Guardian Unlimited
January 2007
Warning
IT WAS ONLY a couple of years ago that cheap flights made owning a weekend home in Tuscany an attractive option. "It's only £40 return!" the Chianti set would trill while swapping horror stories about pig-sty conversions.
Now those same chatterers have a new mantra: "Can't fly darling, my carbon-footprint's killing us all. It's Eurostar now - we've bought a barn near Bruges."
Climate change has changed forever how we view flying. Suddenly, getting on a plane at the drop of hat seems as morally defensible as clubbing seals.
But that doesn't change the fact that most of us still want to do it, and some of us still need to do it. Flying has opened up the planet, and it is not just that we have a passion for the beaches of Thailand or the bazzars of Goa, or that we no longer think twice about flying to Japan to sign some important documents, but 4.9 million people in the UK were born overseas and, for many of these citizens, flying is the only way to go home to see the family.
While the argument about the environmental impact of flying is watertight, what to do about it is far from clear.
Environmental campaigners and the aviation industry agree on the science.
It goes like this. Planes burn fossil fuels, which creates carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas behind climate change.
Climate change doesn't just mean melting ice caps and rising sea levels. It means more extreme weather events, shifts in the oceans currents and changes in the Earth's trade winds. It means people who live on the margins of environmental sustainability - 90 million people in Bangladesh for example - will suffer most.
Planes are particularly bad because as well as generating CO2 (which lasts for 100 years) they create ozone, methane and form contrails (condensation trails), and may increase high-altitude cirrus clouds - all of which contribute to climate change.
These combine to mean the cumulative effect of flying a plane at altitude is twice as bad as burning the same amount of fossil fuel at ground level.
Taking into account this altitude effect, aviation accounts for about 11% of UK climate change impact, and - according to the European Commission - emissions from EU international air transport are increasing faster than from any other sector.
Where campaigners and the corporates disagree is in what to do about it.
Compared to 1994, UK residents took 89% more international leisure trips by air in 2004 (IPS/Oxford University Environmental Change Institute, 2006) and passenger movements are forecast to grow to around 470m by 2030, a rise of 106% from 2005 levels (DfT, Oxford University Environmental Change Institute, 2006). Yet to reach the government's target of a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050, emissions must reduce by about 3% per annum. This is unsustainable growth, goes the argument, and must be stopped.
There is no technological fix either say the anti-plane campaigners- engine technology is not going to change dramatically, bio-fuels won't work, and distances flown are not going to get shorter.
The aviation industry, perhaps surprisingly, doesn't really take issue with any of these arguments. There is "no alternative" to fossil fuel, says Sustainable Aviation, an industry group which represents 90% of the UK airline industry.
And while heralding new technology that will see CO2 emissions cut by 50% per passenger kilometre by 2020, the same body admits that overall the aviation industry's output of greenhouse gases will not go down. "Technology advances will not offset emissions increases," warns the group's 2005 strategy.
Other developments like towing-to-take-off instead of sitting with the engines running, or a European one-sky policy which would stop planes having to dog-leg through dozens of different airspaces, will see CO2 emissions drop on a per-flight basis, but they won't be enough to offset the overall increase of an ever-expanding fleet.
However, in its defence the industry points out that overall, aviation only counts for 2% of worldwide emissions. Road transport counts for 25% they say, power generation another 25% - try driving an electric car and switching to ecotricity before jumping all over us.
So what is to be done? The aviation industry has pinned its hopes on joining the EU carbon-trading scheme - a set amount of carbon credits are traded between those who save and those who spend. This allows polluting industries to 'offset' against cleaner industries. Campaigners dismiss that solution as "pushing food around a plate pretending to eat it", but if we must continue to fly, then it is better than nothing. In December 2006 the European Commission adopted a proposal for legislation to include aviation in the emissions-trading scheme from 2011.
However, we can't rely on the aviation industry to do our offsetting for us. Every time we take a flight, just as every time we drive the car or leave the lights on, we have to be responsible for our own carbon emissions. A private contribution to a good emission-reduction scheme makes a very real contribution to countering the negative affect you have on the environment.
The days of jumping onto a plane guilt free then, are over. Taking a flight, just like driving a car, switching on a light or heating your home with gas is an environmentally-loaded act. From now on, we can't say we didn't know.
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