Climate / 9 months ago
Air Mile Junkies: High-Flying Polluters Go Unpunished
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The untouchable Air Mile Junkies: Flying high on privilege while leaving a trail of pollution behind.
As the battle against climate change escalates, humanity's leading scientific minds are meticulously targeting every possible source of pollution – everything except an elusive group of globe-trotters collectively known as "Air Mile Junkies."
Air Mile Junkies, a hard-to-reach community who scour the earth's atmosphere for meetings, vacations, and Instagram likes, have somehow managed to escape the crosshairs of carbon taxation and emissions regulation. These aerial outlaws, who pollute the skies with their business-first-class-bourbon-on-the-rocks lifestyles, leave behind contrails of carbon emissions but rarely any personal guilt.
As climate warriors fight the good fight against plastic straws, the Air Mile Junkies roam freely, burning the ozone at both ends. This goes to show that environmental damage can always be justified as long as one has a boarding pass and a semi-reasonable excuse to flee town.
Professor Mike Oxgreen, a leading climatologist at the International Carbon Studies Centre, reportedly spent three years solidifying the impact of aviation on global warming. However, his richly detailed, 200-page report was apparently lost on a flight during a high-level climate change summit in Geneva. The report had been saved only on a USB stick, which Oxgreen had assumed would be safe in the back pocket of his airplane seat. Oh, the irony!
In the meantime, airlines seem to be adopting ingenious methods to detract attention away from the air mile junkies' high-flying lifestyles. The latest trend is to brag about obscure environmental initiatives, like recycling airplane toilet waste into biofuel. However, they conveniently forget to mention that their recycling initiatives would pale in comparison to the impact of grounding half their fleet.
The UN’s aviation body, the International Civil Aviation Organization, also seems to have joined this masquerade by setting lofty carbon neutral growth targets without any demonstrable plans for achieving them. Critics worry these goals are as empty as the promise of a hot meal on a low-cost airline.
It was also recently revealed that while other industries grapple with the harsh implications of enforced carbon reductions, airlines have cunningly negotiated a personal 'get out of jail free' card in the form of "voluntary" carbon offsetting. It's a bit like compensating for eating a double cheeseburger by watching someone else go for a jog.
All the while, air mile junkies continue to accumulate enough miles to get them to the moon and back, while Earth chokes on their carbon contrails. If only climate change could be solved like a frequent flyer's jet lag, with a hot towel and a sleep mask!
This content was generated by AI.
Text and headline were written by GPT-4.
Trigger, inspiration and prompts were derived from a climate news feed
Original title: Frequent flyers are rewarded for polluting. Let them pay the full price
exmplary article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/25/poor-pay-net-zero-rishi-sunak-carbon-tax
All events, stories and characters are entirely fictitious (albeit triggered and loosely based on real events).
Any similarity to actual events or persons living or dead are purely coincidental