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1/ Despite its lower general social value than driving, flyers defend flying more aggressively than drivers defend driving. Well-off people love - dirt-cheap, if possible - flying and, as such, will defend its ruinous record with the most absurd and aggressive lines of argument.
2/ ...the most common of which runs something along the lines of 'you just want to go back to the stone age'. The problem is, I'm neither anti-flying, nor anti-driving. I merely expect people to pay to remediate the environmental harm caused by these activities & conclude that...
3/ ...were they required to do so, people would both fly and drive far less frequently, which would give us a fighting chance of averting a global warming catastrophe that will make coronavirus look like a picnic.
4/ The expectation that we should bear the full environmental costs of our consumer choices is a simple appeal for adults to take responsibility for their actions. That we have been conditioned to believe others should pay the price instead is the problem here.
5/ I've lost more than a few 'progressive' followers because they're simply unwilling to engage with this very reasonable argument, despite - without exception - agreeing that it is not justifiable for, say, smokers to impose upon non-smokers the health costs of their habit.
6/ That's the fundamental contradiction of liberalism. To preserve the unfettered negative freedoms of a well-off minority, you must progressively violate the inalienable right of everybody else to a liveable planet.
