Michael Skapinker
Financial Times
Can we still justify the environmental cost
of air travel? Flying accounts for about 2 per cent of
man-made CO2 emissions — but this could be set to increase
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Michael Skapinker SEPTEMBER 12, 2018 Print this page77 In
the months since I began writing this column, I have tried
to promote the idea of engaged business travel: delving into
local people’s lives and work, using public transport, and
strolling into any serendipitous opportunity that presents
itself — a temple, a political rally, a history museum. But
it wouldn’t be right to continue this journey without
addressing the environmental cost of all this flying around.
I prefer trains to planes — less hanging around,
more-refreshed arrivals, nicer scenery — but living on an
island limits the opportunities. Only a few foreign cities
are easily reachable by rail for those without time to spare.
So if all my planned travel happens, I will end up flying 24
times this year. What is all our frenetic air travel doing
to the planet? (If you don’t believe anthropogenic global
warming is happening or that it doesn’t matter, you can take
a break from this week’s column; it’s not for you.) Air
travel accounts for only a small part of global emissions.
The International Air Transport Association says planes were
the source of 2 per cent of man-made carbon dioxide
emissions last year, although some argue that it is higher.
There are other damaging effects in the
vapour trails that airlines leave, but it is true that cars,
power stations and factories do more damage. But aviation’s
contribution to climate change is going to become relatively
larger for two reasons. First, air travel is growing at an
astonishing rate as the new middle classes, particularly in
Asia, take more holidays, visit far-away families — and
travel on business. Over 4bn passengers flew last year. Iata
forecasts that this will increase to 7.8bn by 2036, which
means that there will be more passengers getting on planes
every year than there are people alive in the world today.
The second problem is that aviation is not making anything
like the emission-reducing technological strides that other
sectors are. Electric cars are developing fast;
long-distance electric aircraft are decades away. Aircraft
manufacturers and airlines have improved their fuel
efficiency. Some airlines have begun exploring biofuels, but
Iata says they still account for less than 1 per cent of
fuel production.
What can the concerned business traveller do?
There are “offsets”, where you can make a contribution to,
for example, tree planting to compensate for your flight’s
pollution. There have been problems with these — corruption,
whether you are paying landowners to preserve trees they
weren’t planning to cut down anyway — but there may be
worthwhile schemes, something I plan to explore in a future
column. The obvious answer is to fly less, but most of us do
the flying we have to. Almost all my travelling these days
is to teach on the FT’s newish executive education business.
I do video and web-based teaching, too, but it’s not the
same. People want to see you face-to-face and we don’t have
enough correspondents around the world to do it all. I
either go myself or send a colleague. It’s a necessary part
of developing a global business and most travellers would
say the same. You can follow up by phone or email but those
initial contacts have to be in person.
It may be that there is, for technological
reasons, less we can do to improve aviation’s environmental
performance than, for example, road traffic’s. That doesn’t
mean the industry should stop trying or that regulators
shouldn’t use sticks and carrots to encourage it. But air
travel is an inescapable part of the global economy that has
provided so many with a better standard of living than their
forebears could have dreamt of. There are some problems
without an obvious solution. When it comes to air travel’s
environmental impact, we may have to focus on incremental
improvement.