Okay, it's far past time to get into some more detail about those three main precepts I set for myself and specified in my opening missive — those were, of course: 1. don't fly on airplanes; 2. don't eat meat (or even better, go vegan); and 3. don't buy new stuff you don't absolutely need.
Before I start on details, though, I should add a little disclaimer: of course, I know and believe that individual actions are not enough to solve this dire crisis we have brought on (not even close) — but I also believe that our so-called political leaders are not going to do anything at all to solve it, given that they are nearly all concerned with supporting the corporate empire. So for the time being I am focusing on what we can do as individuals to get the world off of fossil fuels — that is, coming at the problem from the demand side… inspired from a reply to my first post: "I also believe that any radical change worth making has to start with one person which leads to another person which leads to another person…"
So, as to the issue of air travel — I guess we need to start with some numbers. Unfortunately, accurate numbers are a little hard to chase down, but I've seen figures showing the per-passenger cost of air travel in CO2 equivalents as anywhere from 0.4 to 0.64 lbs/mile, where passenger cars are figured at about one lb/mile. However, the real carbon cost for flying is actually much higher, because of the high-altitude climatic forcing effect — the IPCC's commonly cited estimate is 2.7x — so the cost does come out to be greater than for travel by car.
Still doesn't really sound so bad though, does it? Only a little more carbon than driving… But of course, the per-passenger cost is not anywhere near the whole story. To get at the destructive nature of air travel, we need to consider a couple of aspects to this. First, think about how many times you would pack up and travel from (for instance) Los Angeles to New York if you had to get in your car and take a few days to drive there. Maybe once, it could make an interesting family vacation, with stops along the way… but you'd hardly go cross-country for a quick weekend getaway — and those frequent-flyers who work three days on one coast and two days on the other just couldn't do it at all. And there are undoubtedly relatively few people who would choose to vacation overseas if they had to sail those seas on a ship.
The concept at work here is hypermobility — people just move around, at incredibly long distances, a lot more than they used to before air travel was ubiquitous (and cheap). It's nearly impossible to find total miles traveled using various forms of transportation throughout history (believe me, I tried); I doubt they kept statistics on that sort of thing back in the horse-and-buggy days. But the difference must be astronomical (no pun intended, I think) from the days when traveling across the country meant an arduous journey on horseback and covered wagon; or even the middle of the last century, when traveling by air was a rare luxury. Now there are hundreds of international airports in the world (three of what the FAA calls "large primary hubs" in the SF bay area alone); and each one of them has hundreds of airplanes flying in and out every day — even thousands at the busiest. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of miles per flight, and by dozens of passengers on each plane, and the numbers begin to get truly dizzying.
We've become so accustomed to air travel that most of us don't even think twice about flying across the country for a conference, or hopping over to Europe or Asia for vacation, or even just flying a few hundred miles to visit family… while if we had to travel by older, slower methods (cars, trains, or ships) we might think about whether we really needed to take that trip.
Another aspect of this is our global carbon budget — how much carbon we, collectively in the world, can burn up and still have a hope of averting total climate disaster. According to the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), in order to stay under the commonly-cited 2°C of warming we'd need to decrease global emissions to 2 metric tons of carbon per capita annually, right now; and even further, to 0.45 tons, in the near future — all from the current global average of 4 tons.
To do that fairly* means that those of us in the industrial west must cut our own emissions down to two tons per year now, and to less than a half-ton per year very soon. So here's the problem — one roundtrip flight between LA and New York creates nearly two tons of emissions per passenger (715 kilos of CO2, multiplied by 2.7 for the high altitude forcing, equals 1,930 kilos or almost two metric tons). In any sane, fair, and just world, in which we all burn no more carbon than is sustainable, in just one plane trip across the country you would blow through your entire year's allotment in one shot — or exceed it many times over.
*(Of course, our current global average is not distributed at all fairly — we citizens of the US on average spew about 17 tons per year —Australians even more, with a few tiny countries like Kuwait, the Netherlands, and Qatar emitting up into the 30s and 40s of tons — while citizens of Mozambique, Nepal, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chad, Mali, and Afghanistan (among others) each emit a tenth of a ton or less. And naturally, there's a wide range within those nations as well — the famous 1%, with their 5,000-square-foot McMansions, conspicuous consumption, and frequent flyer miles, obviously contribute a lot more to the problem than my students in East Oakland who live in apartments or little old bungalows, never travel, and have no money to buy much more than what they need to get by. In order to get down to a (relatively) sustainable level of emissions per capita, we can't very well ask those who already get by without using much to cut back as much as those who already use much more than their share… Well, actually we could, and given the appalling political situation here and around the world, I fully expect it — but I'd rather pretend for the moment that we would at least make some attempt to be fair.)
I have heard back from some correspondents that massive changes in the way we live (including giving up flying) would risk making our present lives intolerable for the slender chance of preserving our future. But I see it differently: to quote Yotam Marom, "Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate change is already here." There are people losing their livelihoods, homes, and very lives to droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes… If we widen the circle of concern (which we must — this is not just about humans), plant and animal species are already going extinct at an alarming rate (no, not all because of climate change, but it is exacerbating the situation). So, yes, the chances of preserving a livable future are vanishingly slim — but plants, animals, and humans are being hurt, and are dying, right now; and every gram of carbon we add to the atmosphere, for the sake of the convenience of being able to travel around the world whenever and wherever we want, makes it even worse.
The situation the world is in gives true meaning to the term "existential crisis." In this emergency, we can't afford to wait for governments. Many activists talk about fighting the power of the fossil fuel companies, but relatively few mention the time-honored tactic of the boycott. Granted, it is difficult to completely boycott fossil fuels while living in our fossil fuel-dependent society, but we can radically decrease the amounts we use — and one of the two or three most effective ways for an individual to do that is to stop flying.
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