It's time we had the talk...

It's time we had the talk...

Since I'm only 3000 miles away from breaking last year's record (of 35000 miles flown), and have a few more flights coming up during the second half of 2018, I'd say it's high time we had the talk about flying and the environment. Doesn't it bother me? Of course it does. And that's a good thing. It would be alarming if I flew this much and never gave the environment a thought.

But let's take a look at how bad flying is, and what could (and should) be done about it.


How bad is it?
First and foremost, flying is bad for the environment - there's no two ways about it. But how bad is it? According to The Guardian, air transport causes 1,7 % of the total carbon emissions worldwide. The article is from 2011 however, so the number is probably higher by now. The effect is also a little higher than the number would suggest, as much of the emission from aircraft is made higher up in the atmosphere, where it does more damage. But 1,7 % is still a pretty low figure. Especially if you compare it to some other industries. According to the same article, agriculture causes 13,8 % of the emissions. 5,4 % if you only look at livestock and manure. So eating a steak can actually be worse for the environment than flying. Another article from the same newspaper states that 1 kg (2.2lb) beef from a British hill farm generates more carbon dioxide "than a passenger flying from London to New York".

Flying is also often better than driving a car - at least when you're a solo traveller. Swedish airline BRA states that driving an "environmentally friendly" car (now that's an oxymoron if ever I saw one) emits more carbon than taking a ¾ full ATR72 the same distance.

So flying is bad. But not all critics are vegetarians, if you catch my drift. My wife and I eat significantly less meat today than we did a few years ago, and instead eat more fish and vegetables. That's one way of making your carbon footprint smaller. Besides, some countries depend on tourism, and to many of these countries (such as remote islands), flying is the only viable option. So while flying is bad, some flying is also crucial to the local economy of certain countries.


What measures are being taken?
New airplanes use a lot less fuel than older ones. Both the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are built using carbon fibre instead of aluminum, making them less heavy. The fuel efficiency is significantly increased, using less fuel per passenger.

Swedish airline BRA is the first in the world to offer biofuel on their flights. Their goal is that all of their domestic flights should be fossil free by 2030. Other airlines, such as KLM, promote offsetting through their "CO2ZERO" programme, where you can make a contribution to reforestation or other environmental causes as you book your flight.

Another positive aspect is that the "Essential Air Service" programme in the US is on its way out. I wrote about this previously in regard to domestic flights in Sweden, where the government unfortunately has issued so called traffic duty on certain routes.


What should be done?
First of all, people should fly less. Second, the airline industry needs to continue to make their carbon footprint smaller. Some of the steps mentioned above are great moves, and hopefully more airlines will follow.

One way to make people fly less is to penalise companies that fly on routes where the alternatives (such as taking the train or (better still) having phone or Skype conferences instead) are feasible. Many of the busiest routes around the world are short haul flights, where a huge amount of the passengers travel for work. The busiest routes from Stockholm are Copenhagen (CPH) and Oslo (OSL) - two cities that are quite close to Stockholm. 11 out of the 12 busiest passenger air routes globally are domestic, such as Tokyo-Osaka or Rio-São Paulo. 11 out of the 12 busiest passenger air routes in Europe are domestic as well.

The busiest international route is Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, where there were a staggering 2500 flights a month making the short 184 mile hop (296 km) between March 2017 and February 2018. Now, there's not really a market for high speed trains in Sweden, but imagine if the Singaporean and Malaysian governments decided to build a high speed train between Singapore and KL instead...

Measures should also be taken to simplify booking international train tickets. If I wanted to, I could book flight tickets between almost any two cities on the globe, and it would only take a few minutes. As an example, it took me less than half a minute to find domestic flights between Kumasi and Accra in Ghana. 9 (!) different travel agencies can help me buy the tickets if I'm unable to book directly through the airline. When it comes to train tickets, it's almost impossible to navigate the different websites (and in Sweden, taking the train is almost always more expensive than flying).

So if people flew less (especially for work), if well functioning railroads were built between some of the busiest travel hubs, and if booking train tickets (domestic as well as international) was made easier, the carbon footprint of the airline industry could be even smaller than it is today.