Should We Fly?

There’s a hidden gem in Mya-Rose Craig’s book, which might be of interest to travel-minded Escapologists. It concerns the environmental impact of flight.

Before she made her point, I found myself thinking “hmm, you certainly burn a lot of jet fuel for an environmentalist.”

Mya, however, nips this criticism in the bud. She explains that almost all emissions from air travel come from about 10% of airline customers. This, of course, would be the constant use of private jets by billionaires and from wasteful business practices leading to huge amounts of cargo being flown around the world instead of being produced domestically (or, ideally, not produced at all).

Tourism, Mya says, barely contributes anything in terms of emissions. This rings true, doesn’t it?

Surely, the carbon cost of occasionally flying to France or Portugal is negligible. The idea is to withdraw your funding from an ecologically-damaging industry, which makes sense, but the money you give to KLM or easyJet, most of which is tax anyway, is microscopic compared to the antics of industry and the super-rich.

The plane you would have flown on would fly without you. It might even fly if everyone stayed at home. Is it right to ask a person to sacrifice their relatively humble dream of seeing some of the world before leaving it forever, while others are exacerbating the climate crisis purely for money?

Any one person’s contribution against climate apocalypse — reducing your waste for example, or not driving, or generally doing less — is obviously small but they’re usually still worth doing. It doesn’t cost anything to recycle. It benefits you in countless ways not to drive. But not getting on a plane once or twice a year means forgoing your privilege of seeing the world. A devastating loss if you’re of a nomadic or internationalist mindset.

This said, we travelled from Glasgow to Brussels last week entirely by rail. Once we got there, we also took local trains to see Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp. While I refuse to feel guilty about taking a plane occasionally, slow travel is blissful and I recommend it.

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For ideas on how to escape, try I’m Out and for a shoulder to cry on, try The Good Life for Wage Slaves.