The Air Travel Dilemma (Blog Action Day post)

(This post is in English in contribution to the Blog Action Day 15 October)

To fly or not to fly… that is the question which haunts environmentally conscious persons these days. Global air travel is generally considered to cause about 4 per cent of the total CO2 emissions, some research states that the impact is even higher. Unlike ground transportation, where plenty of alternatives to fossil are under rapid development, it is rather more difficult to replace jet fuel for airplanes.

Air travel also has brought, and continues to bring, enormous benefits to mankind. It allows us to meet in person across borders and time zones. Personal meetings help to bring about mutual understanding, recognition and collaboration. This must have been one of the key factors behind the development that most nations now can live in peace with each other. Visiting places with different geography, nature, culture et cetera also broadens our perspectives and fosters respect for others. If air travel would be shut down tomorrow, then we could expect very soon increasing levels of discord and animosity between people.

Does it mean that air travel should continue to expand dramatically without controls? Probably not. Some claim that the solution lies in compensation schemes, where you pay on top to offset the CO2 emissions from air travel with investments in projects for CO2 reduction. But the fact remains that every barrel of oil which is extracted and burnt, cannot be replaced, and the most efficient energy conservation is not to use it at all! Good stewardship of resources is as important to me as mitigating climate impact.

Therefore the principles of lean should be applied, meaning to minimize waste. This means for example:

• cutting down dramatically on business air travel. If we look ourselves deeply in the eyes, there are a great many business trips which little value, and where we return back exhausted and disappointed, not to mention having wasted considerable amounts of productive time with waiting and flying. Teleconferencing technology is getting better and better, and is already at a point where meetings can be held room-to-room with full fidelity. On Oct 9, the European Commission released an official policy paper urging businesses to cut travel by 20 per cent
• using ground transportation on shorter distances where the impact of takeoff and landing is big compared to the time in the air
• staying away longer when we travel internationally, to make best use of the fuel spent. We will also get more satisfactory experiences when we give more time to immerse ourselves in new surroundings, rather than rushing to pack activities into every hour to justify the time spent travelling. An interesting observation: this rhymes well with how air travel is being marketed today. If you pick up any in-flight magazine, you will find feature articles with beautiful images of people and scenery being enjoyed fully.
• letting go of pure back-and-forth shopping trips and such, where the purchases could just as well have been made online or in local stores. Or maybe skipped altogether…

My sincere hope is that innovative research and development can conceive new renewable jet fuels which are better than today’s kerosene while minimizing the emissions. A message to capital fund board members and politicians is to invest more funds into this objective. Of course, we should also work harder to realize improvements in other areas that could absorb the emissions from air travel.

Meanwhile, all of us need to make sure that every air trip we choose to take will bring real benefits, such as increasing understanding and collaboration, personal development and true fulfillment. All other trips are a waste of time which we should anyway avoid in our lives.