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DataDive · 2026-08-30T15:17:20.000Z

Europe is caught in a dilemma: tourism, air travel, and city hopping are its economic lifeblood that keeps the continent running, but these also cause the greatest damage to the environment.

Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.

alde · 2026-08-30T15:34:40.000Z

EU currently emits only 5% of the globally emitted greenhouse gases.

You can cut all the city hopping you want and it won't make the slightest difference.

netsharc · 2026-08-30T15:49:04.000Z

If it's not significant, can I have 5% of your net worth?

If the EU mandated that products imported are made in a carbon neutral fashion, then importers of products will pay attention. Unfortunately it means higher prices, and the governments will get voted out of office by people voting for the populists selling the electoral promise of "Make Prices Low Again!"...

paganel · 2026-08-30T15:57:49.000Z

You won’t mind higher prices? Are you rich? Because most of us Europeans certainly aren’t.

anonymars · 2026-08-30T17:26:21.000Z

By that logic shouldn't petrol be a lot cheaper than it is in Europe?

netsharc · 2026-08-30T18:19:40.000Z

I like low prices, but I'm not looking forward to the chaos (political, social, what else) and deaths which I'm guessing will affect me within in the next 10 years.

paganel · 2026-08-30T20:13:12.000Z

The chaos is already here for us, the majority who are suffering the higher prices. Why do you think we're voting for the "extremist" parties? It's not because of "Russian propaganda", it's because life for the majority of us, normal Europeans, has become quite dreadful, economically and not only.

morsch · 2026-08-30T15:52:01.000Z

More like 6%, roughly in line with its population share (5.4%). Not sure if that includes air travel, international air travel often isn't included in national statistics. https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025

Sayrus · 2026-08-30T16:52:16.000Z

Whenever I see those statistics, I always find them very weird. Many of our products are made in China, but those are counted towards China's global emission, not Europe's. It also applies to the need of power generation for delocalized industry or importing food. A country handling a lot of industry will have a very high per-capita emission, but the people living there may actually have very low individual emissions.

realusername · 2026-08-30T17:02:09.000Z

They aren't, most emission statistics are counting imported emissions.

China's figure aren't that great on their own, with exportation deducted.

bethekidyouwant · 2026-08-30T17:42:30.000Z

EDGAR assigns emissions geographically to the country where the emitting activity occurs. (so in this case no)

TazeTSchnitzel · 2026-08-30T16:10:28.000Z

The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.

realusername · 2026-08-30T16:48:30.000Z

Those are already included in most statistics

bethekidyouwant · 2026-08-30T17:43:05.000Z

Not in the Edgar linked above

morsch · 2026-08-30T15:31:18.000Z

Tourism is 10% of the economy, most of it is domestic or internal to Europe; most of it doesn't involve air travel or city hopping.

simonh · 2026-08-30T15:35:46.000Z

10% of an economy is a lot, you don’t need to lose much of that to hit the entire sector very hard.

DataDive · 2026-08-30T16:09:20.000Z

Note that this 10% is heavily skewed toward the richest, biggest cities.

In bigger cities, it might be closer to 20-30% of their economy.

Take that away, and it would have a cascading effect through entire countries.

morsch · 2026-08-30T16:27:23.000Z

Doesn't appear to be true, it's < 10% for the biggest cities (based on cursory research). Rome was 5% pre COVID; less now.

https://assets-global.website-files.com/6329bc97af73223b5759...

arlort · 2026-08-30T16:35:42.000Z

Big cities are not big because of tourism.

Unless you count the historical city center of Venice as a big city I doubt you'd get many big cities getting even close to those numbers

I can't easily/quickly find some numbers but if we want to accept, with a grain of salt, Gemini research on this even in Venice (I think it counts Mestre as well) it's ~15% and that's the highest it found.