At Home with John and Debbie

With climate change all over the news at the moment, I’ve been thinking about cheap flights. My personal carbon footprint from flying in the last five years has been enormous:

• 4 return journeys to the US on business in the last 6 months
• Bali
• The US on holiday on at least 5 occasions
• Sundry flights to Europe for holidays, weekenders, stag nights etc.

I thought I’d read that the CO2 emissions per person for a transatlantic flight were equivalent to the CO2 emissions of heating a family house for a year and a half. But hunting around on the Internet I was unable to back this up — one figure I got for a return trip to New York was 1.54 metric tonnes of CO2 per person, while a typical “single family home” produced 11.8 metric tonnes per year.

Nonetheless, all those flights add up to a massive amount of CO2, which isn’t good.

However, I look at the current talk about curbing and taxing cheap flights, and as much as I want to be green, I’m not sure about it.

Part of it is selfishness: I like to travel. Yet, any proposed taxes aren’t likely to hit us all that badly. As many letters to newspapers point out, it is the poor who will be hit by these taxes.

The main reason I’m in favour of cheap flights is that I think more people should travel, because — trite as it sounds — travel broadens the mind.

On our journeys around the USA, we met red-state dwellers who were suspicious of the namby-pampy liberal types on the coasts, and we met blue-staters who were equally suspicious of those inland rednecks (most notably the camp vintage clothes shopkeeper in Portland who was appalled that we’d travelled through the middle of the country where “those people” live). Those people would have benefitted from a short drive to broaden their horizons, and it’s likely they would have found that, especially if you avoid certain hot topics (keep it light: avoid abortion and sexuality), the people they’re so suspicious of aren’t so bad after all.

An American colleague recently travelled to France — his first time in Europe. On his return he told me that “all stereotypes were confounded”. Admittedly, my prejudices about the French are generally reinforced when I go there — but his must have been different.

Prejudices about the French are generally harmless (although all that “cheese eating surrender monkeys”, freedom fries stuff wasn’t great), but let’s think about the masses of untravelled Americans and their stereotypes about arabs in the Middle East. While you’ve an image in your head of cartoonish figures with towels on their heads babbling about infidels in a silly language, it’s probably quite easy to sanction your government to bomb their cities into the stone age.

If you were to travel to the Middle East and just spend some time among the people — not even mixing particularly; observing people on the street, dealing with shopkeepers and waiters is good enough — you would come to realise that while cultures differ, there’s a core set of values that pretty much all human beings share. With a handful of exceptions, people want to spend time with their friends and families, talking, sharing food and drink, playing games, getting by. I contend that if you think of people that way, it’s a lot harder to let your government rain bombs on them.

I’ve picked on Americans a little here, which is a bit of a non-sequitur since we started by talking about a potential British tax, but this is just the clearest example of a large population sanctioning inhumanity against another culture because they don’t have the experience to see these people as real people.

The principle is more general than that. Exposure to other cultures makes us more tolerant. As many people as possible should be exposed to as much variety of human life as possible. This is somewhat incompatible with an ethos that says “use as little jet fuel as possible”, as least while time off work is as scarce as it is for most people.

I’d really like to see people able to travel more, while impacting the environment less: is there no scope for the aviation fuel equivalent of biodiesel? Can airline companies push the cost of carbon offsetting down to the extent where it adds a negligible amount to the cost of plane ticket? I don’t know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 16:14 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.