By eurostar the cheapest option is £95, by plane £74.
So, someone gives you a bribe of 21 £ and you are ready to increase your emissions hundredfold for such a paltry bribe? Seriously? With this price difference there should be absolutely nothing unclear about the choice!
I’m in the UK so it’s a bit limiting.
It's a bit funny that you're telling that "I’m live smack in the middle of Europe so it’s a bit limiting" to a Finn. Look at the map. Every time I want to go to Central Europe, I need to first take a train to Turku for two hours, then board a ship, sleep on that ship, make haste to the 7:24 train in Stockholm, take that to Copenhagen (and currently there's an extra change in Malmö), then take a train from Copenhagen to Hamburg. I've left Helsinki the previous day at 17:25 and now it's the evening of my second travel day and I'm still only about as close to almost any possible destination than your home is.
And I can do that. As can 61 000 others (at least that's how many members the Finnish Facebook group for travelling without airplanes has). Your complaints of having to pay 20 pounds more and travel two extra hours to get to France sound... Cutely innocent?
The pricing of car vs public transportation in Britain surprises me! Over here in Helsinki the cost of having and using a car is about 300 € per month. For some people a bit less, but for example my parents pay on average about 370 € per month for various car expenses. In comparison, the ticket for public transportation here costs only 80 € per month. That's less than a quarter of the costs of a car. And if you want to look at the price for coming from further away, then the ABCD ticket, it costs 119 € per month, still less than half of what a car costs. And that covers already an area 60 km away from the centre of Helsinki. So... I know the car tax is very high here, so buying a new car costs a lot more than in England. But much of the costs of a car come from repairing it, and I cannot imagine that's that much cheaper in England than in Finland. Also, the fuel should cost about the same in both countries. Is the public transport ticket's price in your city something like 200 £ per month, or how can the car be cheaper? I'd be interested in hearing how that works, because no matter how I try juggling the numbers in my head, I cannot really come to the result you're telling. I believe you when you say that the public transit costs more, but I'd be interested in knowing how they've managed to reach that!
But look, CO2 per mile is way more in a private plane. We really need to be putting MUCH more into stopping that.
Absolutely! But at the same time, something like 99.99 % of planes' emissions come from the planes used by Joe Average for their holiday trips. I would prefer putting effort into cutting four fifths of those flights away over stopping the private plane flights, because my effort is more efficiently used when it reduces the emissions by 80 % than when it reduces them by 0.01 %. Even if that 0.01 % means that one person is causing as much emissions as tens of thousands of other people together. It's about us staying alive.