Brad Plumer has a smart piece about what the price of oil will do to air travel, one of the hardest sectors to switch over to renewable fuels. Plumer identifies a whole host of potential consequences, cultural and economic, of future increases in the cost of air travel, from the dangers faced by cities who built their economies around regional airports to the fact the folks won't move so far away from their families.
In an ideal world, we can hope that regional flights can be at least partially replaced by regional train infrastructure, which, if properly done, could be a very effective stand-in. Also in my ideal world all trans-atlantic flights would be replaced by some kind of environmentally-friendly steamship or dirigible situation, but I don't really have any sustainability arguments to back that up.
--Tim Fernholz
