Four years ago I sat in a 1980s Norwegian airliner on a runway in Ghana. The second time the power went out I swore if I survived it would be my last flight. Two weeks later, I hopped a super-saver flight from London to Paris.
These days I don’t go past Toronto. Every time I leave the province it’s a crisis of faith. No matter the road you take, travel is hard on the environment. Unless you count military air strikes as legitimate travel, cruise ships are the worst. They’re wasteful, polluting beasts that shed their carbon entrails as they go. Any large boat not running on wind emits far more per passenger-kilometre than a typical plane.
But as a whole, air travel is the biggest threat. If you’re on a full plane you’re responsible for about half the carbon emissions per kilometre as some dude riding shotgun in his best friend’s ride. But when you account for non-carbon greenhouse gas emissions, your contribution to the melting ice caps, per kilometre, is worse than if you were driving. Moreover, you’re likely flying as many kilometres in a day as dude on the ground is going each year in his car. It’s the vast distances we travel that make flying unsustainable.
In total, air travel contributes about five percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. But air traffic is growing unabated—five percent a year since the late ’90s. It’s the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. By 2030 it’ll be the biggest source.
In his influential 2006 book Heat, George Monbiot calculated that if air traffic keeps growing at this rate, meeting emissions reductions targets will be mathematically impossible—by 2050 planes will contribute 134 percent of total allowable emissions, even with hopeful improvements in fuel efficiency.
While innovation may prolong our jet- setting ways, there is no permanent techno-fix. Airplanes use the same basic engine design they did in 1947. Many of the original 747s from the 1970s are still in the air. While airplane manufacturers speculate on fuel alternatives and engine design breakthroughs, the practical implementation of these developments is decades away at best.
A slow train remains the most efficient (roughly tied with buses) way to travel, unless you consider sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain; trains emit up to seven times as much of it as planes per passenger-kilometre. And if your power source is linked to Colombian coal your environmental impact is immense. Once a train moves faster than 200 kilometres an hour, fuel efficiency goes out the steam-stack.
Monbiot argues that to survive this century, humanity needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions at least 90 percent. We’ll come nowhere near that target if we keep criss-crossing the globe. Despite all the international agreements to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, few have shown any concern with all this flying.
Government response to increased air traffic has generally been expanded airports, more runways and promotional campaigns to attract tourists. It’s like trying to control a vermin population by leaving food out for the newborns.
Government inaction is no surprise—almost no one is demanding reduced air travel. Nations can crank up flight capacity because international emissions reduction agreements exclude international flights—it’s too dang hard to figure out which country takes on which portion of the emissions.
Monbiot’s theory explaining the “moral dissonance about flying” rings true. “It is rather harder to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed,” he writes. Taking the bus to work is one thing, but never seeing Europe? Unthinkable. Especially now that we’ve accumulated what Monbiot calls “love miles”—loved ones in faraway places, necessitating further flights to important events throughout their lives.
Staying close to home is unimaginable in this part of the world, where most of us have had the privilege of flying. But the people most affected by climate change don’t live here; they live where most people never see the inside of a plane.
Even the greenest of my generation have taken world travel for granted. It’s our education—it helps us think globally so we can act locally. But if we’re serious about keeping this species going, we’ll heed Monbiot’s frank words: “If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.”
Chris Benjamin is the author of the Canada Reads long-listed novel Drive-by Saviours
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2010.
“Monbiot argues that to survive this century, humanity needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions at least 90 percent.”
This statement is laughable, it will never happen
Monbiot isn’t wrong, but as nayer suggests, he’s pretty naive if he thinks people will voluntarily stop travelling.
My suggestion is simply to stop subsidizing airlines. The number of subsidies and protections is substantial. You could fill a single-spaced page with simply a list of line items of how the taxpayer supports air travel, starting with construction and maintenance of airports. And in marked contrast to road travel, where there is a good correspondence between user and payer, it’s not the case with air travel that the hit to the pocketbook is fairly spread out amongst all taxpayers. With air travel it is the case that the many substantially subsidize the few, because when all is said and done the majority of people travel infrequently, if at all.
Put the burden of paying for flying on the actual people who fly. This is only fair – it’s the free market and capitalism after all. See what happens when the price of that ticket goes up by a factor of 5 or 10 or 50…problem solved.
People alive today are priviledged in a way that we are the last of our species. Imagine, hundreds of thousands of years of human existence has passed and we are the ones to bring it all crashing down. I flew my last (ever) flight years ago after watching my eldest son graduate from UBC but my tiny gesture to quit flying cold turkey is not enough to save the planet. Alas!
Flying is a privilege. I used to want to be a pilot, but one day in grade 6 day I realized that if I ever wanted to have kids, that I would need to make the world a better place first. I needed to first be convinced it would be possible to produce a human being without that action leading to the net degradation of the environment. Part of this responsibility means not flying. It also means that everything I do is measured against this ideal.
Recently, I began questioning why I have to live with that that ideal constantly hanging over my head. I have come to the conclusion that since I didn’t ask to be born in this society, I am not responsible for its endemic degradation of nature. I do, however, feel a moral duty to humanity in contributing my life towards saving it and all beings from ecological collapse.
Saving the environment is not necessarily about personal sacrifices. It is about societal change, and moving beyond capitalism towards anarcho-primitivist principles. I’m flying to Guatemala this winter to help rebuild homes of Mayan campesinos for a few weeks. Does that make me responsible for a net benefit or net aggravation of the world’s problems?
Tom MacD: good point about societal change versus personal sacrifice. I confess to having had some doubts about personal sacrifice myself when I look around my apartment that I share with my better half, and I realize that even though we live relatively frugally compared to an average family (let alone a wealthy one), that compared to a typical Third World family the two of us are still pounding the planet worse than a hundred or two hundred people in sub-Saharan Africa, say. Makes a person wonder if sorting compost and recyclables isn’t just a useless sop to our First World guilt trips, when deep down we realize that nothing short of living like a monk would really make a difference.
Truth be told I don’t know if flying down and helping Mayan campesinos rebuild their homes is all that useful. You (and all the rest of us) would be doing a much more positive thing if we all decided to live *like* Mayan campesinos, but that ain’t gonna happen.
The notion that we live in a “free-market capitalist” system is at least equally laughable.
anarchyisforlovers: I agree. When I mentioned “free market and capitalism” in my first post, I wasn’t suggesting that we had pure versions of either. We have distorted versions and that’s no secret. What I meant by the comment is that often free market distortions lead to unfortunate consequences, and that the way to get back to a level playing field is to remove the distortions: in this case subsidies and disguised costs.