James Webster’s Weblog

To fly or not to fly, that is the question (that very few of us are asking). It’s a questions I’ve not fully answered myself but I’ve at least come to a localised stability point: No more personal flights.

I don’t particularly enjoy flying or travelling in general. Arriving I like, but I’ve never been able to enjoy the getting there. The experience of checking in, security, waiting around, boarding and sitting in a tiny seat (I’ve yet to fly business class for any distance - perhaps now I never will) followed by foreign immigration - not my idea of fun. Where do the Americans recruit their immigration officials? America if full of cheery, pleasant people yet they somehow seem to find enough miserable, humourless, people to staff their entry stations. Actually they don’t seem to find enough - if they had enough I wouldn’t have to queue for an hour every time I arrived in Seattle. Anyway I don’t like flying - even though they give you free alcohol.

Flying with children - let’s not even go there. I’ve heard stories of pleasant flights, but I’ve heard that ‘I only need one pair of shoes and it won’t take long’ and I’ve a friend who’s working on a perpetual motion machine in his spare time - I don’t believe any of you.

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The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. St Augustine

I’m not sure St Augustine was referring to The Maldives but that’s where I’d like to go. It’s a holiday that Rachel and I once promised ourselves.

However I can’t think about that holiday without coming back to something I read on Tom’s blog:

“Consider this. You’re in an airtight room (the environment), with a number of plants (your share of natural carbon-hoovers). Getting food and clean water into the room takes oxygen out of the air. Heating the room also takes oxygen out of the air. An artificial scenario, but then pretend it’s some sort of dream. The type where you can’t just wish for a pony, or more plants.”

We’ve been brought up with a certain understanding that we take more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. I don’t recall air being one of those scarce resources. If the science is only half right (and it seems we are finally coming to consensus) then carbon emissions need to be limited world-wide. If there were an even, binding distribution, an allocation to every person then it would be clear that we cannot ‘afford’ the carbon costs of flying. How about an uneven distribution heavily tilted towards the developed world? We probably still couldn’t afford the carbon.

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“Telling people to plant trees [to solve climate change] is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.” - Oliver Rackham

There is always offsetting. I think offsetting is better than nothing but it’s not really solving the problem. See CheatNeutral and watch their excellent documentary on youtube.

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Probably the single most polluting thing you or I will ever do is step on to a plane. Take that tempting return flight to, say, Thailand, and you become immediately responsible for about six tonnes of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere - three times more than is likely to come from any other activity you do in the year, including driving and heating your house. This is why aviation is the most bitter and divisive issue in environmental politics today. from Mark Lynas the newstatesman

So no more personal flights. Forever? I just don’t know. We have good friends in New York and those white beaches and cloudless skies are still waiting. If I do fly again it will be with a very keen awareness that what I’m doing is expensive and that it’s not my money that I’m spending.

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