45: The carbon cost of holiday flights
As many of us gear up for a summer break, often jetting off to the sun, just how culpable are flight emissions in the context of the climate emergency? Who is most responsible? And is guilt-free flying ever likely to be possible? Joining the LZ team for this chat are Anna Hughes, CEO of Flight Free UK, and Abhilasha Fullonton, a Research Associate at Tyndall Manchester.
Essential Reading:
UK transport decarbonisation plan - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1009448/decarbonising-transport-a-better-greener-britain.pdf
Episode Transcript:
Andy: I’m just into the second day of my trip to Madrid. I started yesterday in Inverness.
Matt: For this episode of Local Zero, Becky, Fraser and I are looking at the environmental impact of flying but we thought it would be good to get the ball rolling this time with an alternative perspective.
Andy: It didn’t all go smoothly. There were a few delays on the Eurostar but I made it to Paris last night and then set off this morning and I’m now currently blasting through the South of France. It’s such an incredible way to travel.
Matt: Andy Emery got in touch on Twitter to say he was doing this epic train journey all the way from Scotland to Spain. He was taking the train instead of the plane and so we got him to record us a few reflections en route. Call this a prologue to set the mood for this episode.
[Sound of Spanish conductor over train tannoy]
Andy: It’s a lovely sort of arid landscape with lots of solar panels and lots of vineyards. The main reason I don’t fly is because of emissions and the other reason is it’s always good fun to see places on the ground, travel a bit slower and investigate different landscapes. On the way back, I’ve got a few stops in cities that I’ve never even heard of let alone visited, so that’s pretty exciting too.
So it’s 9 pm and I’ve just arrived in Madrid. It’s about a 15-minute walk to get to my accommodation for the night and then I can go to the conference tomorrow feeling refreshed and not cramped after having spent time in a plane and stressed after having spent time in an airport.
Matt: Huge thanks to Andy. Absolutely loved hearing that. Now, on with the show proper.
[Music flourish]
Anna: It seems that we’ve got our priorities wrong and when we have limited renewable energy, should we really be putting it towards flying? Probably not.
Abhilasha: We are on the same Earth but it feels like we’re in parallel universes because there’s one place which is experiencing hunger and poverty and there’s another place where we’re trying to make a choice between going on holiday or not.
Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero, your go-to podcast about what each of us can do to take local action against climate change. It’s been a lovely couple of weeks for the pod. We’ve had lots of kind words about the last couple of episodes which has been really great, so thanks to everybody who got in touch.
Rebecca: Yeah, it’s lovely to hear from people and actually, one review that we really liked was from the very appropriately-named RainBow Bikes on Apple Podcasts who said that they ‘look forward to this podcast and that it’s really important in keeping me up-to-date with the latest developments. It definitely helped shaped my thinking about the important stuff.’ So it’s nice to know that we’re doing something right, hey team?
Matt: Quite right and back with us this week is Fraser Stewart whose username on Apple Podcasts is hopefully not RainBow Bikes, right Fraser?
Fraser: No, no. You’ll know mine. I go by the renewable Malcolm Tucker [laughter]. As ever, it’s lovely to be back.
Matt: Good stuff. This week, we’ll be looking at the importance of reducing flight emissions when it comes to tackling the climate emergency and how important cutting our emissions from flying is relative to cuts in other sectors.
Rebecca: Absolutely and we’ll be joined by Anna Hughes to help guide us through this very challenging but important discussion. Anna is the Director of Flight Free UK, a charity whose mission is to inform people of the climate impact of aviation and inspire them to travel by other means.
Fraser: We’re also joined by Abhilasha Fullonton. Asha is a Research Associate at Tyndall Manchester and is currently working on a UKERC (UK Energy Research Centre) project exploring the barriers and opportunities of sustainable fuels in the freight and aviation sectors.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So this is a big topic for us, team [laughter].
Matt: Yeah, they don’t get much bigger, Becky. Yeah, it’s huge and we wanted to do it because we’re ramping up into the summer holidays. So if people haven’t already booked their flights, they are or some people are searching for the holiday of their dreams. Now that’s fair enough. We’ve had a rough couple of years with Covid. For some people, this will be the first opportunity to get a bit of summer sun. Maybe it’s to see friends and family they haven’t seen in ages... but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re in a climate emergency.
Rebecca: No, not at all and I mean I think this is a really relevantly timed conversation. As you say, it’s not just the summer holidays but over the past two years, a lot of folk just haven’t been travelling. I know I haven’t and I wasn’t really travelling that much before then with my young kids. Since things have opened up... well, you’ll remember a couple of episodes ago, I was reflecting on my flight to the US.
Matt: Yeah, you sneaked off.
Rebecca: I did [laughter].
Matt: Well, you didn’t take us along [laughter].
Rebecca: Well, I feel if I took you all, the carbon emissions would have been way too high [laughter]. I went on my summer holidays. It was booked for me and I went to Crete recently. No, I didn’t go to Crete, I went to Corfu. Let’s get that correct [laughter].
Matt: It’s hot and it begins with a ‘C.’
Rebecca: It does [laughter]. Shocking to get it wrong. I find it a very challenging one because it’s just part of a lot of our lifestyles. It’s just part and parcel of the things that we do and that we expect to do. We’re not just making decisions on our own. I might decide for my family that we don’t want to fly but then when I’m travelling with other people or there are other dimensions involved, it feels like I don’t really have a choice and yet I still feel very guilty about it.
Fraser: At that time, we spoke a little bit. Eilidh and I were on a little honeymoon and we went to Lanzarote. The reason that we decided to do that was that we were originally planning on jumping a train and hopping down to France to travel a little bit but work had gotten so hectic for the past few months that we thought we really just wanted to be able to relax. Now, of course, thinking about it in the context of climate and stuff, that’s extremely selfish but also, it’s not just me in the relationship and it wasn’t just my holiday. I completely understand what you’re saying in that you’re trying to strike a balance here as far as possible.
Matt: I’m feeling a bit left out, guys, because it sounds like I’m the only person who hasn’t seen or felt the hot sun for quite a while [laughter]. I haven’t flown since late 2019 but I think next year, I am going to for a summer holiday for my dad’s 70th. It’s not something I’d have probably plumped for. I’d have tried to have kept that flight-free thing going but what I’d like to boomerang back around to is that... we’re doing the kind of confessional stuff here which is good. We need to say this stuff and we need to talk about it but you’ve also been making big inroads at trying to do travel and to travel across Britain without using the plane. Now, Fraser, you’ve been on the train. Becky, recently, you’ve been in your EV. So tell me was it pain-free?
Rebecca: Oh, dear. I feel like we could get on to a right rant here [laughter]. I recently went down to Cornwall for a long weekend away with my husband to celebrate our eight-year wedding anniversary.
Fraser: Congratulations.
Rebecca: Thank you, thank you. He’s from Cornwall and so that was why we wanted to go there. There was a whole load of reasons as to why we wanted to go there. I know it is the other side of the country. At one point, we looked at flights because there is a flight from Glasgow to Newquay. There’s a flight from Edinburgh. I could have flown. It was actually incredibly expensive to do it that way because we needed a car when we got down there. The public transportation in Cornwall is not fantastic and so we decided to drive. We talked about hiring another car and we decided that we would take our EV. My husband did so much research and plotted out all of the different charge-point stations that we could stop at. It’s not helped by the fact that there are so many different companies that have charge points but there is an app called PlugShare which helps because it kind of plots them all out but you have to click on each one that you see to look at the details of the station. He’d spent hours plotting the route of where we were going to stop and charge and we thought we had this great plan. We decided to drive down through the night and it should have taken us nine hours driving through the night. It took us over 13 hours and that was because of all the challenges we had when we stopped to charge.
Matt: That’s with young kids as well, Becky.
Rebecca: No, no. We left the kids [laughter].
Matt: Oh, it wasn’t? Right, fair enough. Oh well, it doesn’t matter then [laughter].
Rebecca: You can’t celebrate your anniversary if you have the kids [laughter].
Matt: I don’t feel any sympathy at all [laughter].
Rebecca: I know, it was savage. The kids were unwell and we just kind of parcelled them off to my husband’s parents and left them there. It was awful. No, really needed the time away. But I will say this though that all of the chargers worked. We’ve done a lot of trips around Scotland over to Edinburgh, to the coast on that side and up into the Highlands and I would say two out of every three times of stopping at a public charging station in Scotland has not worked. It might have been that the station was broken. It might have been that it just didn’t work for me because I couldn’t get my app to work or my card to work but I’ve had so many problems. When I stop at a Scottish charging station, I can’t trust that it’s going to work. So I will say that we didn’t have those issues and so that was great.
Matt: Fraser, you went on a completely different mode of transport to avoid flying and you took the train. Any better?
Fraser: Yeah, I think so. I regularly or semi-regularly travel down from Glasgow or from Edinburgh to Exeter for work which is where Regen is based. I travel down every few months to spend time with everyone and there is a direct cross-country train. To be honest, you’re sitting in one place for 7-8 hours or so and it’s not the most comfortable but it’s relatively painless and efficient. The trains come on time. However, at the time of recording, obviously, we are about to run into a week’s worth of train strikes and I’m due to go down to Glastonbury...
Rebecca: Oh gosh!
Fraser: ...to speak as part of the Green Fields Speaker Corner thing. So if getting to Glastonbury isn’t a pain enough, to try and get down South from Glasgow to then get to Glastonbury... we don’t talk about what happens when you get through the gate at Glastonbury but to get there is nothing short of a total nightmare.
Matt: It’s very remote.
Fraser: It’s not only that. It’s a long journey and you then have potential disruption which I accept isn’t all the time but it’s also still more expensive than if I was to just fly to London or Bristol and jump on a bus from there.
Matt: Yeah, it’s a big problem, for sure. It remains to be seen whether the strike goes ahead but obviously, people are having to reach out for other modes of transport. Now, a quiz question. I haven’t had some of these for you for a little while. I want to ask you both what do you think is the average share of international and domestic flights for each of our carbon footprints. So if you took our entire annual carbon footprint, what slice of that pie would be given over to international and domestic flights?
Rebecca: The UK’s?
Matt: These are emissions from UK households, so not total UK emissions. These are household-related emissions.
Fraser: This is difficult as well because there’s a huge amount of households that don’t fly at all.
Matt: Exactly and we’ll come on to that, Fraser. You’re jumping the gun [laughter]. You’re jumping the gun.
Rebecca: I presume we’re not going to be reflecting on the past year and a half where Covid has probably made that a very, very low proportion.
Matt: Quite right, yes [laughter].
Rebecca: What’s the timeframe?
Matt: This is 2019 and so pre-pandemic.
Rebecca: Okay, pre-pandemic [laughter]
Matt: Very good. I’d like to say I planted that red herring on purpose but I didn’t, so thank you.
Fraser: Ah, Matt, these parameters are horrendous [laughter]. I don’t think you’ve put enough thought into this.
Matt: Come on! We’re on a countdown here. Who’s going to go first?
Rebecca: I know, right?
Fraser: Average across UK households? I’ll take a swing at 15%...
Rebecca: 15%?
Fraser: ...bearing in mind that a lot of households don’t fly.
Matt: I’m keeping a poker face, Fraser. Okay, Becky?
Rebecca: Oh, I wouldn’t have said it was that high. I would have gone lower because this isn’t including surface transport. It’s not including travel that we do by car and so I probably would have been closer to 5%.
Matt: 12%.
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: Fraser, you take the gold medal there.
Rebecca: He was close!
Matt: Yeah, but it’s actually higher and then as Fraser says, it’s shocking when you think that’s on average. There is a fantastic paper that basically identifies that half of aviation emissions are from just 1%. This is globally. So more than 90% of people have never flown globally and just 1% of the world’s population is responsible for 50% of emissions from flying.
Fraser: Doesn’t this speak to what came up in the last episode as well about the idea that people who live wealthier lifestyles don’t consider themselves as being within the 1% in any scenario when we’re talking about behaviours and lifestyles?
Matt: Well, we’re in the 10% there. We’ve flown. This is globally. This really ramps up. There are some people who are flying once a year, maybe once every few years and some people fly a few times a year but then there are the 0.0001% - that’s not actually a statistic and me just being silly – of folk who are using private jets. These are the Ed Sheerans of the world who are looking to offset doing other stuff. The same paper from Gosling and UMPA which we can put a link to on the website. My carbon footprint, according to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) calculator, last year was about 9.2 tons of CO2.
Rebecca: Contextualise that for us, Matt. That means nothing to me.
Matt: Whilst the average footprint internationally would be much, much lower, according to Pawprint, which is a tool or website for you to be able to outline and calculate your carbon footprint, they estimate that the UK average carbon footprint is 12.7 tons of CO2. So I’m below average but not massively. If you were to use private aircraft, 7,500 tons of CO2...
Fraser: Wow!
Matt: ...for those individual users.
Fraser: Wow!
Rebecca: Oh my gosh!
Matt: 7,500 tons. That is a thousand times more than mine. It just gives you a sense of the jet set.
Fraser: This is an interesting question as well in that we’re having this discussion about how we go flight-free and how we reduce emissions. That’s important and we have to but I think there’s a bigger discussion here as well about how you hold those people accountable to make sure that you’re having that impact too. It’s about looking in on yourself and what you can change and what you can do differently but also how we make it so that there’s a fair distribution of the burden and responsibility for this.
Rebecca: What folk can’t see and that I’m looking at with a big smile on my face... Fraser, we’ve got all of Matt’s notes. All of Matt’s show notes are back in our documents, including some really, really beautiful graphs. I know you didn’t make those graphs yourself, Matt, [laughter] and I can’t actually tell from your notes which you’ve brought there...
Matt: Patrick, one of the production team, has been a big help on this and we’ve pulled together some of this.
Rebecca: It’s brilliant!
Matt: In there, you can compare, can’t you?
Rebecca: Yeah, and I’m actually looking at a chart that says ‘Personal Choices to Reduce Your Contribution to Climate Change.’ There’s actually a really, really nice chart in here. I know we talk a lot about switching to an EV and I’ve talked a lot about that before or I’ve talked about eating a plant-based diet. Actually, I remember you did a quiz for us a while back, Matt, on this and you asked, ‘What are the top things you could do?’ and I said, ‘Not have children.’ [Laughter] Actually, having one fewer child is top of the list.
Matt: Yeah, because they’re doing all this stuff. They’re the ones flying and eating meat [laughter]. It’s the human production here that’s the problem [laughter]. That’s from a paper from Lund University and that’s the big one.
Rebecca: It’s great. Having one fewer child is a big lifestyle decision and obviously, one of the biggest impactful things you can do. The next one is living car-free and I would say that for a lot of us, living car-free is not entirely attainable. The next one down is to avoid one round-trip transatlantic flight and that has a huge implication. So if you just sort of trade that off against living car-free, a very big lifestyle change, to just one fewer transatlantic flight...
Matt: Not crossing the Atlantic.
Rebecca: ...is huge. It’s a phenomenal impact that this has.
Matt: But then you can flip it the other way in that many would argue that aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise just in terms of finding an alternative way of putting people in the sky and moving them from A to B. It’s technologically very challenging but I completely take your point. Maybe it’s just that we don’t take the flight in the first place. That’s why we’re speaking to Flight Free UK today to get a sense of that. I think it’s also worth pointing out another figure that we pulled out before we bring the guests in just to compare the emissions per kilometre of different types of travel. Some of the flight figures here, I should say, incorporate the primary effects of flying in terms of climate change. That’s the carbon emissions but there’s other stuff in terms of the soot, nitrous oxide and the secondary effects of flying which supercharges the impact this has on the climate. Domestic flying is by far the worst. It’s about 250g of CO2 per passenger per kilometre. If you take a car with four passengers in it, that drops to about 43g and so it’s about a fifth of the domestic flight. Becky, your EV car is probably lower than 43g because I’m assuming this is internal combustion. Fraser, domestic rail is 40g and so that’s 40g versus 250g. That just gives you a sense of it. It’s a fraction. It’s 20% maybe of what it could be and so you’re making the right call but it isn’t without its wrinkles.
Fraser: Yeah, of course. I think the question is where there’s the will to make the change, how we facilitate it in the best possible way. I think we’re all on that page. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t delved into it and I don’t do an awful lot of the more technical side of a lot of this stuff and I’ve never gone into aviation before but, to be honest, I was quite taken aback by how you could have a bigger impact by dropping that one big flight over going meat-free for a year.
Matt: It’s a big hitter.
Fraser: I didn’t realise it was so, so big.
Matt: It goes back to Becky’s point that these are single decisions. I know they have ramifications beyond that. It might be that you’re not seeing family in America or they’re not coming to see you but it’s a single decision point; whereas, not dropping the kids off at school every day by car or completely changing your diet are important things too and I’m not belittling them but they’re decisions that are made multiple times every day. Listen, we could talk about this but whilst we’re engaged and interested, we’re not the experts on this per se [laughter] and so we should bring the guests in I think.
Rebecca: That’s it. Bring them in.
[Music flourish]
Abhilasha: I am Abhilasha Fullonton and I work as a Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. I used to work in industry as a consultant in carbon markets and a lot of the work that I did before was partly on transport and partly on other sectors. Now that I’ve made the transition to academia, my focus is on alternative fuels for the shipping and aviation sectors. My research looks at green ammonia as a potential aviation fuel but also within that, looks at what barriers and opportunities lie in setting up a brand new fuel supply chain which is much needed for transport decarbonisation.
Anna: Hi, I’m Anna Hughes. I’m the Director of Flight Free UK. It’s a behaviour change charity. We encourage people to choose to fly less. There are two pillars to our work which are informing people of the climate impact of aviation and inspiring them to travel by other means. I set the charity up a couple of years ago and before that, I was working in behaviour change with Sustrans mainly focused on overland transport and road transport; so encouraging people to drive less and to be aware of the environmental impact of their travel. That’s translated now into focusing on aviation.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So welcome Asha and Anna to Local Zero. It’s absolutely fantastic to have you aboard. No pun intended given that this is all about flying and many of us will be gearing up to go on our holidays and for many, that means getting on a flight. So can we explain to our listeners how bad flying is for the climate and whether it’s getting better or worse?
Abhilasha: Yeah, I think there are two different ways that I can answer that question. One is setting up a case for how that aviation is on a global level and then how bad it is at an individual level. At a global level, aviation is making upwards of 2-2.5% of global aviation emissions which doesn’t sound like a lot when you say it but individually, it’s one of the most carbon-intensive things an individual can do in their lifetime. So if people are concerned about their carbon footprint and what they should and shouldn’t do, they should consider that flying is probably one of the things that they are doing that adds to their carbon footprint the most. Of course, in the UK and EU, we’re in a very unique region. I want to say that it’s not the same everywhere because there are alternative modes of transport within the UK and EU that can be tapped into and that people don’t. There’s a choice which is a privilege really because that’s not available everywhere around the world.
Matt: Quite right and just going back on to the 2-2.5%, I read that that actually could be a lot higher if we account for the radiative forcing of different aspects of aviation. There are the carbon emissions but the other stuff that aviation can generate, whether it’s nitrous oxide or particulate matter, could be almost double in real-world effects. Am I right or wrong?
Abhilasha: Yes, you’re right. The way that we looked at it is we divided it into two different bits and one is the CO2 impacts which is what is talked about mostly but there are also non-CO2 impacts of aviation. The reason that we don’t really talk about it as much is that there is undergoing research that’s trying to clarify how we can actually address the non-CO2 impacts of aviation. It’s a lot more difficult because when you are combusting fuels at such an altitude, there will be particulate matter, soot, water vapour and serious emissions that will affect the radiative forcing. It’s particularly difficult to really tamp down on how serious the non-CO2 impacts are but it is proven that it’s more serious than CO2.
Matt: Yeah, it’s a live debate. Anna, I mean Flight Free UK is a really important initiative to try and encourage people to move away from flying and this must be your bread and butter, knowing exactly how bad flying is for the climate. From your perspective, how bad is it and what do people not quite understand yet about the impacts?
Anna: Lots of people simply don’t realise how huge the climate impact of aviation is. I think our awareness of the other things that we do in our lives, such as driving, what we choose to eat, how we clothe ourselves and generate our energy, we’re fairly well informed about that kind of stuff. Even if we don’t change our behaviour, we’re quite aware that the low-meat and vegan diets are the ones that have the lowest impact on the planet. If you drive less and you ride your bike, that’s going to really help lower your carbon footprint but there seems to be a bit of a blockage when it comes to flights and I wonder if that’s because we don’t do it very often [laughter]. So unless you’re a super frequent flyer, you might take two or three flights a year and not really think too much about it because you might be, in all other aspects of your life, trying to reduce your carbon and you might leave your car at home a few times a week. These are regular decisions that we make on a daily basis but then when it comes to our handful of flights a year, we don’t really register them. That was certainly the case for me. I hadn’t flown for over 12 years now but when I did fly... everything else in my life was about keeping my carbon footprint as low as possible and yet I just booked a flight because that’s how you travel. We’re trying to disrupt that narrative with Flight Free UK, partly by informing people about how climate-heavy their flights really are but also by showing the alternatives and inspiring people to use those other modes of transport. I think one of the more helpful ways to illustrate this is to compare it to the other things that we do. For example, a return flight to the West Coast of the US per passenger will generate more carbon than the typical average driver would generate in a year’s worth of driving. That’s immense. Similarly, if you are trying to cut down on your meat intake and you go vegan for a year, you could wipe out those savings with one flight. This is how carbon-heavy these choices are. If we compare that to other transport modes, for example, if I choose to travel to Barcelona, let’s say, by air, on a train journey to Barcelona (because it’s perfectly possible to travel to Barcelona from the UK by train), I would save 90% on the emissions by travelling by train. Those are really significant savings when we’re facing climate breakdown. That is the stark reality of how carbon-heavy flights really are.
Matt: Just to put that in context, I was looking at carbon emissions from Glasgow to fly to Majorca, a round trip, which I think is without the radiative forcing. This is around the 300kg mark. If you bring that in, it’s about half a ton. So 90% of half a ton is a lot of CO2. I just wanted to put some numbers to that.
Rebecca: Already, this is a fascinating conversation and quite a few things have come up but I just want to tap into it a little bit. I want to question how we’re framing this as a choice. Asha, you said how we actually are privileged as we have alternative options. Anna, you framed this as we have a choice to get on that plane and a choice to make that flight. Part of me agrees and part of me wants to challenge that because sometimes, for work, it might be a choice on the face of it but ultimately, there’s not a choice really if you’re being sent there and if there’s something embedded in that, as an employee for something as part of your business. It feels like the world is changing and it feels like the past few years and what we’ve been doing in terms of virtual communication is starting to shift that dynamic but even with colleagues that I work with around the UK, there’s nothing like being in a room together. There’s just some stuff that you cannot do virtually and the fact that we do live in this kind of global society on the work front. On the personal front, even if you are travelling locally, sometimes economically it’s not a choice [laughter]. Sometimes, from a time-constraint perspective, it’s not a choice. How much of this can we tackle at the individual level versus actually having to think a lot more systemically? Is it fair to be framing it as a choice? Asha, what do you think from the work that you’ve been doing?
Abhilasha: I agree. I was going to make that point about it still being not economically viable for a lot of people but I think it’s also important to remember that when consumers make a choice when it comes to money, they will always choose the thing that’s cheaper and that’s faster. That is just a very logical way that we think but when we’re talking about that group of people who can travel or can afford to travel, it’s a very small group of people, even by train. When we’re talking about leisure travel, that’s a small handful of people that do the frequent flying and go on holiday and there are added expenses. When I say it’s a choice, it’s truly a choice because you’re financially differentiating yourself from the larger group of people who cannot afford to go on holidays because travelling is just one part of the cost that you’re spending. You have to go there, you have to stay in a hotel, there are expenses and things like that. There’s a large part of the population that doesn’t actually get to experience it. When we’re talking about that group of people that can make the choice to travel or to take a train, they’re fairly financially well-off enough to make that decision in itself. It’s inherently privileged. You don’t get that choice if you are a low-income earner with a family of four. So it’s a very specific demographic that I’m talking about.
Rebecca: That’s really, really useful. Anna, I’ve been having a browse of the website and you have some real champions in there who are really making the choice, making the pledges and talking about what they’ve done. Do you see this aligning more with a particular group of people over others or are you starting to see this broadening out?
Anna: Our pledge and our campaign is aimed at everyone but, as you have identified and as Asha has said, it’s generally the people who have more disposable income, who can make this choice and who perhaps are more well-informed. There has to be a way that people can access this information as well. We’re looking at the slightly well-educated and interested people even just to start with. It’s a tricky one because everything you said, Becky, there was really very accurate. These choices are not always easy to make and they’re not made easier by the system that we’re in and so it can’t just be about those individual choices. It has to be about the system change but what we acknowledge and what we try to promote with our campaign is that those two things are linked. One of the reasons, for example, why flights are so comparatively cheap is that there is no tax on aviation fuel. That’s something that we can demand. Another thing that we can demand to make these travel choices easier is better information and more linked-up transport. For example, in France, the way the coaches and the trains are managed is that they do link up, so it’s much easier to travel long distances by a variety of different types of transport than it is here in the UK. We all know how ridiculous our rail prices are here in the UK and the system of doing it is just nuts really. Those are things that all need to change but we can demand those changes with our consumer choices. We can look at other consumer movements such as veganism as an example. Ten years ago, when I started being vegan, my option was a salad if I was lucky. Now I get a menu with choice on it and that’s not because everyone is vegan now. It’s because there are enough people doing it and talking about it and it’s now a bit trendy that even Subway offers me a vegan choice. That’s the kind of social tipping point that we can get to through those individual habits.
Matt: If I can extend Becky’s point, there’s a question mark around whether we have a choice. The next obvious question to me is who should be making a positive choice first. There are various stats I can point out about the number of people who take flights versus those that don’t. We’re going back a bit but in 2013, 70% of all flights in the UK were taken by only 15% of the population. We know that there are the frequent flyers and there are people who do this a lot more. Also, if you go down that curve in terms of the number of flights, there’s probably a strong correlation with wealth. The wealthier you are, the more you can fly. We’ll get to a threshold where people simply cannot afford to fly. So who should be making a positive choice first to reduce or, indeed, stop flying versus those that are maybe flying once every three or four years? Who is responsible here first and foremost? We can’t just say everybody, although that might be the answer [laughter].
Abhilasha: I think you’re right, Matt. That’s a good point. I think just to quickly touch on the system change or the bottom-up change that we were talking about, I was at a conference yesterday and one of my colleagues, Maria, used a very interesting example. She said, ‘Think about gay marriage. A few years ago, gay marriage was illegal in a lot of places and the way that we have transitioned as a society into accepting something that is new as a concept or foreign to a lot of people, was a bottom-up response that we collectively called for.’ I don’t know if it can be equated to aviation per se but I’m saying that there is some strength in this bottom-up response if we can harness it in the right way. I don’t think it should be ignored. I think, at the same time, there are government interventions and regulations that are very vital when we’re talking about something like aviation. Just to go back to who should be making that choice first, I think what Covid has done, and there’s a silver lining here, has changed the way we perceive travel permanently I would argue. Now with business travel, we know that there are viable alternatives. I understand that, of course, there’s something else about being at a conference in person, meeting your colleagues and things like that but I think it’s completely shifted the way that we do business travel. A lot of the arguments that the UK government actually puts forward for airport expansions, revenues and wider economic impacts is through business travel. Realistically, when we’re looking at the future, a lot of it is going to come as a result of leisure travel and not business travel. It’s really changed the scope in which we conduct business in the first place. We used to think that we couldn’t do conferences online. We’ve done it and we’ve done it for two years. Even as a university, at the University of Manchester, we have to rethink the way that we do business because we have our own internal CO2 goals.
Matt: I would wholeheartedly agree. I think business is possibly a way of doing this. I’m going to hand over to Anna in just a moment but I just wanted to say that in terms of Covid, I had a quick look at the flight stats from the European Flight Network and it’s interesting to see how this has rebounded now and we’re running at about 15% lower than pre-pandemic levels. You’d expect, in summer, to see it rebound. In terms of Covid, I do wonder whether things have changed for the long term. Anna, did you want to add anything there about who is most responsible and who should take responsibility?
Anna: It’s a really good question and, of course, as you’ve illustrated, there are certain people who take more flights than others. Of course, the most impact would come from those people reducing the amount they fly. Just to add a little bit to your statistic of 70% of flights which are taken by 15% of the people, that classifies you as a frequent flyer. In fact, in order to be part of that 15%, you only need to take three return flights a year. Now I reckon I know lots of people in my friendship circle would take three return flights a year but they wouldn’t class themselves as a frequent flyer, mainly because everybody knows someone who flies more than they do.
Matt: Which is different from the most frequent flyer, right? That’s really interesting.
Anna: Exactly. So the targeting aspect of this is quite problematic when you leave it down to individuals because no one is going to look at themselves and say, ‘Yeah, I’m that frequent flyer that needs to reduce my amount of flying.’ That’s where the regulation has to come in. Why are we rewarding people for taking many flights a year? We’ve still got these reward programmes in place. That’s an obvious one to go first, right?
Rebecca: We don’t have that for the train. We don’t have a reward programme for the train [laughter].
Anna: Exactly, yeah. That’s what we need. Last week, I was just talking to a colleague who had just booked a flight because his voucher was about to run out. He didn’t need to go on the flight and I thought, ‘This is the madness of the society that we’re in.’
Fraser: This is the thing though, Anna. Sorry, but speaking to accountability on this and who is likely to hold themselves to task and it speaks to what Asha mentioned about the bottom-up approach as well, is there a limit to what we can do as consumers before we have to start thinking about citizens, about making demands and about pointing the finger up the way for that accountability?
Anna: For sure and everybody responds differently. There will be quite a sizeable sector of society who will change their behaviour as a result of being presented with information that then influences their choices like having the emissions comparison on a plane ticket before you buy it, for example. There is also a sizeable section who won’t be influenced by that at all and so that’s where the regulation needs to come in. It has to be both of those sides.
Rebecca: I just also want to come back on this and think about the example or the comparison that you made, Asha, towards the legalisation of gay marriage. I was just stewing on that whilst you were talking and I was thinking that a lot of people were for that either because it aligned with their fundamental values about rights but also because there was no detrimental impact to them of that change being made. I have gone through a period of my life where I’ve certainly been a frequent flyer. I lived in New Zealand for a number of years and internally in the country, that’s how people get around. It’s just very, very far to drive. There are no good train lines and there’s not the population. I flew a lot and I would say that I haven’t over the past five or six years and that’s partly because I had a family and then partly because of Covid. Now that we’re opening up again and I’m starting to travel again, partly to visit family in other parts of the UK, partly to take holidays and partly for work, I’m looking at my options. It’s not just about cost and time for me. It’s also about what that better option is. I don’t mind if a train journey is longer but I can’t work on it and so it’s wasted time. I feel like there’s an element in here that even if people fundamentally believe and want to do their bit to reduce emissions, how are we going to get a groundswell around it when the upshot is that it’s going to negatively impact other parts of their lives? How can we flip this so that not flying is the better option?
Abhilasha: I think it’s also important to point out that there is a physiological dissonance when people fly. They really don’t think about their impact as Anna pointed out. When you’re taking a flight, you’re not really thinking about what your individual impact is going to be, especially if you’re doing it for two hours. Let’s talk about the UK Euroflights. They’re cheap and people take them frequently. They’re going to be taken frequently over the summer. It has grave impacts not just on people in other parts of the world but also on our own future. As an economist, when I think about it and I will do a quick cost/benefit analysis of an individual’s life, we’re going to end up paying more for everything if we continue to do it. I think the way that we should frame it is what is an individual going to experience over an entire lifetime if they continue to not change their own behaviour. I think we have to close that gap of understanding where we think that what we do now doesn’t really matter because we’re not going to see it for the next few years but in reality, we’re already seeing it. I remember before COP26 that there was a very stark Guardian article that came out where the Environment Minister in Madagascar held the cheap flights from the UK to Europe and vice versa accountable for the climate-induced famine that was happening in Madagascar at the time. Really, it’s the first time I’ve read on paper an official making that connection and saying, ‘Cheap flights have caused something that’s happening in my country and because climate financing targets have been missed this year again, we are not able to grow food.’ We are on the same Earth but it feels like we’re in parallel universes because there’s one place which is experiencing hunger and poverty and there’s another place where we’re trying to make a choice between going on holiday or not. It’s a very weird comparison but it’s really happening now. It was old news and sometimes when we read about these headlines, we forget about it but I feel like I have to reinstate it every time I talk about this issue because it can’t be overlooked.
[Music flourish]
Matt: I want to start to move into what we do next. How do we tackle this? We’ve talked a little bit about flying less. We’ve talked a bit about adopting alternative modes of travel but if we look at the UK government and look to them to point the way forward and their Jet Zero strategy which came hot on the heels of their Transport Decarbonisation plan, other stuff starts to creep in. Their big focus is on ‘improving the overall efficiency of our aviation system’ – that means the efficiency of the planes but also the efficiency of the logistics and the management of those flights – ‘the acceleration and development and deployment of Sustainable Aviation Fuels and the progression of zero-emission flight’ (which is kind of walking into battery territory. Also, something we’ve talked a little bit about in previous pods, particularly the Green Lairds episodes a couple back, they say ‘driving down emissions in the most cost-effective way using markets and much of this can be carbon credits and offsetting.’ Both of you, I’m sure, will have a view on this and I’m going to you in a moment because I know Asha has researched this but I certainly want your view and Flight Free UK’s view on this. Asha, I know you’ve been deep in the research on some of those issues.
Abhilasha: Yeah, I used to work for the California Emissions Trading System (ETS) and some of the features or the principles features of the ETS there are similar to what we’re experiencing in the UK and in the EU. Yeah, you’re right. Market-based mechanisms play a huge role or any projection that you will see about aviation emissions and how to get to net zero with aviation has a big chunk of that because of market-based mechanisms. There are a lot of inherent issues with that regulation as it stands to be perfectly honest. If we take CORSIA, for example...
Matt: You’ll have to unpack some of these terms for the listeners.
Abhilasha: Of course.
Matt: The Emissions Trading System... [laughter] just a few words about how this works because we’re talking about international market mechanisms here.
Abhilasha: Exactly. Basically, the principle of the market mechanism is to allow emitters to decarbonise in the most cost-effective way possible. That’s really the bottom line. When you’re looking at it from an industry perspective, you want to allow them to decarbonise in the cheapest way possible. That’s really the principle of the ETS, even though it’s controversial and there are a lot of different features that are troubling as it stands. I think the first very important thing we have to understand is that we have to price the carbon the right way and in an appropriate way if we’re going to go ahead with market-based mechanisms. To be honest, right now, it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of other options on the table with the way things are going. So market-based mechanisms, unfortunately, will play a big role going forward but it has to be an appropriate amount. What I mean by that is that when an airline operator or when an aeroplane is polluting, there are social costs that are incurred by us as a society. There will be environmental costs, health costs and other damages that will be incurred by us as a society. To cover that, airline operators should, in principle, pay appropriately for that. What happens right now is that the price of carbon is not actually costed in the right amount. There is research that exists on how much it should be costing. Some say it should be in the $80-$100 range and some say it should be above. There are ETSs that are in place that charge $200 per ton of carbon which is a lot of money.
Matt: To put that into perspective, to fly from the UK to New York, from what I looked at before, that would be well over a ton return and so you’re adding another $200 on top of that flight.
Abhilasha: Exactly. Essentially, what you’re trying to do is make the polluter pay for the pollution. On paper, it feels like a very equitable way of distributing accountability or at least financial accountability for the pollution or emissions that are happening.
Matt: And to reinvest those carbon...
Abhilasha: Correct... those funds back into the system for other decarbonisation or even to subsidy SAFs (Sustainable Aviation Fuels).
Matt: Anna, from a Flight Free UK perspective, I think the answer may be in the name of the initiative with Sustainable Aviation Fuels but do you see these as playing a role or are they just unhelpful?
Anna: Honestly, I think they’re unhelpful. Unsurprisingly, I don’t really trust the government to sort this out. It’s not even just about trust. I don’t believe they will, mainly because I don’t believe that they know the seriousness of this. All governments want people to vote for them. They have not shied away from the fact that they want to solve everything without asking people to change their behaviours, even though the Climate Change Committee has made recommendations that, overall, we can use technology as a supplement to reduce emissions but fundamentally, we need to reduce the amount we fly. If we are to reach our net-zero targets, we cannot do it without demand management and yet the government continually ignore this because that’s not a vote winner. People do not want to hear that we’re going to have to change how we live but actually, to solve the climate crisis, we’re going to have to change everything about the way we live. The shiny Jet Zero plan is full of these promising-sounding things like Sustainable Aviation Fuels and I’m going to call them alternative fuels because actually, they’re not really sustainable. There are some versions of alternative fuel which might potentially be zero carbon and that is likely to be an e-fuel; so that is electronic fuel created using renewable energy. By the way, the technology for that is still ten years away but once you’ve developed that technology to get into commercial aviation, it’s going to take another perhaps ten years. So we’re way, way off this actually happening on a practical level commercially but the e-fuels generated with renewable energy are likely to be the only way we can genuinely fly carbon neutral, mainly because all other fuels still create the same amount of carbon during the combustion phase. It’s just as carbon-heavy to burn a so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuel created from waste palm oil because the combustion still creates the same amount of pollution. It’s just the ‘savings’ – and I am saying savings in inverted commas here – are from the life cycle of generating that fuel. There are claims that alternative fuels can be 80% lower emissions than conventional jet fuel and that’s because the projection is that because they’re not going to sit in landfill creating methane, then we’ve saved that methane from going into the atmosphere. Well, it’s quite a difficult calculation to make but just to round up this conversation and come back to the genuinely zero-carbon fuel, we’re in an energy crisis. We’re already in an energy crisis. We already don’t have enough renewable energy to a) decarbonise the grid and b) decarbonise all our land transport. I would say, and I’m sure most people would agree, that those are probably the priority over trying to keep on flying around on holiday. We are talking about a luxury here. It seems that we’ve got our priorities wrong and when we have limited renewable energy, should we really be putting it towards flying? Probably not. We should probably be putting it towards the more immediate life things.
Rebecca: The thing is we could talk about this for hours and we could actually have you back to talk about each of these individual aspects at a time. I just want to ask about offsetting because every time you go and buy a plane ticket, there’s always that little box which asks, ‘Do you want to tick an offset?’ I never actually know whether I should tick that or not. Asha, you’re shaking your head. Could you just give us a very, very brief explanation? Tell me about offsetting and set the story straight for us [laughter].
Asha: Don’t tick the offsetting box [laughter].
Rebecca: What should we do instead? Not fly? [Laughter]
Asha: Not fly [laughter]. No, I think offsetting is a very complex mechanism. It has gotten a bad reputation and for good reason because it has a lot of wider environmental impacts that are not really appropriately, again, costed. When we can charge £1 for a carbon credit, it doesn’t really seem like a fair price to pay for flying across the country. It has wider impacts because when you’re setting up projects in another country, and mostly that happens in the Global South, you’re creating an entire economic ecosystem where to get there, people have to take cars to operate the wind farm. There are capital expenditures. There will be emissions to set that up. If you look at the entire life cycle of an offset project, it doesn’t really add to what it looks like. It sounds like a very easy way to get away with flying and that’s a very large part of what’s troubling with CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) is that you have these big projects that claim to remove one ton of CO2 for one ton of CO2 elsewhere but it’s not really a fair system. I would maybe steer clear of the carbon offsetting schemes.
Rebecca: It just makes us feel better, right?
Asha: Yeah, I would even classify it as a classic greenwashing technique and so I would maybe steer clear or you can contribute to offset projects elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be what’s advertised. There are a lot of different types of offset projects and each of them has different impacts. It’s very important to read up on those before blindly accepting what’s there.
Rebecca: It seems then that the end goal of where we want to be and maybe where we can aspire to be is being able to choose not to fly and finding alternatives. In the interim, we need to think about those flights I guess that we need to take, those flights we don’t need to take and what we can do to reduce the impact of flying. It sounds like then perhaps just ticking the offsetting box is not a good way that we can go about reducing the impact of flying. There may be other options. We like to always end Local Zero by thinking about how we can bring that down to us as individuals and communities. What can we do? I’d love it if you could both perhaps just share a few ideas beyond the kind of all-or-nothing. What can we do as individuals to try and reduce the impact to get us started on that journey which may end in all of us pledging never to fly again? How can we get started on that journey?
Anna: I’m going to start by saying, of course, we would love people to sign our pledge because it doesn’t say you can never fly again. It’s simply to quit flying for a year. This is our method of behaviour change. If you can challenge yourself to do things differently for that period of time, then when you finish your pledge year, hopefully, those behaviours that you’ve picked up during that time will continue into your later habits even if you do then have to get on a flight again because, as you’ve illustrated, Becky, it’s not that simple that we all just say that we’re not going to fly anymore. We have a very globalised society now and lots of us have family across oceans and we have some work commitments that are slightly unavoidable in terms of flying. That’s our method of behaviour change. Could you try it for a year? If you want to sign up, it’s FlightFree.co.uk and we would love to have people choose to sign our pledge.
Rebecca: Fantastic. Thanks, Anna. Asha, any closing ideas from you?
Abhilasha: It’s a tricky one, honestly. I think when it comes to aviation, I feel like people always view it as all or nothing but I’m hoping that there are going to be more demand-side changes because I think, coming from a more technology side, I can tell you that we’re trying to answer your questions. One is whether it’s feasible to have alternative fuels on the scale that we require and the other is if it’s doable by 2050 because we have a real deadline at hand. We’re not just aiming for 2070 or 2080, it’s 30 years away and so our impacts now have to be more practical than they were.
Anna: You’ve asked how people can feel like they’re making a difference and we’ve spent quite a lot of the podcast just talking about people making those climate-friendly choices and, of course, it is down to us as individuals. In many ways, that’s all we ever have control over but there are so many other ways that we can put pressure on to change things and to reach that system change that we need. There are lots of groups that fight airport expansion. That’s a key one and an easy one. Write to your MP about airport expansion if you live near an airport and join your local airport expansion group. Just talk about it with your friends. These are things that we can all do. Our campaign is not the only one that’s asking for people to fly less. There are other campaigns across Europe and there are other campaigns that focus specifically on frequent flyers and all of this stuff. You can definitely go beyond your own individual choice. There are lots of people out there working really hard on this and that’s how we achieve societal change and that’s what we really need to see.
Fraser: You’re speaking my language there, Anna. I was quietly on mute off to the side there shouting, screaming and clapping my hands. I think that’s such an important point about citizens as well as consumers which is a really important thing to remember there. I think that was a fantastic chat and, Becky, you’re right that we could have done that for a long, long time. Matt and Becky, do you have any final remarks or takeaways after that chat? Do you feel motivated to change how you live and travel?
Matt: More motivated and a bit clearer which is good.
Rebecca: Yeah, I will be visiting Flight Free UK. I will be trying to make the pledge. I think it’s great.
Matt: No more trips to LA for you, Becky. That’s for sure [laughter].
Rebecca: Absolutely not. Gosh, I hated the travel but I still come back to the fact that it is hard and it’s not something that’s going to change overnight. I do think that there is the option to ramp it up, realise that it doesn’t have to be a switch for all of us and that it is this kind of gradual evolution. I’m completely vegan now but I didn’t do that overnight and so I think that this is possibly something that’s going to end up going in the same direction.
Matt: Asha was saying about costing the carbon and if you doubled the cost of the flight and halved the cost of the train (and also made the train nice or nicer... it doesn’t even have to be that nice)... I hope to live to see that day.
Fraser: I think a big point as well and something that I think resonated from what Asha raised really perfectly was that we think about it as to whether we could or couldn’t do this, whether it’s convenient or whether it’s economically effective but it’s actually critical to global climate justice as well. When you put it into the bigger perspective or bigger picture, we’re dealing with ourselves but we’re also dealing with something much bigger too.
Great. On that note then, Asha and Anna, thank you so much for coming along. That was an excellent discussion and we hope we can get you back up again to draw it out some more.
Anna: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Abhilasha: Thank you so much, guys.
Matt: You have been listening to Local Zero. Thanks to our guests and everyone we’ve heard from about previous episodes. Please keep the feedback coming in and tell us what you’ve enjoyed and what you’d like to hear about in the future. If you haven’t already, go find and follow us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter to get involved with discussions over there. If you can’t constrain your thoughts and feelings to just a few characters, you can always email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. So if you’re enjoying Local Zero, please, please, please do leave a review as this helps us climb up the charts and drive the local energy revolution. Until then, thanks for listening and goodbye.
Rebecca: Bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
Transcribed by
PODTRANSCRIBE