The wider problem. Flight shaming

When something seems like a solution to a problem, look beyond.

Greta Thunberg insists on shaming people for flying. She even forced her mother—an opera singer—not to hop on a world tour. While some voyages are faster and cheaper by rail than by plane (Genoa to Rome, for instance), others are not.

Don’t tell me to take a five-day train from Moscow to Sanremo because it’s better for the environment. It might not be. It’s a waste of time to spend five days instead of eight hours to get from one place to another. During the extra four days in Sanremo I could have invented something that would in the long-term help the planet more.

If businesspeople were to cancel their flights to meetings “in order to save the planet” we as a society could be losing more: breakthrough ideas would not be shared, so new products would not be created, therefore the economy would not develop faster and polluting factories would exist for longer.