Richard Begbie from Canberra discusses the environmental cost of air travel. Back in August 2008! On ABC Radio National’s Ockam’s Razor.
It was a delicate moment in an otherwise happy session during last year’s Science Week at the ANU. The British environmentalist Jeremy Leggett was speaking, and a week or two later The Science Show broadcast his talk. It was a lively conversation with a clearly engaged audience, and ranged far and wide across the coal economy, peak oil, and especially solar energy. No great surprises there, given the passion that Leggett’s UK company brings to its work in solar power.
But well into the session, ANU researcher John Rogers noted quietly that Leggett had presumably flown from England to speak to this meeting, and he wondered what the great environmentalist thought about the air travel problem.
As well he might. To attend a dinner party in Melbourne, or a barbecue in Sydney, or indeed any social event where talk amongst the moderately affluent flows free, is to embark on a Cook’s tour. The dreary Slide Evenings of the 1960s pale in comparison . Everyone has just been, or is shortly to go, on another trip. Whether for business or research or pleasure, or family, three times out of four it will involve air travel. So for anyone who has given a moment’s thought to these issues, social occasions have become a minefield. Do I say what I really think, or do I shut up and keep my friends?
The facts seem clear enough. Aeroplanes currently add around 750-million tonnes of carbondioxide per year to the atmosphere’s swelling burden. In the process they burn 250-million tonnes of a non-renewable resource, which by common consensus is fast approaching practical extinction. For every nine barrels of oil we consume, we discover one. At our present consumption rate we will use the same amount of oil in the next 25 years as has been used in the last 150. Any rational species would be measuring out this clearly limited resource with care. Especially it’d be using much of its vanishing gold to build a seriously sustainable infrastructure, with a wisely articulated social structure in parallel, against the day the wells shut down.
Alas, we are not that rational species. Our black gold goes rather into a weekend in Bali, or a Very Important colloquium in Vienna, or even a flying visit to the new grandchild in Chicago. Isn’t it worth pausing to think what options might be open to that grandchild half a century from now? He or she may not be so glad that we fiddled in flight while the oil burned.
By its nature human flight is about as energy-inefficient a mode of travel as we have devised. As Ivan Illich noted years ago, the only form of locomotion on the planet more energy-hungry than a man in an aeroplane is a man in a helicopter. To lift the aeroplane as well as its human cargo 9 or 10 kilometres vertically above ground and hold them there, requires massive energy reserves before a single cross-country metre has been gained. And unfortunately, at that great height the emissions become potent. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us the actual greenhouse effect of aircraft emissions at 30,000 feet is 2.7 times that suggested by their raw CO2 emission figure.
So back at the ANU, John Rogers knew he had raised a tough question. He actually went on to explain that he had a particular problem in the form of two children living on the other side of the world. ‘Yeah’, breathed an extremely sympathetic Leggett, ‘Yeah, love miles, as they’re called.’ Here was a phrase new to this listener. It seems that as people scatter (by plane) across the planet, their families will inevitably follow for multiple visits, clocking up ‘love miles’, along of course with frequent flyer points for later trips.
Jeremy went on to explain that for this reason he is a great believer in video conferencing. No one asked the obvious question – why he wasn’t himself appearing at the ANU in cyber-version – partly because he went straight on to explain that with his Japanese wife he would be dropping in on relatives on the way back to London. ‘We too’, he said, ‘have to do our love miles.’
Now I have absolutely no desire to bag Jeremy Leggett. He has committed his life to the energy problem in ways that put the rest of us to shame. But much does depend on a close look at those two small words ‘have to’: ‘we have to do our love miles’, he said. With this weary aside, Leggett embraced and included his questioner in a select group of air travellers who, unlike the rest of profligate humanity, have no option. They simply must fly, and often.
The problem with this is that once one group sees its travel as inevitable, why shouldn’t others? What of those whose job or research requires their regular presence in remote corners? What of our countless celebrities whose media-anointed hubris declares them another special exception? And what of a billion Chinese who have watched the rest of us do what we like? The list of exceptions ends up including, well, almost everyone.
It was different once. For more than half the period of European settlement the vast majority of new Australians crossed the world but once. Even as recently as 50 years ago the few people who ‘travelled’ saw it as the single experience of a lifetime. They saved and planned for years, they travelled by boat, and spent long periods savouring every exotic moment of this one-time pilgrimage.
And now their baby-boomer children pile astronomic sums into already bulging super and pension funds, in part to ensure the safety margin of at least a couple of overseas trips a year in retirement. It is an unprecedented escalation in habit.
The tyranny of distance has become a quaint historic fact, a strand in folk memory. As the telegraph gave way to telephone, radio and satellite communications, that tyranny was miraculously dispelled. No longer did we have to plan and hope. Instant contact without arduous and polluting travel lay within our grasp. For a moment or two around say 1990, thoughtful people even hoped that the internet and the video-conference might actually reduce our addiction to physically cross-crossing the globe.
But like that other whimsy, the paperless office, this too has turned out to be a dream. Air travel has in fact been catalysed, and its exponential growth seems headed for an unchecked future.
And all the while our tacit complicity in a seemingly intractable problem is turning air transport into the delinquent younger brother of an already dysfunctional climate-affecting family.
We can’t look seriously to passing governments, who are disinclined to threat the tourist, or any other, industry. Nor can we look to technical advance in oil-powered flight. The wriggle room for improvement is less in aviation than almost any other energy-related sector.
More efficient engines, better aircraft design, perhaps even carbon offsets may help, but only a little. Any serious response will require much more than tinkering. The ‘solutions’ put forward by the travel industry, already verge on the farcical. A friend recently went to book a flight within Australia. The ticketing website asked if she would care to pay the carbon-offset on her flight. Yes, she responded at once, and awaited the impost on her $150, 800km flight. It came to precisely 89-cents. This is beyond funny.
It’s true that coal-fired power stations, deforestation, and the combined engines of land transport all produce more greenhouse gases than aeroplanes. But these are mostly used for more basic needs, and do attract at least some pressure and opportunity for change, as that Science Week discussion demonstrated.
Our capacity to reach across the globe has been perhaps the phenomenon of the last 250 years. Human ingenuity is almost as stunning as human myopia. If pressed we are certainly clever enough to envisage and effect sane solutions to this as well as other aspects of the climate dilemma. The problem unfortunately, lies not with intelligence or even the visionary mind, but with the human will.
Here lies the key, not merely to solutions, but to a happier end to our gloomy tale. If the will is there, radical change in habit will turn out to have advantages way beyond a cleaner and healthier planet. There are fascinations to fill a dozen lifetimes far closer to home than New York or Antarctica. With a simple telescope and our superb night sky you can travel to the edge of time itself. If people stay at home, local communities might actually revive, and begin to thrive in new ways. And the restless spirit of a consumer age might find other far more fruitful and fulfilling forms of expression. How often have you heard the truism of the returned traveller ‘It makes you realise Australia is the best place in the world’? Multiple overseas trips seem a heavy price to pay for so simple a discovery.
Flying began as a high adventure of the human imagination. It has become the trivial addiction of a bloated consumer society. Any quit program will involve similar adventure of the spirit and imagination at least as fertile.
One thing seems certain. The part we all play in keeping the 747s airborne, while currently a dinner-table taboo, is one discussion our species will have to have at some stage. I am merely suggesting sooner, rather than too late.
Oh, and by the way, Ivan Illich revealed something else about transport efficiency. The most energy-efficient mover in the entire animal kingdom does indeed turn out to be a smart, perhaps even rational, member of our own species. It is a person on a push-bike. Now there’s a discussion starter.
