What size is your carbon footprint?
I admit it – when I travel by air I’m worried about the carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and water vapour emissions being generated by the aircraft that whisks me off to foreign parts. Evidence to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the notion that pollution caused by jet aircraft is having a significant effect on global warming is freely available; however, the scientific view strongly supports the view that this is a major problem, something that will have to be addressed in the short to medium-term if catastrophic climatic change is to be avoided – the real debate concerns the best compromise solution.
How so? Surely it’s obvious that governments must take immediate steps to reduce the amount of air travel, developing new and ingenious methods of taxation and using the proceeds to develop ‘greener’ methods of travel and to fund projects designed to slow down and ultimately reverse the rise in atmospheric temperature. Attractive though it may seem (even some airlines like the idea), this quick and obvious fix needs to take into the following into account:
- Many countries (including Scotland) now depend on tourism as a significant part of their economy, any major cut in air travel will have disastrous effects on these countries, many of which have limited alternative sources of wealth.
- Apart from bulk items like timber, coal and iron ore, etc, international trade is a big user of air freight, the strawberries you buy in the supermarket probably came by jumbo jet
- World business is a major user of air travel, alternatives like video-conferencing, etc, have not replaced the face-to-face meeting
- Just as rising fuel prices have a limited and very short-term effect on car usage (something economists call ‘inelastic demand’), the evidence is that airfare tax increases are rapidly assimilated and do not depress the demand for air travel
- Any major tax increase will penalise lower income earners much more than the rich, something that is inequitable and hard for politicians to sell to the electorate
- If air travel becomes prohibitively expensive, people will to revert to car travel – something that is arguably even more damaging to the environment
In the medium term, the introduction of newer and more fuel efficient aircraft and improvements in air traffic control, aircraft scheduling, etc, will help to slow the rate of increase of air travel pollution – longer term, the only sensible way forward is by an integrated and truly international transport policy, something that isn’t even on the distant horizon right now.
So, what to do? Given the inertia that is part of the democratic process, I feel fairly powerless about actually changing things, but I’m fast running out of time to do and see the things that I want to do and see before shuffling off this mortal coil, so my plan is try to minimise my carbon footprint while at home, with all the usual stuff about better home insulation, more efficient heating system, no appliances left on standby, high efficiency light bulbs, etc – then I’m going to vote for any kind of joined-up thinking on policies that address global warming and stop worrying about the rest.
What’s your plan? You can comment on this post by clicking the ‘reply’ link below, give it a try!