Kevin Anderson on flying

I'm still working on the next long post, about the carbon cost of eating meat (I work pretty slowly during the school year, I'm afraid)… in the meantime, I recently heard an interview on Democracy Now with Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the COP 19 climate conference. They had a lot of things to say about many aspects of the climate crisis, and you can read (or watch) the whole interview here; but in light of my last post, I was especially interested in the part about why they took a 23-hour train ride to the conference instead of flying. His basic point is about hyper-mobility — here's a bit of an excerpt, in response to a question about using a train and using a plane, in terms of energy consumption:

"Well, a lot of people just ask me that question: Is the train that much better than the plane? Actually, it doesn’t really matter, in terms of the journey, whether it’s better or not, because what happens if you go by train is you don’t go very often. So you immediately curtail about how much you travel. And also, you plan when you get there to spend longer there. So I went to China, and I spent two weeks doing a lecture tour in China, as many of my colleagues flew there to give 20-minute talks and then flew back the following day, and then probably the following week were flying to another venue. So, it’s not the actual emissions from the journey that matter; it’s how it makes you change your life.

"Virtually everyone that I’ve spoken to who’s flown here say, "Oh, I flew here and then got a taxi into Warsaw." So people who fly already do not then use public transport to, say, travel back into the town. It normalizes a whole load of high-carbon activities, that we then—that then become what we do every single day…

"You know, we manage to engage with scientists around the world using all of the forms of communication that we’re all using here... We do not have to keep flying around the world in a sort of old-fashioned, colonial style. You know, here’s the great white hope, the great white males from the rich parts of the world, flying around to the poor parts of the world, telling them how they should be living their lives. So I think that we really need to be stepping away from thinking about the world like that."

the climate cost of flying

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.

my opening missive

Last week I sent a very long email to a few dozen of my friends, hoping to start some conversations and perhaps somehow make a difference. This is what I wrote:

Dear friends,

I would like to beg your indulgence as I begin the year with a long missive on a subject which has troubled my mind and occupied my thoughts for some time now. I have debated with myself over how to word this, and then whether to even send it out — knowing that this will pretty much brand me as a crazy obsessed environmentalist — but I so felt the need to do something that I have finally decided to send a cry from the heart and see what comes. I apologize for the length — it proved difficult to say what I feel without including the background information — my intention is not to pretend to know everything (I certainly don't), but to share some of what I've read about and perhaps to give some food for contemplation and start some conversations. So I would greatly appreciate your reading this, if you might have the time, and letting me know what you think about it...

I have read enough about global warming to understand the desperate situation we are in — the human-created calamity already set in motion, and the near-impossible measures needed, almost immediately, to avert an even worse crisis and somehow preserve a habitable planet. "Business as usual" puts the world on course for a rise of 6°C (11°F) this century. Researchers and activists have used 2°C (3.6°F) as the upper limit of minimal "safety" before positive feedbacks send warming spiraling completely out of control. Yet even now, at 0.8°C of warming, the Arctic sea ice is melting away alarmingly faster than anyone ever predicted; and the greenhouse gasses we have already emitted are enough to bring us to nearly 2°C of warming, even if we stopped using fossil fuels, cold turkey, tomorrow. We are well on the way toward a climate that is simply incompatible with life as we know it. Meanwhile, right now, the oceans are dying before our eyes (with dead zones expanding and 90% of large fish already gone), trees are dying across the planet, and species are being driven to extinction at the rate of one every seven minutes.

I also understand the extreme improbability of anything meaningful being done. Most solutions put forth in general discourse are on a scale so insignificant as to make almost no difference at all. There are solutions that could make a difference — emissions reductions of 10% a year, coupled with massive reforestation, would be a step; and a large carbon fee (with the dividends returned to the people, per capita) is one proposal for a way to get there. The problem is that we live on a finite planet, and reducing emissions enough to avert climate catastrophe is simply not compatible with endless growth — but endless growth is what all our economic and political systems depend on. So we talk about "sustainable growth" (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) and keep chasing the chimera of a technological fix that could allow us to grow indefinitely — a fix which is as mythical as a perpetual motion machine. Because of the rebound effect, producing more energy (of whatever kind, including "renewables") simply lowers cost and leads to more consumption — much in the same way that widening freeways simply encourages more driving and never actually solves the traffic problem. "Clean energy" really only helps keep us on the path of thinking we can keep using all the energy we need to fuel our unsustainable "lifestyles"… and allow us to put off facing the fact that what is needed is to simply STOP what we are doing, change the way we are living -- and radically, and now. In this situation, there truly is no free lunch.

The crisis we face goes so far beyond fluorescent lightbulbs, hybrid cars, and "green consumerism" (another oxymoron). Research has determined that we cannot pour more than about 500 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere and still have any hope of averting total disaster —and that 500 gigatons is about one-fifth of the carbon in proven fossil fuel reserves (forget about "peak oil" — our problem is that we still have way too much of the stuff). Only governments, working together, could possibly be powerful enough to keep all that carbon in the ground and rein in the fossil fuel companies that profit by using our atmosphere as a waste dump; only true systemic change will get us where we need to go — and systemic change, as Derrick Jensen warns, will not be brought about by personal choices. And I do know that my own attempts to live within a carbon budget, such as they are, really make no discernible difference (especially given that rebound effect, by which my conservation just makes consumption cheaper and easier for others…)

And yet, and yet... While it is absolutely true that global warming cannot be fought through consumer choices alone — we must battle the powerful economic interests who profit from our emissions and the government entities who serve them — it is equally true that we cannot hope to battle those interests while continuing to buy whatever they are selling. I do feel the need to make the best choices I can, to "walk my talk"… And, despairing of any hope for systems to change or for the powerful to do the right thing, I am beginning to agree with the sentiment expressed by a commenter on a UK Guardian thread, who said that "it is much harder to change the political system than to change your own behavior and the behavior of people you know," that the only way to make headway is to live as low-carbon as possible, and persuade others to do the same, one by one if need be. If enough of us do that, recursively multiplying our numbers, eventually the systems that support our unsustainable consumption may begin to crumble… (it's not much hope, but it's all I've got).

And here's the problem — I know very well that telling anyone that "this is what you should and shouldn't be doing" is a really quick and easy way to lose friends… So let me say right off that I certainly don't consider myself any kind of exemplar —I still drive a car to work every day (sigh… to two different schools, on opposite ends of town), I generally use far too much carbon just living in our rich industrialized culture (the best estimates of allowable limits for the kind of reductions we need are anywhere from ½ ton to 2 tons of carbon per person, per year — the average American uses twenty). But there are a few things I've looked into and found out a little about — so if you'll indulge me (if you're still reading, this far), I'll share a little, and you can take it as you may — and if enough folks start the conversation, maybe our governments might get around to doing what's necessary to allow us to live sustainably… My big three precepts for myself, as the three biggest things an individual can do, are: 1. Don't eat meat; 2. Don't fly on airplanes; and 3. Don't buy any new stuff you don't absolutely need.

Eating meat — When I stopped eating meat long ago it was for completely different reasons; but as it happens, meat production is incredibly carbon-intensive. The way it is produced these days, meat is simply grain, concentrated: each pound of meat contains many times that amount of grain (the vast majority of grain we grow goes to feed livestock) — along with all of the petroleum fertilizers, the rainforests cut down to run cattle, etc. etc… The UN FAO estimated that meat is responsible for 17% of all carbon emissions worldwide; Worldwatch added up the things the FAO left out and came up with the incredible figure of 51%. Either way, it's huge.

Flying — Air travel is also incredibly, if not unconscionably, carbon-intensive. One roundtrip LA-to-NY flight uses the equivalent of about 2 tons of CO2 emissions per (economy class) passenger — about the same amount the average resident of Brazil uses in a year, and either equivalent to or many times more than the per-person allowable annual limit for the necessary reductions… When my parents were young, flying was a huge big deal, but now it has become so commonplace that we think nothing of jetting across the country or the world for work or vacation. If carbon were priced at anything like a rate commensurate with its damage, none of us (at least in my circles) could afford to fly — it would again be a rare luxury rather than something we regularly use for transportation.

Buying stuff — This is sort of a no-brainer. A huge part of our emissions comes from manufacturing, buying, using, and then throwing away our stuff — It is a measure of the sickness of our society that we are defined as consumers instead of as citizens. China recently (and famously) passed up the US in total GHG emissions — but what's not usually mentioned is the reason for that is all of the stuff we buy from them! A Chronicle story before the holidays said that 75% of all new toys in the US are manufactured offshore (and the majority of those in China). So if you hear that US emissions have dropped slightly, that is why — we are simply offshoring our carbon emissions along with our jobs.

Of course, I know that common wisdom will say that if we all did this, our economy would take the proverbial nosedive. There's the rub: our economy, dependent on endless growth, just cannot be sustained over the long run — and the long run is getting very short these days. I know there are models of steady-state economies out there, which I have yet to investigate fully… but the important thing is that the collapse of a habitable planet, and the chaos that goes with it, will be orders of magnitude worse than the collapse of an economy. David Roberts, in "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change," talks about planned austerity, shared sacrifice… an "all-hands-on-deck mobilization" that is the moral equivalent of war. Life as we know it will have to change, for life as we know it not to be lost entirely.

It is already too late to avert disastrous effects — right now the Arctic icecap is melting away, with all of the feedbacks that entails — and it is easy to lose hope completely, to say there's no use trying, we can't prevent catastrophe whatever we do… But what we can do is to prevent catastrophe from being even worse, and in so doing we can make a difference.

The story I keep telling myself is the one about a father and child walking on a beach covered as far as the eye can see with starfish washed ashore, dead and dying. When the child picks up a starfish to toss it back in the ocean, the father asks "Why? What difference can you possibly make, just you, with all these thousands and thousands of starfish dying?" And the child picks up another one, tosses it in the ocean, and says "It makes a difference to that one."

Dear friends, if you are still reading, I truly appreciate the time you have taken with this… I have been sick at heart, knowing what we are doing to the world and the innocent life around us, watching as we hurtle toward a mass extinction, not knowing what to do that might be of any use. David Roberts said that "building a core cadre of intense, motivated citizens who feel the climate threat in their bones is an indispensable part of the puzzle" — maybe that's part of the reason I wrote this. Getting the conversation going is perhaps a start, and I would love to hear your thoughts… Thank you for listening.

peace and good wishes,
Avilee


(and just a few of my favorite, pertinent, quotes)…

"Do we want a living real world, or do we want a social structure that is killing the real world? Do we want a living real world, or do we want a dead real world, with a former social structure forgotten by everyone because there is no one left alive to remember? You choose." - Derrick Jensen

"I believe we are musicians in a human orchestra. It is time now to play the Save the World Symphony. It is a vast orchestral piece, and you are but one musician. You are not required to play a solo. But you are required to figure out what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can."   - Sandra Steingraber

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time… Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late."
    - Martin Luther King Jr. — "Beyond Vietnam" speech, April 4, 1967

"If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable."
    - Port Huron Statement of the SDS

 “It makes a crucial difference whether humankind thinks of the natural world as consisting of resources or relatives.” - Oren Lyons, quoted by Daniel Wildcat in Red Alert