Flying straight into climate chaos

Published in Sustainability magazine, Spring 2007

Climate change’s fastest growing contributor requires urgent action, and is being fueled by the banality of modern living, writes Lenny Antonelli

Last October, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke announced that he was considering “refusing to tour on environmental grounds”. If he’s as serious about environmental issues as he appears to be, his band should stop flying to their gigs immediately.

According to the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, 35,000 trees would need to be planted and maintained for 100 years to offset the carbon emissions generated by the band’s Hail to the Thief tour. Although these figures took into consideration the monumental volume of emissions generated by fans traveling to the gigs, the carbon footprint of simply flying the five members of the band to the various venues was huge. It amounted to 54 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or roughly the same level of emissions as would result from heating an average Irish home for around seven to ten years.
Flying is the fastest growing contributor to climate change. Currently, aviation accounts for about three per cent of global emissions, which might not seem alarming. But this figure is set to rise quickly. Since 1960, air passenger traffic has grown at almost nine per cent annually. It is difficult to predict future trends, but in its milestone report on aviation and climate change in 1999, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used a model which predicted the burning of aircraft fuel (another way of looking at the growth in air traffic, while taking into account likely increases in fuel efficiency) to be 6.6 times greater in 2050 than it was in 1990.
However, this doesn’t tell the full story. Because it is released high in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide emitted from aircraft, unlike that released from other sources, has a ‘radiative forcing ratio’ of around 2.7, meaning that the global warming effect of aircraft is about 2.7 times greater than that of its carbon dioxide alone. Take this into account along with the likely future growth of the industry, and the gravity of the problem quickly becomes clear.
Current research suggests that aviation emissions alone will exceed EU carbon targets by 2050. Essentially, this means that if air traffic continues to grow as projected and we still intend to meet our emissions targets, all other sectors will be forced to be become totally carbon neutral in order to accommodate planes. Even by 2030, aviation would exceed half of our allowed carbon emissions. What’s perhaps more frightening is that these figures take into consideration likely improvements in fuel efficiency and engine design.
As for the possibilities of a new, clean aviation fuel, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change summed up the scientific consensus: “It appears unlikely that any alternative to kerosene as an aviation fuel will be in widespread use by 2030.” So what is the significance of this? Well, if unabated, climate change is predicated to shrink global economies by between five and twenty per cent. It could cause up to 200 million people to become refugees through drought or flooding, and lead to a 30 per cent decline in annual water availability in sub Saharan Africa. Tens of millions more people would be exposed to tropical diseases. Between 20 and 300 million people would be forced to move due to flooding, with an estimated 145 to 220 million at risk of falling below the $2 per day poverty line. Coral reefs could disappear completely within 100 years, while a 3C temperature rise, as forecast in the latest IPCC report, would threaten between 20 and 50 per cent of species with extinction.
Clearly, urgent action is needed, and due to the rapid rate of the industry’s growth, aviation should be near the top of the list of industries we target. So can we continue to fly? The Tyndall Centre concludes that aviation must be halted at current levels, or even perhaps reduced, if the EU is to meet its emissions targets. According to the latest research, however, the EU’s targets are not far-reaching enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. If we are lucky, we may still be able to travel by air very infrequently, but the days of weekend trips to Prague, Venice and Rome must surely be drawing to an end. It is hard to justify shopping trips to New York, weekend breaks in European cities, or domestic flying, when the emissions from the planes we fly in are the fastest growing contributor to the cause of drought in Ethiopia and serious flooding in Bangladesh.
Currently, there are no national or international plans to reverse, stop or even manage the growth in aviation. Rather, it is being encouraged. The UK is set to add the equivalent capacity of an additional Heathrow airport to its aviation infrastructure every five years as it undergoes a major airport expansion program. Here in Ireland, minister for transport Martin Cullen said last year that, in regards to aviation, his department had an “unambiguous mandate for growth”. And this is despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluding that “if (the) infrastructure was not available, the growth in traffic…would not materialise”.
If we were to accept Ben Franklin’s definition of insanity as doing something over and over again and expecting a different result, surely this would qualify. While some might suggest that the rapid growth in air tourism is a shining example of the wonderful freedoms that living in a modern, developed and wealthy industrialised economy offers; there is also validity in the argument that much of this growth is fueled by a sense of claustrophobia, discontent and boredom that living in such a society causes.
What awaits people when they enter the working world is essentially a life of concrete suburban banality: living in identikit, featureless housing estates, driving to and from jobs that are highly unsatisfying for most, and spending little or no time connecting with our community, nature, or the world around us – essentially the very things that allow us to feel free and human without needing to travel halfway around the world and sit on a beach. Paradoxically, here in western countries it is often those who have flown to far flung places who are best at empathising with and fighting for the rights of the those living in extreme poverty on other continents – the people most likely to suffer the effects of flying and climate change.
A redefinition of our values is needed; we can make protecting the long-term well-being of humanity and the planet more important to us than an impulsive and ultimately destructive urge to “escape”.
Perhaps, when it comes down to it, a big part of the solution to halting the growth in aviation emissions won’t be new fuels, better engine efficiency or alternative forms of transport, but the adoption of a seemingly simpler, but possibly far more personally challenging strategy. It was best summed up by author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot in a discussion of the potential for space tourism. His logic applies equally to the era of cheap flights: “Doubtless space tourism agencies will seek to make us feel inadequate and dull if we choose to stay behind. They will broker the dissatisfaction that holiday companies trade in today when trying to persuade people to visit India or the United States. We will go, as we go on inter-continental journeys, in the hope of finding something that we have never defined in the course of a quest we have never examined. And, as ever, the thing we are looking for will be inside us all along.”