A few months back, I stumbled upon a call for submissions to a zine by Climateverse: Futurescapes – Visions of Earth 2024-2100. They were looking for art or stories around the climate in a future setting. The way it asked for submissions for different time frames got me thinking about a problem I have been thinking about for a long time, namely how to reduce the amount of flying in the world. While there are systems with taxes, those quickly become unjust as the very rich ones just pay and keep flying. And systems with steep progressive taxes (like where the tax increases exponentially for each flight) need to track how much everybody is flying, and thus is a concern for the privacy.
But the problem remains.
And the last idea got me thinking. What if, if we somehow anyway need to forsake some privacy, instead of tracking where people go, have an agency that decides if you are allowed to go somewhere in the first place. And it makes that judgment based on the necessity of the flight in light of the harm the flight itself causes. Basically, reframing it by treating flying as such a pollutant that you need an exception from the baseline of flying not being allowed, and you will only get permission if you can prove that the flight will bring some kind of benefits for humanity. The purpose of the agency would be to reduce carbon emissions.
Enter: Office of Carbon Omission
On the website, there is a form for applying for permission to make a flight as the landing page. The form is really meant to show that there needs to be good cause for a flight and that pleasure is not an option to base travel on.
After working on flight permission form and the website for a while, I felt that there is more to explore in this space. I want to expand this site to both be an experiment of radical ideas and a showcase of good steps in the world.
Therefore, I will be adding news as I find them, and I would also love if you help me out if you see good and previously radical ideas implemented. Send them to me at ideas@carbonomission.org or make an issue or pull request on GitHub.
And on the more provocative side, I will keep adding ideas that an agency could do. Here, too, I would be thankful for any ideas that you have. Use the same email or GitHub to share them with me. The purpose of this is to show what an agency could do, increasing the Overton window in the public discussion, perhaps finding solutions that are going in this direction.
Now, this started with this call for submissions, so I sent my idea in and a little bit to my surprise it was accepted. And here is a preview of the zine Futurescapes – Visions of Earth 2024-2100! There will be an online flip book with a 2-page layout featuring presentations of the artists after the new year, I will update this section then. There might also be a printed version somehow, we’ll see how that unfolds.
As another preview, here is an animated GIF of the website, selecting the first dropdown in the form.
