Flying

23 Mar 2010

I have a carbon footprint the size of Nebraska.

It's a little unfair. I'm a vegetarian*, and apparently that's good. I have no children, also good apparently, and no pets. I don't have a car. Lovely. But I flew to Australia three times in 2009, so I think I would have to live off locally-sourced salad and sleep in a ditch until I'm 77 before I pay that one off.

It's all rather depressing. And not really for me. Air Travel has shrunk the world - the ability to leave your family behind in a different country, work somewhere else and yet still see them at Christmas has sent people criss-crossing around the world leaving a tiny trail of filaments behind them, always connecting them to where they started via many nodal points and making sure they never get lost.

But the world is changing back. It's getting bigger. And I worry about all those people who made life choices on the basis of ease of travel and are beginning to feel a bit like a sun-bather finding out they're on a sand bank whilst the tide flows in. It can't be nice.

I've watched the main parties trying to sort out their policies on this with some interest. The Tories, influenced perhaps by the 'shampoo-crusties' of Plane Stupid, have made a big fuss of targeting air travel in their policies, though in their usual half-arsed way they are only planning to slow the increase in air travel (and I can't help but think part of their anti-plane zeal is due to pricing out all those nasty foreigners they're so concerned about coming here). Labour fucked up when they raised taxes on long-haul flights and did nothing to short-haul flights, despite the fact that mile for mile short haul flights are more damaging** and - and this is the important bit - can be achieved by other transport methods. It didn't come across as the most coherent policy I've ever come across, but it does explains their passion for an extra runway at Heathrow - more long-haul flights means many times more the £20 levy. Help the treasury or help the environment - fly to Honolulu, your country needs you.

Maybe all the flying is because "the rich are flying more". Maybe it's because of the family from Pakistan who have relatives in Dubai, London and Seattle. Maybe it's because as long as you have no luggage and a good deal of patience you can fly Ryanair to Sweden for the price of a Ryanair sandwich***. I don't know. But restraining air travel - however necessary - will mess up more people's lives than almost any other change we're going to have to make in the years to come.

* there was a piece in The Guardian recently that "debunked" this, claiming that dairy is more "carbon intensive" and therefore that lacto-oovo veggies are destroying the world. Yes, McDonald's is cutting down the rain-forest to make the little squares of processed cheese for its burgers. Daft. Especially when you reread the piece and realise they are saying that hard cheese is more intensive than chicken. Is there a vegetarian on the planet who has ever claimed that their beneficial environmental impact is down to all the fucking chickens that no longer need to be kept in a shed in Norfolk? I don't think so.
** 60% worse per mile. But of course, but the time you have flown 600% times as far this is a bit like a builder fucking your house up so badly that they have to charge you for an extra year's work but telling you they'll give you a 10% discount on their daily rate. I bet they'd do that, too.
*** about £25