And will it also fall in part on the passengers who demand cheap and cheaper air fares? (Not only to the detriment of their own safety but also to further increasing ecological debts).
On the passengers directly I wouldn't expect so, the passengers didn't keep demanding reuse of the same old airframe.
It might fall on the airlines, especially Southwest which refuses to fly anything but 737 and thus keeps demanding new ever more altered revisions of the same original frame without type change.
But even then at the end of the day if Boeing can't fulfil those demands properly and ethically they are the ones to blame.
In the aggregate, consumers will likely flock to the cheaper version of commodities, that doesn't mean it's legal let alone ethical to e.g. sell talc full of asbestos because that's cheaper than selling asbestos-free talc.
You can't put this on passengers. What are they supposed to do? Pay more voluntarily in the hope that the money goes to safety and not just towards a bigger bonus for the execs?
I started to compose a reply to your comment, and it turned out to be a deceptively hard question to answer.
My attempt at a succinct answer is that carbon should be more expensive, and that Boeing very likely moved too aggressively to meet the market with a more fuel efficient plane.
In some ways – based on my probably naive understanding – consumer desire for a cheaper flight results in increased fuel efficiency, since the cost of flying is heavily dependent on the cost of fuel. Environmentally speaking, that's good. However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.
Pricing carbon to reflect its true environmental cost could fix that issue, by raising the price floor. Consumer choice would still drive higher efficiency, but ideally the overall higher cost of carbon would keep flying to a 'sustainable' rate. (Whatever that turns out to be.)
What I don't have a clear sense of is whether point-to-point travel with planes like the Max are better for the environment. Theoretically, hub-and-spoke travel is more fuel efficient. The reality ends up being more complicated, with airlines flying half-empty 747s. From what I understand, that makes airlines like Southwest (which operates point-to-point) more fuel efficient.
But I'd love to hear a more clear explanation from someone who better understands the subject.
> However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.
This part sounds complicated. It might be good for the people but bad for the environment. On the other hand, it probably also displaces some long-distance driving, and we have to estimate how much that is. Even if the environmental impact of reduced driving doesn't cancel out the cost of added flights, it's probably worth putting a value on the safety benefit. (Even though the current thread is about plane crashes, flying is overall much safer than driving, and reducing driving by even a little saves lives.)
It's also extremely well known especially in environmental economics, if not well understood / solved: it's Jevon's Paradox (more efficient use of a resource can lead to an increase in demand which causes an increase in total resource consumption).
Sure, it falls on the passengers in the form of increased risk and, in the case of crashes, actual death. Otherwise though, no it doesn't fall on them. They're not in the chain of responsibility for building and certifying planes as safe and free of defect.
Come on, way to blame the victim. Of course we all want cheaper things, but everyone got on those 2 planes with the faith that it would take-off and land safely, it's not like they signed a disclaimer saying "I accept the risk of death to the fact that the plane is an unairworthy rust bucket but I deemed it OK because the airfare was cheap.".
