Air travel is cheap these days, allowing ordinary people to travel further. Some people say that airfare should be increased because this leads to environmental problems. Do you think raising airfare can help reduce air pollution?

 

Air travel is cheap these days, allowing ordinary people to travel further. Some people say that airfare should be increased because this leads to environmental problems. Do you think raising airfare can help reduce air pollution?

Nowadays, people belonging to all socio-economic strata have started travelling across the globe for numerous purposes by air owing to the inexpensive tickets which is affecting the environment adversely. There is a lobby that believes emerging air pollution can be addressed by increasing the airfares. This essay will justify the rationale behind their perspective and discuss that of others.

Many have hailed the proposal of raising the air ticket prices for curbing the ecological disaster prevailing in the society. Since people would not be able to afford the phenomenal prices of air travel for fear of tumbling their budgets, and by going beyond their financial feasibility, entailing a decrease in the number of passengers, thereby minimizing the colossal amounts of air pollution, by virtue of reduction in the number of flights.

However, there are many detractors of the idea of creating an upsurge in the prices. As per them, hike in the prices of air tickets would be of little avail since a major chunk of travellers, especially affluent ones would continue to travel as air transport helps them to save the most imperative commodity which is time. Moreover, in the contemporary era, most are using air travel to negotiate extremely long distances: undertaking overseas or journeys to distant locals, which cannot be substituted; thus, barring a few, most will continue flying. Additionally, this lobby also asserts that such a move will do little to reduce pollution but simply shift it from one mode to the other. Those who can ill-afford air travel will be using surface transport, thereby causing pollution elsewhere. 

To reiterate, the idea of raising the airfare would not bring in any improvement in the situation of deteriorating environmental conditions since people would persist to travel by airplanes owing to its time-effectiveness.