"Help me! My husband doesn't want to fly!"
I recently saw a post on a large WhatsApp group from a woman asking for advice. She wanted to fly on holiday, but her husband did not, due to the high carbon footprint. What should she do? The responses covered a range of opinions and statistics. Many were nuanced, but plenty were strongly on one side or the other - essentially saying either, ‘he’s talking rubbish and spoiling your fun - don’t listen to him’, or ‘he has a very valid point - we should be trying to fly a lot less.’
On the ‘go flying’ side, responses included:
Tell him flying is only 2% of global emissions, so it’s tiny really, it’ll make no difference.
If you want to fly somewhere, you shouldn’t let him stop you - if he feels bad about it he can choose not to come, or he can offset his footprint by going vegan for a year.
The plane is going to fly anyway whether he’s on it or not - he might as well get on it.
Does he drive a car? Modern aeroplanes are very efficient and the emissions are about the same as driving.
Is he really as worried about climate change as he says he is? He has decided to have children, which causes a bigger carbon footprint than pretty much any other choice you can make. (!)
And here are some responses from the opposite end:
One person’s decision not to fly may not prevent a flight from happening, but if we all cut down on our flying there will be fewer flights - airlines will not run empty planes.
Choosing not to fly is the easiest way for people like us to take a big cut from own carbon footprints.
Needless to say, I identify more with the second set of opinions. What most of the statements on the pro-flying side have in common is that they have some element of truth, but they fail to see (or perhaps avoid) the big picture.
Driving vs. Flying
What if we look closer at the statement that emissions from flying are roughly the same as from driving? Although it is true to say that carbon emissions from flying can be roughly the same as from driving a car over the same distance, I would argue that, in most cases, that is a fairly meaningless comparison. Why? Because flights open up the possibility of travelling distances that we would hardly ever consider in a car, especially for leisure travel.
How far we choose to travel is influenced to a very large extent by how long it takes, and flying enables us to travel much further in a given amount of time. That is why, in my view, the biggest problem with aeroplanes in terms of climate change is also their greatest strength: their speed.
Here’s an example to show how the speed of an aircraft affects the choices a family might make, and the emissions created as a result:
Ten hours is probably about the maximum time most people would wish to spend travelling for a week’s holiday. Starting from, say, Edinburgh, and factoring in transfers and queues at the airport, a ten-hour journey by aeroplane could take you to Tenerife, a distance of over 2,000 miles. If you chose to drive somewhere, instead of flying, ten hours in a car on a reasonable journey might get you about 500 miles, which would get you from Edinburgh to Cornwall.
500 miles in an average family car should use about 9 gallons of fuel, so if the car contains a family of four, that’s less than 2.5 gallons per person. An A320 will burn, at a conservative estimate, 2,300 gallons on a flight to Tenerife. If the aircraft is 90% full (which would be above average), each passenger is responsible for 14 gallons, over five times more fuel per passenger than the car.1
Over five times the fuel means more than five times the emissions. More than five times the warming effect on our planet, and, if you include a reasonable estimate of the non-CO2 effects, that factor of five could be a factor of ten. More than ten times the cost to fragile ecosystems and people in vulnerable parts of the world who are already suffering severe consequences from climate change, and over ten times the cost to us and our children in the near future.
So why are we still choosing to fly?
For thousands of years, past generations of humans did not have the option to travel thousands of miles in a day. Few ventured far from where they were born (but I expect that many of them still managed to live full and contented lives). The invention and development of aircraft means that we have a new possibility: we can travel thousands of miles in a day quite easily.
We can, so we do - it seems to be as simple as that. It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum’s character, Ian Malcolm, questions the wisdom of doing something just because it’s possible: ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should!’ When presented with an exciting possibility, our minds tend to overvalue the benefits and undervalue the risks or costs. We like the idea of travelling far and wide, and the environmental damage is easy to overlook if you don’t care to see it. And when irritating voices, from real-life Ian Malcolms or our own consciences, question our choices, we are eager to find excuses to justify them. And then possibly find safety in numbers by sharing those excuses on WhatsApp groups.
From my privileged seat at the very front of the airliner, surrounded by big windows, I got to see what most passengers do not: the places we flew over on our way to wherever it was we were going. In the last few years of my flying career especially, those views of golden sandy beaches, cities, lakes and snow-capped mountains kept prompting the question: could we not just stop and enjoy here? Do we really need to fly any further?
I would hesitate to go as far as to say that the world would be a better place if aeroplanes didn’t exist. The benefits they can bring are tremendous. But so is the damage. Unless we can manage to restrain ourselves, and use aeroplanes responsibly, I fear there might come a day when almost all of us really do wish that they had never been invented.
So what do we do?
We know because we have done it in the past, both individually and on a societal level, that we care capable of overcoming strong urges for things which give quick gratification, but we know will be harmful in the long run. We are much more successful at doing so when we acknowledge how very difficult this can be, and therefore give ourselves extra incentives to do the right things, which don’t simply rely on will-power or moral values. The best example is probably smoking. With law changes on where smoking is allowed, high tax on tobacco, a ban on tobacco advertising, and an information campaign highlighting the dangers, we accomplished major, positive change, and we have been reaping the benefits for decades: cleaner air and better health for everyone. Could, should a similar strategy be used to reduce the harm from flying?
My personal belief is that significantly reducing the amount we fly should take much less will-power than giving up smoking - there is no nicotine to artificially trigger a dopamine release. Dopamine is still a factor though - we can experience a rush when we book a holiday. But how hard would it be to find an equivalent thrill that doesn’t cause as much harm as booking a holiday thousands of miles away? Can we get the same thrill from booking a holiday within a five hundred miles, or ideally less?
The tricky bit is that these holidays might not feel as glamourous. But why shouldn’t they? Have we really already enjoyed everything there is to enjoy within, say, a five-hundred mile radius? Or do we simply believe that the further we go from where we live, the better our adventure will be? Why?
Of course we have a natural curiosity about far-off parts of the world, and that’s a wonderful thing. Of course we should be curious, and want to explore. The challenge is to turn more of our curiosity a bit closer to home, and get excited by exploring places we can reach without causing disproportionate harm to the very planet we are so eager to enjoy. That’s why I am so excited about finding stories from people who have infectious enthusiasm for local travel, and really believe it can be more rewarding than the kind of far-off travel sold to us by airlines. There may well be an argument for displaying hard-hitting evidence of the environmental cost of air-travel on flight booking pages, but let’s see if we can make the change without that!
I have been quite critical of aviation so far, but in an upcoming blog, I will write about how lessons learned in aviation could still help us avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Aviation has done an amazing job of making itself an incredibly safe industry, and other industries have benefitted from the wisdom that has been learned in reducing aircraft accidents. The same wisdom can be applied in avoiding a climate disaster, and I will take a closer look at that, from a pilot’s point of view, soon.
- Assuming an average of 55mpg, from my own experience of driving a medium to large diesel family car. Aircraft fuel is based on 4.5kg per nautical mile, which is based on personal experience and guidance issued to A320 pilots for fuel planning purposes. ↩︎
