To fly or not to fly?

Chris Brazier

This chapter originally appeared as an article in New Internationalist magazine (Issue 409, 1 March 2008), www.newint.org

Chris Brazier started his journalistic career at the rock music weekly Melody Maker in the late 1970s. Since 1984 he has been a co-editor at New Internationalist Publications, working on its monthly magazine about global justice issues as well as on its books. He writes regularly for UNICEF's State of the World's Children report and has authored books on topics as wide-ranging as The No-Nonsense Guide to World History and Trigger Issues: Football.

The plane is over the English Channel when the pilot's voice crackles over the loudspeakers. 'Just to warn you that there's been a bit of trouble at Heathrow with people protesting about the impact of air travel on climate change. Nothing to worry about, but when we land you may see a bigger police presence at the airport than you would normally expect.' The tone is jocular and clearly intended to draw us all together into a kind of community of 'sensible' travellers who might have to suffer the disruption of 'extremist' campaigners.

So what exactly am I doing here, in August 2007, given that I feel a much greater sense of kinship with the Climate Camp protesters below than with the pilot's cosy set of assumptions? It's a good question. My family and I are on our way back from a holiday in Italy. Last time we went, a few years ago, we drove there and back, via Luxembourg and Switzerland, taking our time and making many stop-offs on the way to break the journey. This time when we booked, almost a year in advance, we knew our holiday would be squeezed between work commitments and being back for our daughter's exam results. So, not without qualms, we took advantage of ludicrously cheap flights that would get us there in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days.

I tell you this to indicate my starting point when I began to research for this piece – for all that I bike to work, compost like crazy and am vegetarian, I am far from being in the environmental vanguard, and certainly don't feel able to lecture people about what they should or should not do.

Given this, I was not exactly burning to pick up the topic of ethical travel. I had no problem considering the effects of tourism on the Majority World (the so-called 'developing world'). But since most tourism depends on air travel, I knew I was likely to find myself in the unenviable position of having to offer readers some guidance on when flying is acceptable and when it isn't. And the more I sounded people out, the more my suspicions were confirmed. People are concerned and looking for guidance on an issue which has leapt to public attention in recent years – at least in Britain, where the debate about flying rages much hotter than it does in Australasia or North America.

Mind-boggling statistics

My early research left me shocked by the statistics on aviation emissions. Put simply, jet aircraft not only emit carbon from vast quantities of kerosene fuel, they also do it at high altitudes, where it has a much greater warming effect than it would in the lower atmosphere. In addition, jets emit other greenhouse gases, including nitrous oxide and water vapour ('contrails'). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the net effect of all these emissions from jet aircraft at 2.7 times the carbon consumed in the fuel. An individual's share of carbon emitted on a return flight from London to New York (equivalent to 1,700 kg of CO2) exceeds the carbon emitted by six months' worth of modest driving in an average car in the USA (equivalent to 1,650 kg of CO2).

How such statistics are calculated is always a contentious issue. But the exact numbers are less interesting than the broad-brush comparisons: you can easily dump more carbon into the atmosphere from one return flight than from the gas and electricity you use in your house for an entire year. This was, to be frank, a mind-boggling discovery for me, which couldn't help but challenge my attitude to flying. Travel has played an enormous part in my life. I cannot easily conceive what kind of person I would be, had I not been able to board an aeroplane. But I do recognize that the profound implications of climate change (and the fight to prevent it) are going to force us all to take stock of our lives and challenge all our assumptions. Just how far, I wonder, are we prepared to go in challenging the flying culture?

My tentative proposal to the New Internationalist editorial team was that we should oppose the expansion of aviation – especially the development of new airports or runways – and encourage readers to reduce the amount they fly. But we should stop well short of calling for an end to all holiday flights.

A great deal of heat was generated in the discussion that ensued, but not a lot of light. It soon became plain that the issue of flying is a particularly thorny one, in which emotions are perhaps too readily engaged. And this was despite the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, there was no one in the room arguing that the magazine should rule out altogether flying for leisure or experience. One or two people argued that it would be so impossible to pin down reliable estimates of the emissions of various forms of transport that we would be treading on dodgy ground even to enter the flying debate.

There was also an argument that for the New Internationalist to concentrate its attention on individual behaviour – when and whether people should be travelling by plane – would be a mistake. There are much more important battles to be fought in the war on climate change, ran this strand of thought, than that of encouraging people to think about their 'carbon footprint'. I invited one of my editorial colleagues, Adam Ma'anit, to lay out this...