Yeah, I'm definitely not saying people should be flying or driving as much as they do (the time-convenience or price of air travel may cause people who wouldn't otherwise travel to go for it - I've definitely hopped a plane back to CA just because Frontier was offering flights for $20 each way). And the use of cost functions in terms of the dollar rather than thermal / fuel efficiency do result in a lot of poor decisions by airlines based on maximizing profit.

But in terms of the financial impact on the 1% and their incentive to try to shape policy, there are a mountain of reasons for them to want people to use cars rather than planes.

For one, there are some ultra rich people that own a bunch of gas stations and the attached convenience store. People flying over middle America hurt their bottom line, and they get to cry foul on the basis of it killing "small town business."

Next, regarding thermal efficiency, planes operate at 35,000 ft (this may be less now as I notice low-cost airlines like Frontier tend to fly lower) but the thing is, the less atmosphere you have above you, the less insulation you have for the heat to be retained inside the atmosphere and the more cooling you have from the cold of space.

Driving on the other hand generates enormous amounts of heat on the surface of the planet. Both with the gasoline burning, but also with the road network.

If you've ever ridden a bike on a hot day and crossed from a concrete to black asphalt, you probably noticed a rather substantial temperature change. Black asphalt, in addition to being yet another way to sell a petroleum product to the masses, is more black than pretty much any naturally occurring substance on the planet and as such generates more heat. And unlike other black substances like volcanic rock, asphalt traps heat (I've definitely had my feet scorched while running across blacktop).

This surface heat generation has a compounding effect for the 1% as America has an unhealthy obsession with climate control and by generating more surface heat, they are essentially selling more coal to power the air conditioning units (places like Arizona where heat is the worst are not even mildly interested in ecologically responsible power generation - the retirees living there by and large support Trump who's putting through legislation like PV tariffs). And any heat is good in the eyes of a coal tycoon because it creates a positive feedback loop - the hotter it gets the more coal they get to burn and the hotter it gets.

Plus the hotter it gets, the more people can make an excuse to drive their air conditioned car to their local whatever rather than riding a bike or walking because "it's just too hot" or "it's unsafe to be out in this heat."

So I guess I'm just saying that I think air vs car travel has a much bigger impact on the bottom-line of the 1%ers than most people account for.

To your point of average BTUs, I think you also have to average out passive BTUs generated by all cross-country roadways against cross-country travelers to get an accurate number and a multiplier effect of coal & gasoline fueled climate control (I assume fuel efficiency with driving goes way down when high temperatures cause people to blast their AC), and also account for added thermal efficiency of air travel in terms of how much of that energy is actually captured by the atmosphere and how much is negated by space cooling.

There's also the point of average environmental cost vs marginal environmental cost to the consumer. The average cost might be really high if my $20 flight was under-booked and there were only 40 passengers onboard. But if that flight were going to happen anyway because the airline had already passed the threshold to justify not cancelling it, then the marginal environmental cost of me flying is low. I'm essentially just a 200 pound weight on a 135,000 pound machine. Fuel efficiency-wise for the plane, I am equivalent to a ~3 lb weight in a 1 ton automobile.

Interesting graph, though also curious that it would appear that the intersection point of the airlines incrementally improving efficiency trend line and the auto's relatively stable trend line appears to have happened around 2000/2001 right around the time of the 9/11 attack. (Not that I'm suggesting anything nefarious, but Ooooooo....)

And agree to disagree on the airlines being the driving force for these measures (or any related measures like the travel ban).