Flying contributes only a small proportion of global emissions - but it is growing fast. Photo / Getty Images
Flying contributes only a small proportion of global emissions - but it is growing fast. Photo / Getty Images
COMMENT:
Why does flying attract so much flak when it accounts for just 2 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions? That was the pained question from an audience member at a sold-out FT event I chaired last week on aviation's future.
Leo Murray, an environmentalist who was one of the panellists, said that when you included flying's other emissions, the true figure was about 5 per cent. But that still leaves 95 per cent of climate damage coming from elsewhere.
Yet air travel, which reunites far-flung families, brings people into contact with other cultures and boosts employment in tourism, is picked on for its warming impact, with critics calling for a tax on aviation fuel and a ban on air miles.
It is true that the aerospace industry, unlike the motor business, is a long way from going electric. Two of the other panellists, Sandra Bour Schaeffer, Airbus's head of new aircraft development, and Amy Ruddock of Virgin Atlantic, admitted that while we would soon see electric short-hop air taxis, long-haul decarbonised flying wasn't a likely prospect.
But while electric cars may have arrived, only a tiny proportion of drivers are buying them.
An FT article last year said that electric vehicles on the road represented less than a tenth of 1 per cent of all cars — and many more drivers were buying SUVs.
Critics of flying tout video-conferencing as a replacement for business flights, but technology produces high levels of emissions too. The Shift Project, a Paris-based think-tank, said last year that digital technologies were responsible for 3.7 per cent of global emissions, making IT almost as big a culprit as flying. That was a rise from 2.5 per cent in 2013 and the "explosion of video uses", such as Skype and streaming, was one of the main drivers.
So why the focus on flying? One reason is that the 2 per cent CO2 figure, or even the broader 5 per cent, is complacent because aviation is growing so fast. The number of air passenger journeys worldwide is expected to rise from 4.4 billion in 2018 to 8.2 billion by 2037.
The number of air passenger journeys worldwide is expected to rise from 4.4 billion in 2018 to 8.2 billion by 2037. Photo / 123RF
Today's numbers are largely concentrated among the better off and for those of us who can afford air travel, flying represents far more than 2 per cent of our personal carbon emissions. According to the WWF calculator, flying represented an astonishing 69 per cent of my carbon footprint last year.
That proportion may have been boosted by my rarely eating meat or driving, but the two long-haul return flights that I took in 2019, along with a clutch of short-haul trips, would have given me a high number anyway.
This goes to the heart of the apparently disproportionate criticism of air travel: flying is an elite activity worldwide and frequent flying is an elite activity even within wealthy countries.
According to 2014 government figures, 70 per cent of flights by UK residents were taken by just 15 per cent of the population. Among people in managerial and professional professions, 71 per cent made at least one flight a year, compared with 36 per cent in manual occupations.
That may seem obvious — people in professional jobs need to travel more for work — but the evidence suggests that in rich countries business trips are a falling proportion of flights.
According to the UK's Office for National Statistics, fewer business trips were taken from the UK in 2018 than in 1998. In the US, a 2017 survey for Airlines of America showed that business trips had fallen to 31 per cent of total flight journeys, down from more than half in 1979.
It is leisure travellers — on holidays, to second homes, to exotic weddings — who are boosting flight growth. And as their numbers rise, the climate warriors will carry on gunning for air travel.
