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Is Flying All That Bad?

Stacking Up the Stats

I was the grand old age of 12 when I first set foot on a plane to go on holiday. I don’t remember feeling anything in particular about it – surprising as it may seem, considering my later career path. I suppose I must have had some degree of excitement but, if so, it got firmly squashed under my all-consuming tween desire to appear ‘cool’.

Back then, flying was emphatically not the norm for the people I knew. This was the late 1990s, a time before the proliferation of low-cost flights, before the stratospheric rise of Ryanair, before the birth of the £10 flash-mega-bargain-basement sales that made flying more cost-effective than catching a train to Scunthorpe. EasyJet’s Stelios was just an intrepid entrepreneur with a few planes and a big dream; UK airports handled a mere 100 million passengers a year,¹ less than a third of the number they dealt with before the pandemic hit.²

It wasn’t all about price, though. It was about mindset. Growing up in a middle-class family (Dad was a civil servant, Mum a translator), I was lucky enough to never feel like money was an issue. Presents may have been rationed, clothes purchased on a strictly need-to-wear basis and pocket money capped at £1 a week, but there were no discernible financial worries. I’m pretty sure we could’ve splurged on a once-yearly migration to somewhere hot and exotic – but I don’t think it ever even occurred to my parents. It just wasn’t what you did. Destinations were limited to coastal Devon, rural Wales or, to really up the ante, northern France, reached by car while listening to the same three tapes on a loop for five hours straight (Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Themes and Dreams, a compilation that included the Inspector Morse theme tune). Holidays meant grey skies and grey seas and scrambling across pebble-strewn beaches to discover rock pools teeming with life; this, too, being mostly grey-coloured. We were freezing but happy.

This was pretty much the experience of all of my peers at that time. Flying somewhere was an unusual enough occurrence that it bagged you a feature-length presentation at show and tell; I still think back, with something akin to envy, to Stephanie Hunt’s ‘My Two-Week Trip to Disney World’ talk, coolly delivered from behind a pair of new Minnie Mouse shades.

Cut to a quarter of a century later and the world of holidaying has changed beyond all recognition. Today, we Brits take more flights abroad than any other nationality, including Americans. Some 126.2 million passengers were British in 2018, roughly one in twelve of all international travellers.³ Far from it being a noteworthy event, kids are likely to be as well travelled as you or me; families with children under 5 take the most holidays abroad of any demographic, averaging 1.8 a year, according to data from the holiday association ABTA.⁴

The age of the low-cost airline, which properly got going in the early noughties, democratised flying in a way that no one could have anticipated. It transformed travel from the preserve of the elite to something anyone could do, provided you didn’t mind forgoing a complimentary meal and a comfortable seat. This seemed like a Very Good Thing – both for tourists and, in many cases, locals. More visitors equals more money equals more jobs; a whole new supercharged industry to revive flagging communities. But, like everything in life, change comes at a cost. There’s the human cost – residents displaced in Barcelona because soaring rents have forced them out; Amsterdammers feeling like strangers in their own city as badly behaved stag parties take over – and then there’s the environmental cost.

In 2019, just shy of 40 million flights took off worldwide.⁵ Passengers flew a total of 8.1 trillion kilometres, a number so staggeringly big as to be practically meaningless. This was an increase of 5 per cent from 2018 – and more than 300 per cent higher than in 1990.

For a while, the impact of all this exponential growth on the planet we inhabit was lost on most people, me included. The world was getting smaller, and that was fine by me – all those places you could previously only dream of going were now not only tantalisingly accessible, but practically on your doorstep. Five minutes on the internet could mean you’d soon be jetting off to Borneo, Barbados, Bolivia. It changed travel journalism, too: writers were no longer the gatekeepers, magnanimously (read smugly) sharing a glimpse of the exotic to help readers imagine far-flung places they’d never have a hope in hell of visiting. That age is over. Now, the aim is to inspire, to convince would-be travellers that this particular corner of the globe is the Next Big Thing: ‘Go now, NOW, before it’s ruined by all the tourists!’ we shriek into the void, with a somewhat endearing lack of irony.

Once upon a time, pointing out the negative effects of all this flying was something only offbeat outsiders did. The same people who went vegan ten years before it was ‘cool’, because farming livestock is responsible for 14.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions globally;⁶ the same killjoys who were banging on about recycling when no one wanted to know; those same Debbie Downers who, when you railed against the cruelty of child labour, would politely ask where you thought your mobile phone battery came from – and your £3 Primark dress. Overly earnest do-gooders whose greatest gift was bringing down the mood at a party, you understand – not normal people.

But they saw what the rest of us were far, far too slow to catch onto.

According to a report by The Guardian, taking one long-haul return flight produces more carbon emissions than the average citizen in more than fifty countries will account for in a year.⁷ Aviation industry emissions, which currently contribute 2 per cent of all global emissions, look set to double by 2050. (And even that’s an optimistic prediction, as it assumes that future aircraft could be more efficient based on technology that doesn’t actually exist yet.) The International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts passenger numbers will double – double – to 8.2 billion by 2037.⁸

I find these numbers just the tiniest bit frightening. The sky already feels damn near full. Pre-pandemic, if you went and stood at Myrtle Avenue, the famous plane spotter’s point near London Heathrow, you’d quickly realise just how full, as jet after jet after jet landed every ninety seconds, without pause, for eighteen hours a day. It was mesmerising in its relentlessness. Imagining double that makes my brain hurt. It makes me feel like this whole flying business is slipping out of our collective control.

But am I, along with everyone else, just getting hysterical about the latest cause célèbre? Is flying really so terrible when stacked up against the alternative ways of getting around? Let’s crunch the numbers.

Plane vs. the rest

While there’s a lot of talk about how bad flying is, it’s not always backed up by something tangible we can get our heads around. The calculations are tricky, for a start, because not all aircraft are alike. The newer they are, the more efficient they are, as a general rule – just as not all cars are alike and not all trains are alike. We’re therefore always talking in generalities when it comes to comparisons – taking the average emissions of a mode of transport, for instance.

In this book, we’ll often be looking at emissions on a per person basis – it’s how you calculate an individual’s carbon footprint, by looking at the total amount of CO2 produced during their journey and dividing it by the total number of people who are on that particular mode of transport. This way of calculating doesn’t take overall emissions into account – it’s purely a way to see what’s most efficient.

Obviously, there are some problems with using this method – the main one being that ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean ‘non-polluting’. Take Ryanair, for example. At the end of 2019, it released an ad campaign claiming to be the greenest airline. Technically, on the parameters it was using, this wasn’t inaccurate: the airline has one of the youngest fleets and highest load factors (aviation-speak for bums on seats) in the business, making individuals’ carbon footprints lower than if they flew on rival airlines. But this is the same Ryanair that, according to EU data, was one of the top-ten polluting companies in Europe in 2019 – and the other nine were all coal plants.⁹ Claiming to be a ‘green’ company in this context seems like a teensy bit of an oxymoron.

Bearing all that in mind, here’s a broad overview of the main modes of transport purely based on CO2 emissions (per passenger per km travelled):¹⁰

Now, if you’re surprised to see a bus beating a long-haul jet, you’re probably not alone. But hold your horses before you start booking long-haul flights like it’s going out of fashion – the story these numbers tell us isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Most importantly, this just shows CO2 emissions. If you add in secondary effects from non-CO2 emissions – water vapour, aerosols and nitrogen oxides, for example – which have been proven to significantly impact the climate, domestic flights contribute an extra 121g per km, while long-haul flights are responsible for 93g more, putting them both solidly ahead of motor vehicles. And it’s crucial that we do include these – back in 1999 a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that the total historic impact of aviation on the climate when factoring in non-CO2 emissions was two to four times higher than when looking at CO2 emissions alone.¹¹ Jo Dardenne, aviation manager at European sustainable travel NGO Transport & Environment, tells me the impact of flying ‘is much greater than carbon – a lot of warming impacts are being linked to contrails, which have twice as much impact as CO2 emissions’.

Including the warming impacts of non-CO2 emissions, then, our table looks more as we’d expect:

There are other factors to consider too – the ‘per passenger’ number is based on the plane having an average load factor, that is, most seats are filled. Sometimes this might be the case; sometimes it might not be. The car you have will also make a difference – the average hybrid, for example, will emit 113g per km, totalling around 28g per person if you have a full carload, making it technically more efficient than the train.

It’s also important to think about the bigger picture. On paper, travelling on a long-haul flight might not look that much worse than driving. But, realistically, are you going to be travelling to Sydney by car? By looking at just the km per passenger number, we can be in danger of overlooking the fact that a long-haul flight goes much further, and therefore produces a load more emissions, than a mode of transport that’s never going to travel that far. Likewise, although a long-haul flight is technically more efficient than a domestic one, the very fact you’re flying much further means more emissions overall. So, although the per passenger per km number is useful, it’s certainly worth also looking at our overall journeys, rather than just breaking them down into their component parts.

Looking at the bigger picture again, aviation accounts for about 12 per cent of transport emissions worldwide,¹² with all flights producing just shy of 1 billion (915 million) tonnes of CO2 in 2019.¹³ If it helps, you can picture 100,000 Eiffel Towers, 6.6 million blue whales, or just under three times the amount of CO2 the entirety of the UK emits annually.¹⁴ Meanwhile, emissions from trains make up just 1 per cent of transport emissions and, unsurprisingly, road travel accounts for a whopping three-quarters of all transport emissions, most of which come from passenger vehicles. So, cars are clearly a big problem too. But one big difference is that the technology already exists commercially that can help decarbonise the automobile industry; electric cars are on the market. The technology that could revolutionise aviation remains more pipedream than reality, while the desire for uninhibited growth shows no sign of abating in the meantime. Right now, aviation accounts for 2 per cent of all global CO2 emissions but, if it continues on the same track, its impact is projected to rise by 200–360 per cent by 2050.¹⁵

There’s no getting around it: although other modes of transport aren’t perfect either, flying usually trumps them when you add other harmful emissions into the mix, and the industry has barely scratched the surface of decarbonisation while continuing to expand (at least until Covid-19) at an increasingly rapid rate. There’s a reason scientists say the quickest way to dramatically slash your carbon footprint is to simply stop flying.

How much is too much?

Part of the problem is that, for many of us, we’ve never even tried to calculate our emissions from flying. We might eschew plastic straws, be gung-ho about recycling and carry our reusable coffee cup with pride, all while compartmentalising the part of our life that includes travel – because who wants to ruin the excitement of gearing up for a holiday with dreary old climate change?

I’ll hold my hands up and say it: I’ve flown so much in my life I’m not even sure I could calculate my total emissions from flying. I’m not a list maker – I’ve never written down all my journeys or scratched off countries on one of those special gold-leaf maps. And while the first twenty-five years of my life might be fairly straightforward to track, the last eight are not. When I became a travel journalist, that’s when s*** got real.

Taking just my last year of travel before going flight-free, then – the year I took twenty-four flights in the first six months – I used an online calculator to work it out.¹⁶ You pop in your from/to airports, and the calculator gives you a number (frighteningly big in my case), in tonnes, of your CO2 emissions.¹⁷ I encourage you to go ahead and try it yourself – if only to look that number squarely in the eye and acknowledge its existence for the first time. Then feel free to go and hide under the bed.

My number? Some 9.3 tonnes in one year. To put that into perspective, the average UK citizen’s annual carbon footprint – so not just flights, but all the carbon they produce from every single thing they do – is 5.65 tonnes. I’m also more than double the world average (again, just for my air travel) of 4.35 tonnes, and almost six times greater than India, which is a saintly 1.57 tonnes. Even the biggest carbon offenders, the US, have an average annual footprint of 14.95 tonnes per person.¹⁸ I can’t be far off that when you factor in the rest of my carbon-guzzling life.

Now, that year was a particularly travel-heavy one. They won’t all have been like that. But say I only took half the number of flights the preceding seven years (4.65 tonnes): that’s still 41.85 tonnes in total during the time I’ve been a travel journalist. If it helps you to visualise it, that’s about the same weight as a Boeing 737 plane.

It means that, a) I have a lot of making up to do, and b) I can never cast judgement on anybody for their decision to fly. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. The flight shame movement has been consistently mistranslated as ‘flight shaming’ in the media, but it was never about shaming other people, or castigating them, or looking down on them. It was only ever about looking at yourself; it was only ever about changing your own habits.

Can I fly at all?

The big question: is flying really so bad that I can never do it again? Or is there a number I could aim for that would be OK – once a year, say, or one big long-haul trip every few years? Life is rarely black and white. Yes, a lot of us fly purely for pleasure. But what about those of us who fly to see family? In a globalised world, we move around, we migrate, we build lives halfway around the planet from our birthplaces. It’s one thing to suggest not flying. It’s quite another to suggest people commit to never seeing their parents/children/siblings/long-distance partners ever again.

One statistic that suggests you probably can fly, just not as much, was calculated by Possible – a climate-action charity that tries to create positive, practical ideas to encourage people to become part of the movement. They say that 70 per cent of all flights in the UK are taken by 15 per cent of people, which points the finger squarely at the frequent flyers – the people like 2019 me – and not at those who take a two-week holiday once a year. Get the former to change their lifestyles and reduce the number of flights they take, and we could be onto something. Bear in mind, though, that you don’t need to jet off as much as you’d think to wind up being classed as a ‘frequent flyer’ in this equation: just three return flights a year thrusts you into this category.

Aside from the Flight Free UK pledge, there’s another campaign called Pledge to Fly Less, founded by CAGNE (Communities Against Gatwick Noise Emissions). This acknowledges that people might not be able to go completely cold turkey, but that if everyone took fewer flights – in particular those of us who already take a lot – that would go a long way towards improving things.

Globally, it’s a similar picture. Stefan Gössling, a professor at the Linnaeus University School of Business and Economics who specialises in sustainable tourism, co-published a study in November 2020 that found just 1 per cent of the population worldwide caused half of all aviation carbon emissions in 2018.¹⁹ To be included in this group of ‘super emitters’, you had to have flown 35,000 miles (56,000km) in a year – the equivalent of either three long-haul return flights or one return short-haul flight per month. ‘We think everyone’s on the move, but in reality, just 4 per cent of the world’s population fly internationally in any given year,’ he tells me. ‘When we talk about flying, we are really talking about an elite activity.’ He’s not wrong – even in the UK, less than half of the population will take an international flight each year. In Germany it’s only about 35 per cent of people.

‘What we are really talking about is a small group of people who might have to change their behaviour – it’s not “normal” behaviour when the majority of the world’s population aren’t doing it,’ says Professor Gössling.

When asked if there’s a certain amount we could fly sustainably, he says restrictions and quotas usually aren’t feasible:

Personally, I don’t believe in budgeting or restrictions – not because they’re not valuable, but because many attempts to restrict, limit, or budget have never made it politically. People don’t even need to be involved in a certain activity, such as flying, to still feel like their personal freedoms are being challenged if there’s a limit imposed.

Whether we should stop flying or fly once a year isn’t the right question, in my opinion. With the right market mechanisms in place, people will decide for themselves. If we saw a big increase in the cost of flying – which is justifiable because aviation in the UK and EU currently doesn’t pay VAT, doesn’t pay fuel tax, doesn’t have an inbuilt carbon cost, and it carried coronavirus around the globe – a huge chunk of frequent flyers would disappear. People wouldn’t even notice too much – because it’s not curbing their personal freedom by telling them not to fly, rather, it’s a personal choice they’ve made.

Part of the problem is price. Over the last sixty years, the real cost of air travel has reduced by 60 per cent. And although cranking up the cost of flights might feel elitist – and like it’s penalising the poorer end of the market – other studies would suggest that is not the case. In debating whether a third runway at Heathrow would really benefit the UK, Professor David Banister, Emeritus Professor of transport studies at Oxford University, outlined that the evidence pointed to the same people flying more, rather than more people flying, as the price of flying has decreased.

‘Some might argue that low-cost airlines have helped rebalance this inequality, but the evidence would suggest that cheaper flights have enabled those already flying to travel more frequently and possibly to save money,’ he wrote in The Conversation.²⁰ He continued:

On grounds of inequality, environment and spend, building additional airport capacity at LHR does not add up, as it will enable the richest 10 per cent to fly even more and spend their money overseas. It will be the poorest 10 per cent that stay in the UK, and they will suffer from even higher levels of CO2 emissions and poorer levels of air quality.

However it’s done, experts agree that reduction is essential for the aviation sector over the next twenty years. Transport & Environment’s Jo Dardenne says it’s best to look at it in terms of short-, medium- and long-term action. ‘Short term, we need to reduce demand, because the impact of flying is much greater than the carbon emissions,’ she says. ‘In the medium term, we have to develop sustainable fuels for as many flights as possible, and long term we’re looking at breakthrough technology that could let us fly with zero emissions, such as electric planes.’

According to Professor Gössling, to meet targets stipulating that by 2050 all sectors have to be carbon neutral, emissions across the board need to be in sharp decline. ‘We’d like to see a 5 per cent reduction in emissions year-on-year,’ he says. But translated to an aviation industry that’s been rapidly growing by 6–7 per cent year-on-year, this looks more like a 13 per cent decline each year in order to achieve those targets. Which certainly doesn’t fit in with the aviation sector’s plans – and which, in the wake of colossal financial losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic, will be fiercely contested by an industry trying to claw its money back.

When all’s said and done, scientists are reluctant to give a number of ‘appropriate’ or ‘sustainable’ flights because, behaviour-wise, humans simply don’t like being told what to do. If reduction is key, perhaps this should be the goal for each of us as individuals. Sit down and work out how many air miles you flew per year for the last few years. Calculate it as a number and then challenge yourself to reduce that number next year. If it’s choosing a holiday, consider short haul instead of long haul. If it’s a conference or business meeting, consider whether you need to be there in person. If it’s travelling within the same continent, consider whether there are viable alternatives by train or by boat. Work out what your non-negotiable travel looks like – seeing family, going to a friend’s wedding abroad – and go from there.

Travel saints

So, we’ve established that air travel equals ‘not so great’. Now it’s time to look at which forms of transport are the least impactful. The lowest, of course, are walking and cycling. These aren’t accessible for everyone – but if they are for you, one of the easiest ways to bring down your carbon footprint is to swap car journeys for using your legs wherever possible. Even the UK driving theory test now acknowledges this, and has a whole section on reducing emissions (revving your engine is a no-no, FYI).

For longer journeys, rail travel is usually the most carbon-efficient bet, but there’s an argument to say even this is beaten by hitchhiking (as my colleague at The Independent Simon Calder is always eager to point out). Think about it: it’s a journey the car would already have been making, whether you hitched a lift or not. Therefore, by travelling this way, you’re not contributing any extra carbon emissions (for more on this see chapter 6). The logic might seem strange, but it does check out, I promise.

For instance, one of the saintliest ways of travelling long haul is by cargo ship. Cargo ships aren’t green by any stretch – they’re massive polluters. But, like hitchhiking, this way of travelling can be seen as ‘carbon neutral’ purely because you aren’t creating any demand. The ship is making the journey anyway, taking its cargo between ports; you’re simply hitching a ride.

People will often make the point: ‘What use is giving up flying? You think the plane won’t still go without you on it?’ It’s a fundamental misunderstanding about supply and demand and how the aviation industry works. Airlines exist to make money. They do this by taking people from one place to another. If I stop flying, not much changes. But if lots of people do? Everything changes. Say something happens in a tourist-friendly country in Southeast Asia – a terrorist incident, for example – and people are scared. Demand drops dramatically; planes are taking off less than half full. You think that route will just continue as normal? Hell no! The service will fly less and less frequently, and, if there’s never really enough demand to justify it, it might get cancelled altogether. Airlines do this all the time. They are good at making money because they constantly adapt their routes in response to customer appetite.

The coronavirus outbreak is a perfect practical example of this. When it first broke out in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and started spreading in early 2020, certain Chinese cities were put in lockdown. Governments worldwide started responding, including the UK government, telling citizens not to travel there. But crucially, airlines were not ‘forbidden’ from flying there – they were free to continue their schedules as planned. Aside from the top-down response, people did not want to go there regardless – they were understandably hugely anxious. Obviously, this had a significant impact on demand for flights and airlines took a machete to their China routes.

The result? Almost 100,000 flights were cancelled during the first month of the coronavirus outbreak, according to data from between 23 January and 18 February 2020. The grounded flights accounted for over two-thirds of China’s originally scheduled services.²¹ Of course, we all know what happened next – travelling was pretty much off the table, full stop, for most of the following year – but before it was officially banned, consumer behaviour had already massively changed the landscape. It neatly demonstrates the way that airline schedules are not set in stone – they are completely formed and shaped by consumers’ choices, which are in turn formed by the bigger picture.

Cargo transportation companies also exist to make money. They do this by taking cargo from one place to another. The difference between flying and travelling by cargo ship is this: if people stopped booking to travel on the latter, precisely nothing would happen. It is not the primary reason the ship is making the journey; passenger behaviour has zero bearing on it. Whereas if lots of people stopped flying … well, the airlines would be terrified, that’s for sure.

Are airlines changing?

There is already some mad energy being put into making airlines look ‘greener’. A lot of this is pretty standard greenwashing – the practice of falsely making products or services seem ‘eco’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ through marketing and spin, when they’re merely paying lip service to the concept of sustainability. The problem is, without targeted government intervention when it comes to properly taxing aviation, there is little incentive for airlines to go through the expensive business of amending their operations in a genuinely meaningful way.

But PR stunt or not, it is important to note that until a couple of years ago, carriers wouldn’t have even bothered to make the effort in the first place. Why are they doing it? Because they’re scared that the Greta-effect will permeate and that people will start flying less as a result of climate guilt; they’re scared that the writing is already on the wall.

Airlines don’t really do anything unless there’s something in it for them. If they’re bellowing loudly about their green credentials, it’s because they believe that’s what consumers want to hear in order to buy. So, when people say individual decisions don’t make a difference, they’re only right up to a point; when things reach critical mass, businesses are forced to react to meet the demands of consumers. And some of the technology airlines are investing in is impactful, as we’ll find out later on in this book.

Veganism is a great illustration of reaching a critical mass that prompted businesses to change. For a long time, vegans were an insignificant enough minority that there was no need for restaurants and supermarkets to cater for them. Then the movement expanded, helped by stunts like Veganuary, and seemingly became mainstream overnight. Demand grew, and smart companies met this demand head on: all of this coming to fruition in the UK in that paragon of loveliness, the Greggs vegan sausage roll.

Do individual actions even matter in the climate fight?

This is the big question that often comes up in terms of sustainability. What on earth is the point in changing our behaviour as individuals when big oil companies and the like – and safe to say we could probably include airlines in this – still aren’t bothering to decarbonise? It’s even been claimed that the idea of ‘doing your bit’ and the concept of an individual’s carbon footprint is ‘one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever’, promoted by the likes of BP to shift blame and focus from them to consumers – the ultimate distraction technique.²²

We know that the real problems lie at a big-business and governmental level; we should not let corporations wriggle out of their obligations to reduce emissions and take on that guilt for them. But I think this argument also misses the essential point outlined above: that pressure for those above to change comes from below, from the grassroots, critical mass of ordinary people demanding better of their politicians and the businesses they choose to patronise. Change comes when the tide of opinion turns, and that often starts with ourselves.

After all, our own behaviour is the one thing we have control over. It doesn’t mean we let the real culprits off the hook – but it means we stop expecting improvement to be a top-down affair, and put pressure on those in charge through our own expectations and demands. In the words of Michael Jackson, ‘I’m starting with the [wo]man in the mirror’, in the belief that individual behaviour change has a much wider ripple effect than just my own actions.

If you still don’t believe me, let’s turn our attention back to Sweden – the place where the flight-free movement first took off (pardon the pun). Has flygskam had any tangible impact on flying habits? The simple answer is yes, it has: domestic air travel dropped by 9 per cent in 2019 compared to the previous year, according to Sweden’s airport operators, Swedavia.²³

Never let anyone tell you that you don’t have power as a consumer – you’re voting every time you get out your wallet. Your spending decisions can, quite literally, change the world.