Global climate breakdown and ecological crisis are forcing us to re-think many things. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that turning down a straw in our cocktails, recycling our milk bottles or turning the tap off while we brush our teeth is not quite going to cut it when it comes to avoiding sheer disaster. Instead there are going to have to be wholesale changes to how we organise our society and how we live our lives. It is a difficult pill to swallow that one of these changes has to be the amount of travelling we can do.
Everyone knows that air travel is ridiculously carbon intensive and, along with switching to plant-based diets and moving to a renewable energy supplier, not taking flights is one of the easiest things we can do to decrease our personal impact on the environment. The aspirational nature of travel, and how it has been sold as such a virtuous activity, make it appealing to the young and the green. Get out and see the world, expand your mind and broaden your horizons. Such platitudes are commonplace, and massively appeal to people of an environmental persuasion. In an age of rampant consumerism, spending money on experiences is seen as an antidote to buying unnecessary things. Take only pictures, leave only footsteps is a solid mantra for not damaging the place you visit. But it doesn’t take into account the journey you took to get there. The airports, security checks and immigration desks don’t feature in the Instagram posts. You can flaunt your experiences, your sensitivity to other cultures and your environmental credentials on social media for the world to see, carefully edited to look idyllic. This feeds the cycle of aspiration and the production of greenhouse gases that goes along with it. This is why giving up flying and international travel is so hard, even for people who are otherwise massively invested in the environmental movement.
It is difficult to tell people that they have to reduce their quality of life and stop doing something that is now so ubiquitous as to be considered a right, not an indulgence. The falling price of an activity that many people enjoy, taking it out of the hands of a few and making it widely available, is certainly a good thing. The issue is not with the wider availability of air travel, it would be wrong to demonise people for taking advantage of the opportunity for cultural enrichment, or even just for the chance of some sun. The easiest way to reduce the amount of people flying would be to tax the activity more heavily. Making air travel prohibitively expensive would massively decrease its net impact of the environment yes, but regressing to a system where wealth buys you access is surely not the right way. The problem is not with the increasing availability of the activity, but with the activity itself. A tax is not the correct way forwards in my view, although I will not pretend to have the answer. A start would be to stop subsidising domestic air travel. Any policy to reduce reliance on air travel has to go hand in hand with an improvement in other public transport and nationalising the railways, which are a joke in the north of England, is surely the low-hanging fruit.
Whilst it is possible to replace domestic air travel with much less carbon-intensive alternatives, this is not the case with international air travel. Stopping this will be much more difficult, as it needs a fundamental change of mindset, and a recasting of desires and aspirations within our society. In the same way that people get defensive when it is suggested that changing their diet might be a good idea for the environment, they do the same when it is suggested that the planet cannot afford their annual holiday, even if they can. But it is not progress to blindly continue with an activity that contributes to environmental breakdown, even if we have been given the hard sell that it is.