travel
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Maybe we’re wrong thinking that airline executives don’t get it
This Washington Post story suggests that the airline industry is not being led by dumb people who just don't get it.
No, the darling of the industry, the best and the brightest, the folks heading the industry vanguard, aren't stupid. They get it.
They just don't care. They believe that personal wealth will protect them and their children and grandchildren.
They plan for growth, even as the planes carry fewer people, which means they plan to keep increasing both their overall greenhouse gas emissions and the per-mile traveled emissions, as well as to have more planes emitting more water vapor into the atmosphere where is serves as powerful heat trapping barrier.
But you're not supposed to think ill of them, because they earn money for helping destroy the climate.
At least the damage inflicted by cigarette companies is felt mainly by the smokers and the people close by -- these guys are helping push a rock over a cliff onto millions of people who can't even afford an in-flight magazine, much less a flight.
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When is pizza not a turkey sandwich?
What we have available to eat is controlled by different businesses in different ways. Whether they are responsive to our needs and desires is something about which Americans can and should be at lot more vocal.
We arrived at the boarding gate at George Bush Intercontinental Airport about an hour before the scheduled departure time, stripped of any liquids over 3.4 ounces not stored in a clear, quart-size, zip-top plastic bag. I went to the service desk to ask the airline rep what food would be provided on our flight. (This is the airline which runs TV ads boasting that unlike their competitors they offer food on their flights.) The airline's website establishes that economy passengers get a sandwich on a flight like this one. Here's what we got:
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Isn’t aiding and abetting tax evasion a crime?
Does anyone remember what a petard is? I think most folks only know them from the line in Shakespeare -- they picture some kind of quaint device, a Flintstones-like crane ... so you could be "hoisted on your own petard" in a clever, comical way.
Actually, a petard is a kind of primitive land mine.
The airlines have built an enormous petard beneath themselves; alas, they will not be the only ones hoisted when it explodes. 14 trillion miles of "free" flying outstanding ... man, that's a bunch of flying. OK, if only 1 percent are actually turned into flights, then it's only 140 billion miles of "free" jet travel.
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What if city hall had to disclose its assumptions like Wall Street does?
For those unaware, Michigan has been hard hit by the increasingly insistent intrusion of an unpleasant reality (that the era of cheap energy is over). Detroit and Wayne County are especially hard hit, as the economic malady destroying the auto industry hit a city already weakened to the point of collapse by stark racial segregation and disinvestment.
What Michigan likes to do is imagine that "big projects" will save it, so it tends to build enormous temples to optimism, much in the same way the pharaohs built the pyramids as monuments to themselves: "I may pass on, but my mighty empire will last forever," the pyramids say.
Well, in this country, not so much. Instead, you just get big tombs and sad little stabs at pouring big rivers of public money down leaky drains, hoping that somehow it will stick around long enough to fertilize some growth in the ruined soil.
The latest fantasy in Southeast Michigan is "Aerotropolis," a gigantic industrial park centered on, you guessed it, the airport, because we all know that every day, in every way, flying's getting better and better.
Sterling writer and columnist Jack Lessenberry wrote an article about the scheme here, which caused me to realize that one of the biggest reasons we have a hard time finding the capital needed to build a sustainable infrastructure in this country is that we squander it all on the kinds of investments that are:
- killing us, and
- clearly stupid at the time, no hindsight needed.
Hmmm, I thought -- when Wall Street wants to issue a new stock, they have to put out a prospectus that warns the rubes about the key assumptions made and the vulnerabilities of the company being touted. Like when they want to sell stock in a company whose profits all depend on cheap energy, they have to include some warnings about that dependence in the prospectus.
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We’ve got it figured out
It's a big problem, but I've been thinking hard about it and I think I've got it figured out:
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Uh, literally
An Inconvenient Truth replaces the Gideon Bible in fancy new hotel. Dirt-worshiping hippies rejoice.
