Here's my rant on frequent flyer miles.

I don't know why, but at least in my country (the USA), people (mostly rich people who fly a lot) routinely obsess over their frequent flyer miles. There are entire websites dedicated to how to increase your frequent flyer miles (incidentally, these websites make quite a lot of money for their owners, thanks to your advertising clicks). Tom Stuker, the world's most frequent flyer (and an American, of course) recently hit 22 million miles in the air (and counting).

In my view, this is madness. Tom is single-handedly responsible for 3,600 tons (and counting) of CO2 emissions (assuming 100 gCO2/km). Actually it's probably closer to double that because Tom probably flies mostly business or first class, which takes up about twice as much space in the plane as economy class. This is 20x the CO2 emissions that the average person on earth will generate over their entire lifetime (assuming 4.75 tons/person/year and life expectancy of 80 years).

But Tom is proud of his achievement, and so (it seems) is everyone who meets him or talks about him. Ok, I know Tom is just an extreme case. But those extreme cases get in the press, and that causes people to start thinking about how many miles they could fly - maybe they could be like Tom!

So here's my proposal. Instead of calling them Frequent Flyer points, we should call them Climate Killer points. Because that's what they really are. So congratulations Tom, you are the #1 Climate Killer on Earth. I'm sure your children will be proud.

But seriously people, don't be proud of your frequent flyer miles. It's annoying, snobbish, or to borrow a term from Gen Z, super cheugy.