Even if the ICE car doesn't cancel out your greenhouse gas from flying, it still matters.
I didn't mean to imply it didn't. I definitely did not want to get into whataboutism. In other words, someone does something laudable on the climate problem and you say, "Well what about all those flights?" Yup, Bill McKibben flies to events, but there's no question that his net impact is positive.
I was just trying to say that with a given amount of funds, an EV is not always the best way to spend your money. Sort of like if you have a mortgage at 4% and credit card debt at 14%, it may feel good to pay off your mortgage and you might feel great that you own your house outright, but really, you should pay off the 14% loan first.
Mike Berners-Lee (yes, Tim's brother) has a book called "How Bad Are Bananas?" which I recently read. Answer: bananas are not bad.
He does his best to calculate the carbon footprint of various choices. He argues on the numbers that if you have an old car that gets halfway decent mileage and you are a low-mileage driver, you'll likely never actually pay back the carbon footprint of the EV. Your best play, from a CO2 perspective, is to drive the old car to death and take the money you save and, for example, change out your gas dryer for an electric dryer.
That was part of my logic behind spending for solar panels and electrifying appliances before getting a new car.
By the way, he has one interesting set of calculations. He asks, is it really better to ride your bike than to drive a car. The answer, surprisingly, is that it depends. If you take the additional calories that biking requires and assume you fuel those calories with bananas, the answer is a definitive yes. If you fuel it with cheesburgers, it's actually worse (I think twice as bad) as just driving your car. If you fuel it with asparagus airlifted from Chile, it is something like 26 times worse.
So whether you drive or bike in the end depends on what you plan to have eat to replace those calories.
Anyway, all that to say that I was not trying to say that buying and EV and flying is probably better than buying a ICE car and flying. I was just trying to say that some things we do are based on what makes us feel good (ahem... wishcycling)
There is an interesting phenomenon that I've noticed. The neighbor with a Tesla, which charges off the grid, tells me that even though she knows it's not correct, she feels a lot less guilty driving her EV. The other neighbor suggested we take our new car on a short ride instead of his because the drive would be "free" (by which he means we would pay for the electricity, but not gas, though some of the charge does come for "free" off our solar panels).
I'm not sure how widespread that is, but I think for people who feel guilty about the footprint of their driving, the feeling that they can drive their EV for "free" offsets some of the gains on a grid that still depends on fossil fuel to charge at night. I know rationally that this is BS, but I feel the siren song pulling me to drive those "free" miles nevertheless, even just with our PHEV. The simple fact is that I feel slightly less bad about driving to a prettier trailhead to go for a run if I know I'll get there and back on electric.
