Early this month, I took a train from New York to Miami to visit some of my family. The day after I arrived, the first of the horrific wildfires in Los Angeles ignited, on January 7.

While the differences between Los Angeles and Miami are large and many, there are important similarities. Both cities heavily embody “growth machine” politics, with developers and real estate interests calling the proverbial shots to an extreme degree. And both cities are characterized by severe inequalities—most markedly along axes of class, race, and citizenship—with large populations of undocumented people who do a hefty share of their most poorly paid and arduous jobs. Los Angeles and Miami are also among the U.S. cities most vulnerable to climate change.

Obviously, what fuels climate breakdown is vastly bigger than the two cities. However, as major urban areas with large affluent populations, they are home to a disproportionate share of the world’s residents most responsible for the consumption-related pollutants that are raising the Earth’s temperature.

Not coincidentally, Los Angeles and Miami are also home to two of the largest airports in the United States in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. But as is the case with so many major U.S. municipalities, despite pledges to greatly lower their emissions, the two cities have no plans to rein in their airports. Indeed, in both official and public discussions around climate change, their airports are typically nowhere to be seen. As such invisibility is hardly unique to the two locales (see, for example, Parke Wilde’s October 2024 blog post on Boston and its airport), it manifests the need for flying less advocates to work to make airports central to discussions about climate change, particularly regarding the emissions associated with large cities.

Invisible airports in epicenters of climate-fueled fires and floods

Climate change, as many have pointed out, has helped to fuel the fires in Los Angeles. As most famously explored by the late Mike Davis, the renowned chronicler of Los Angeles, in The Ecology of Fear, wildfire is a normal part of southern California’s ecosystem. This is particularly the case in the hills and canyons that surround much of Los Angeles as the area’s dominant vegetation depends on fire for reasons of nutrient recycling and seed germination.

This propensity to burn is greatly heightened when the Santa Ana winds blow from the dry, inland areas, westward toward the Pacific coast. For this reason alone, Davis suggested, it was foolhardy to allow privatization—through residential development—of the ecologically fragile area to unfold. Such development requires fire suppression, which allows for the buildup of brush, which only makes wildfire even more explosive when it comes. In this regard, “the L.A. apocalypse was entirely predictable,” as Los Angeles native Harold Meyerson asserts in his eponymous essay on the wildfires.

A warming planet has only exacerbated the situation. Higher temperatures increase evaporation. This has led, Elizabeth Kolbert writes, to “two apparently opposing results—fiercer rains and deeper droughts,” with Southern California experiencing “both extremes in recent years.”

Unlike Los Angeles, wildfire is not Miami’s worry. The primary concern of the so-called Magic City is sea-level rise—due to a combination of its low elevation and geology—Mario Alejandro Ariza explains in his book, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. “As Los Angeles and San Francisco burn with wildfire, as Phoenix broils, and Jakarta sinks into the sea, as Johannesburg and Chennai, India, stumble from thirst, human-driven climate change presents Miami, unique among them, with a looming existential threat,” Ariza declares. “Porous local geology means there is no stopping rising water here.” Between five and six feet of sea level rise is expected by 2100, he writes elsewhere, which would displace 800,000 residents of the greater Miami area (about a third of its population). This would “render a large portion of the city uninhabitable.”

Despite this “looming existential threat,” Miami is in the process of expanding its airport. (And local leaders are now exploring the building of a second major airport to accommodate anticipated growth in air travel and cargo to and from the area.) Already, according to Airport Tracker, which bases its measurements on emissions and pollutants generated by departing flights, Miami International Airport (MIA) is the eighth biggest in the United States in terms of annual passenger flight emissions (5.44 million tons of CO₂—see image below). When these are coupled with freight-related emissions from aviation, MIA’s annual emissions add up to 7.4 million metric tons. (This would roughly be the equivalent of the total annual emissions of wealthy Luxembourg or of Uganda, a country of 47 million people.)

The Florida city has an ambitious “Miami Forever Carbon Neutral” plan, a “roadmap to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.” According to the document, the City of Miami generated the equivalent of 3.3. million metric tons of CO₂ in 2018, the majority coming from on-road transportation and commercial and residential buildings. Apart from a quick mention of “the airport’s energy efficiency overhauls,” aviation is invisible in the 151-page document. Were emissions from flights departing from MIA included in its emissions, the City of Miami’s total would more than triple!

Even more surprising than silence from a local government about aviation-related emissions is that of an insightful, independent analyst. Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza is a fabulous piece of work, one that powerfully illuminates the ties between the making and unfolding of the climate catastrophe and inequality. Still, Ariza largely ignores Miami’s airport, other than highlighting its importance to the metropolitan area and to a fossil-fuel reliant, transport ecosystem. He notes, for example, that “Miami International Airport is among the most visited airports in the world” and calls it “a massive, incredibly important hub.” The author also highlights the aviation hub’s vulnerability to the ravages of climate change. But instead of exploring how MIA helps to fuel these threats, he instead celebrates “the good work done by the airport” in relation to infrastructure upgrades to make it more resilient in the face of climate-change-intensified storms and flooding.

In the case of Los Angeles and its principal airport, LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), it is similarly hidden. In that city’s most recent “Green New Deal” report (2021-2022), for example, the only mention of anything related to aviation is to laud Los Angeles’s phasing out of the sale of single-use plastic water bottles at LAX by June 2023, and to highlight the need to continue working on a  “zero emissions roadmap” for ground transport and to decrease food waste at the airport.

The societal blind spot is further illustrated by an article published in the Los Angeles Times by staff writer Stephen Wharton at the height of the wildfires. Entitled “Can fire-torn L.A. handle the World Cup, Super Bowl and Summer Olympics?” Wharton’s piece raises the question of whether it makes sense for Los Angeles to host mega-sporting events in 2026-2028 given “the long, costly recovery that lies ahead” in the wake of the devastating fires. It gives no consideration to the huge emissions that such events typically entail and that exacerbate the climatic conditions that help to fuel wildfires. It is anticipated, for example, that the 2028 Summer Olympics will bring several million passengers to LAX.

Emissions from LAX make it the number one airport in the United States and one of the largest airport emitters in the entire world. Airport Tracker assigns 18.7 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions to LAX, an amount that exceeds the total annual emissions of countries like Sri Lanka and Slovenia.

The “City of Los Angeles 2022 Community Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report” simultaneously obscures the significance of LAX to the city’s overall emissions and brings it to light. The official document finds that Los Angeles—in terms of stationary energy, transportation, and solid waste—emitted the equivalent of 26.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022. In Table 6 of the report, one learns that aviation (presumably limited to the operation of the airport) was responsible for a mere 15,116 of the 26.2 million tons. In Table 7, however, the report uses a broader approach to aviation that includes jet fuel; when this is taken into account, aviation emissions increase more than one-thousand-fold (to 15,219,316 tons in 2022)—the equivalent of 58 percent of what the City of Los Angeles says constitutes its total!

The document justifies not including jet fuel in the measurement of the emissions of the City of Los Angeles by asserting that they “fall outside the City’s direct regulatory control,” while saying nothing about who does or should regulate them. Such exculpation manifests poor reporting standards in relation to airports (and aviation as well). The typical approach is to focus only on the climate impacts of airport terminals and ground operations and ignore the much larger environmental impacts associated with flights that airports help generate. The result,  Shandelle Steadman and Sam Pickard argue in a policy brief that accompanies the latest version of Airport Tracker, is one that allows airports “to significantly obfuscate their contribution to climate change and local air pollution.” They allow metropolitan areas where airports are located to do the same.

To disturb and disrupt

The lack of scrutiny of the airports of Los Angeles and Miami and associated air travel is a form of climate denial, but, as suggested above, it is hardly unique to the two cities. That said, such denialism emanates from and perpetuates environmental injustice given the elite nature of air travel—with one percent of the world’s population responsible for half of the CO₂ emissions associated with commercial flights—and the myriad detrimental impacts of air travel on the health of people living near airports.

As to what to do, one might argue that to focus on airports is to miss a bigger picture. As Mario Alejandro Ariza suggests, however, the “little” and the “big” are dynamically tied. “[R]ooftop solar and electric vehicles and plant-based diets,” he writes near the end of Disposable Miami, “aren’t enough. Neither is restricting personal air travel or limiting households to one motor vehicle or reducing food waste or increasing ambient air temperature in air-conditioned rooms by two degrees.” Still, he calls such practices “necessary,” while asserting that “the most important thing that individuals can do is to take that political power away from those special interest groups, and that requires education and political organizing.” As to whom those “special interest groups” are, he lists “the oil lobby, the car lobby, the utilities that burn coal and gas.” One could easily add the airport and aviation lobbies to that list.

Indeed, we have no choice but to do so given that flying epitomizes a fossil-fueled world that we must transform.

As environmental biologist and Native American writer Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in her most recent book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, “the fossil fuel economy is propelling mass extinction in acidified oceans and disappearing forests, deadly heat waves and untold human suffering.”

The manifestations of these words become only more visible with each passing day.

“How do systems change?” Kimmerer asks. “How can we move toward the just communities we need and want?”

Kimmerer looks to natural processes of ecological replacement for guidance. Ecological succession, she notes, relies on two key mechanisms: one that is incremental involving “slow, steady replacement,” and another which “relies on disturbance, on disruption of the status quo in order to let new species emerge and flower.”

Both the slow and steady as well as disruption, Kimmerer suggests, are necessary tools in the fight for systemic transformation.

From Los Angeles to Miami and beyond, for the well-being of all life forms, advocates of flying less must continue to work in a slow, steady manner to illuminate the high costs of air travel and push individuals and institutions to grapple with the choices they make in relation to mobility.

At the same time, we must also do a lot more work to illuminate the infrastructure that both enables and encourages aviation as part of a project that disturbs and disrupts.

Refusing to accept the all-too-frequent silence surrounding airports must be central to such efforts.