You're Grounded
I’ve been fiddling around with different versions of the carbon counters that can be found on the websites of carbon offset sellers. The Climate Trust has one at carboncounter.org and Zerofootprint has one as well. There are three primary inputs – the amount you drive, your home energy usage, and the amount you fly – and they typically appear in that order. So as I work my way down the list, I feel pretty good about our own personal efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. We’ve obviously cut back significantly on driving and switched to 100% renewable power for our electricity. We get dinged a bit for our natural gas usage, but nothing like the whammy that results from air travel. Just seeing the numbers is jarring. We’ve had a fairly low key year in terms of air travel, with only three trips totaling six round trip flights (i.e., each person counts as one round trip). Yet, the estimated carbon output from those trips is at least three times that produced by either our annual car use or our house. It’s enough to make you want to give up and buy a Hummer. I’ve written about the damaging impact of air travel before, as well as the efforts of some to bring more attention to the issue. But the issue receives surprisingly little press. Airline executives have astutely kept their heads down while the nation obsesses over hybrid cars and compact fluorescent light bulbs, knowing full well the far more significant damage inflicted by air travel. They may believe that air travel is too important to the economy to be held accountable for its environmental impact, but the facts are hard to ignore. Increased scrutiny of not just airlines but frequent fliers is only a matter of time.
I have to admit: bashing car drivers is a lot easier than calling out air travelers. There are usually alternatives to driving, and the short distance of the average car drive is easy to characterize as selfish and indulgent. Air travel, on the other hand, is almost always viewed as a necessity. The substitutes for air travel are typically unacceptable, especially for cross-country and international trips. While I can imagine a life with little to no car use, I can’t imagine limiting myself and family to travel only accessible by a train. Nor can I fathom a career in which air travel is not required. I can implore people all I want to avoid air travel, but I fully understand the implications of such actions. A life without air travel feels like a luddite nightmare.
Our addiction to air travel is not much different than our dependence on cars, and owes much to our Pavlovian response to the transportation options presented to us. The current state of the airline industry is the result of the destabilizing influence of intense competition and the frenzy of support showered on the industry by state and local governments. Despite finding profitability elusive on even a small scale, the airlines, like the automakers, misinterpreted the beneficence of the public sector and assumed that they were issued a mandate to provide low cost flights to anywhere no matter what the cost. Much like the sprawl that resulted from the nationwide construction of highways, the proliferation of subsidized fares lured the public into unsustainable lifestyles. Businesses adopted the expectation that transactions between parties spanning huge distances should still done face to face. Appropriately infrequent family reunions became every day occurrences. Once-in-a-lifetime trips to exotic locales turned into quick weekend excursions.
So what is so wrong with these seemingly positive developments? Air travel brings the world closer and helps us lead supposedly richer lives. Isn’t that the goal of progress? Unfortunately, this type of progress is no different than food additives and fertilizers. We now know that food that lasts forever and weed-free yards aren’t necessarily good things. Our knowledge of the harmful side effects of these products helps us to seek a better balance between progress and sustainability. The same balance is required with regard to air travel.
While we wait for the airline industry to achieve more than incremental change in the emissions produced from flying and the public sector to throw more than crumbs to a national rail network, we must begin to treat air travel as a useful tool rather than an everyday convenience to be used at our whim. And the only reliable way to achieve such a change is to pass on the full cost of air travel to fliers. As with recreational driving, the wastefulness of air travel is due as much to our overindulgence as to the current state of the technology. But unlike driving, when it comes to air travel, we are a surprisingly price sensitive bunch. If air travel produces as much CO2 as these carbon counters indicate, a hefty tax is order, with any tax penalizing the most inefficient polluters most. The price increase should be designed to cure businesses of its addiction to frivolous travel, especially by egregiously wasteful private jets. More expensive flights should limit discretionary personal travel, forcing travelers to prioritize precious gatherings with family and friends over glamour weekend trips.
Flying, despite the frequent headaches and hassles, has assumed the romantic spot in our culture previously occupied by driving. Like the image of a car on the open road, a flight holds the same promise of adventure. Yet the lifestyle associated with flying is as contrived as that of driving. Luxuries become needs; convenience becomes an end in itself. We can’t imagine a life with trips to far flung places because years of government supported travel have fooled us into believing that our lives would be empty if we never stepped foot on a plane. I have difficulty giving up the illusion myself, but am slowing waking up to the reality that the road to sustainability does not run through the airport.
Photo Credit: Kansas State Collegian