortable with integers.
Even the mass of a person and their luggage on a powered flight has a non-negligible effect on both fuel consumption and future flight scheduling.
It seems like you're trying to use booleans (i.e., flight existed: true or false) where, in the real world, effects exist from events and choices outside your narrowly established baseline of causes.
The number of flights is not a constant, and the number of passengers in a plane is not that big.
If you book a flight, it may push the number of passengers past a critical threshold, and the airline decides not to cancel the flight.
Or, if you don't book the flight, someone else who would have otherwise flown on another flight will be able to book that seat, and the other flight could get canceled.
Or, if some flights are often almost full, your booking may push the demand past a critical threshold, and the airline may choose to schedule another flight. And because there are now more flights, flying that route will be cheaper and more convenient, which may attract new passengers.
If you only fly a few times in your lifetime, you can plausibly say that those planes would have flown anyway. If the number of flights is much greater than the average number of passengers in a plane, your actions have almost certainly increased the number of flights flown.
In some cases. This happened in the EU during the COVID pandemic due to weird regulatory reasons.
But in general: if no one is booked on the plane, they will stop selling that flight pretty quick. Of course in the short term they might fly an empty flight if all passengers no-showed and if they need the plane at the other airport, but their fleet allocation optimizer probably works at most a couple days ahead, so empty flights will soon be culled. Similarly routes with few passengers will get allocated smaller planes in the future, etc, etc.
Airlines often also cancel flights due to lack of demand, sometimes at the last moment, because rescheduling the passengers is more profitable than flying the plane.
> Those flights would have happened without Vitalik on them, so the carbon footpring is not really attributable to him.
This is ridiculous. Taken to its logical conclusion, all flights would’ve happened without each individual passenger being on them. I guess that means nobody is responsible then?
Other situations seem similar (ie, "why should I go vote? my vote doesn't really matter?") they really aren't: yes, I shouldn't throw trash in the park, because if we all did we'd be screwed--but we can't all fly every 2 weeks.