I don't own a car. I take public transit everywhere, and I do think personal vehicle use has real environmental costs. But I don't think driving is inherently unethical.
I live in Seoul, and the city makes transit easy for me. That's not a virtue. It's a condition I happen to benefit from. Some people live where transit barely exists, or where it doesn't get them to work, school, or care. In those places, driving is not optional.
The same is true of flying. In parts of Europe you can cross borders by train. In island nations, or in places with weak land connections, flying may be the only realistic option. “Just fly less” means very different things in those places.
A lot of what gets called my ethical choices comes from the conditions I live in. That makes me wary of turning structural failures into personal morality. If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves nothing.
When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter. It's not an accident that oil companies spent decades popularizing the idea of the personal carbon footprint.
