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October 2021 Update: On Greenwashing Aviation & More

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Activists from Greenpeace paint an Air France plane at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to protest the French government’s greenwashing of air transport, May 2021. Source: Euronews.com.

When nine Greenpeace activists scaled a fence at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and painted an aircraft green this past May, they helped bring to the world’s attention a global problem: the greenwashing of aviation. This refers to the hiding or understating of the ecological harms associated with flying.

Take Qantas, for example. In March 2021, Australia’s largest airline announced that its non-stop flights from Sydney and Melbourne to Frankfurt, London, New York, and Paris, scheduled to begin in 2024, will be “carbon neutral.” Qantas will miraculously achieve this neutrality by “offsetting” these 18-20-hour flights–the CO2 emissions for which average 5.6 tons per business class traveler and 8.75 tons for those who fly first class.

Many–including Parke Wilde on this website–have offered hard-hitting critiques of carbon offsets. Central to these critiques is a recognition of the hollowness of the concept of carbon neutrality or what some call net-zero. As climate scientist Peter Kalmus recently wrote in The Guardian, “‘net zero’ is a phrase that represents magical thinking rooted in our society’s technology fetish. Just presuppose enough hypothetical carbon capture and you can pencil out a plan for meeting any climate goal, even while allowing the fossil fuel industry to keep growing.”

And growth is certainly on the mind of the aviation industry as it seeks to lock in its high-emitting practices in various ways. Currently, for example, airport operators are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to expand airports or construct new ones (with 673 projects worldwide underway)–and from Barcelona to Seattle, airport authorities are laying the groundwork for additional expansions. In February, Airbus revealed that the planes it had sold in the previous two years (in 2019, it sold a record 863 planes) will emit more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide over their lifetime.

Such projects and estimates are predicated on the assumption that the infrastructure and aircraft will be utilized as intended. But they may instead become “stranded assets” that don’t realize their promise. Indeed, given marked economic, political, and ecological instability, this is more than a theoretical possibility.

Go to journal home page - Climate Risk Management

To give one example, a recent paper by two earth systems engineers (Aaron N. Yesudian and Richard J. Dawson. 2021. “Global analysis of sea level rise risk to airports.” Climate Risk Management 31: 100266) asserts that many major airports are already at risk due to coastal flooding. The authors find that sea level rise associated with a 2-degree-Celsius increase in average global temperature will lead to 100 airports below mean sea level. The cost to maintain risk at present levels in 2100 , they estimate, will be between US$39 billion (the median-case scenario) and US$57 billion (the highest case).

This irony, of course, is that flying exacerbates these very risks. And there is little indication that those most dedicated to jet-setting will change their profligate ways voluntarily. According to a recent report, for example, “Private jet providers are experiencing ‘unprecedented demand’ from wealthy customers seeking to avoid the “mosh pit” of commercial flights on autumn getaways as coronavirus travel restrictions ease.”

And just last week, the Manchester United football (soccer) team took a flight of less than 20 minutes to Leicester–a distance of 74 miles (119 km) as the crow flies–for a game with its Premier League rival. (Given such recklessness, we might consider Leicester City’s 4-2 victory a small slice of climate justice.) Dale Vince, the chairman of the Forest Green Rovers, a team in the English Football League Two, called Manchester United’s decision to fly “shocking.” “To fly 100 miles is an egregious act,” he stated. “It’s wanton climate vandalism.”

In the face of such vandalism, some recent developments and ongoing struggles provide some hope.

The Campaign for Better Transport, an organization in the United Kingdom, has called upon the UK government to ban all domestic flights that can be completed in less than five hours. Were this ban to be approved, it would end air routes such as London to Manchester, London to Edinburgh and Birmingham to Glasgow. These flights, says Paul Tahoy, Campaign for Better Transport’s chief executive, are “a climate disaster, generating seven times more harmful greenhouse emissions than the equivalent train journey “

In April, French legislators voted to end short-haul flights within France that cover routes that one could travel by train in two and a half hours or less. The vote took place about two months after the French government decided not to go forward with a plan to expand Charles de Gaulle airport because it did not conform with the country’s commitments to cut CO2 emissions.

On 22 May, activists block a main road in protest against the construction of a new airport in Lisbon. Photo by Marta Vidal. Source: Equal Times.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, that country’s aviation regulator blocked plans to build a new airport Lisbon area in March–and did so in part for environmental reasons. Still, the Portuguese government is pursuing various avenues to advance the project. But climate justice activists are intensifying their efforts to prevent this from happening. In May, for example, activists blocked the road to Lisbon Airport to protest the government’s plans.

In the United States, fights against airport expansion are not as high-profile, but they are present–particularly in California. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, numerous organizations have come together to stop the proposed expansion of the Oakland International Airport (OAK). (OAK happens to be among the world’s 100-most-threatened airports by sea level rise–see above.) The Stop OAK Expansion Coalition is comprised of groups ranging from Flight Free USA to Railroad Workers United, the latter a manifestation of the coalition’s commitment to including organized labor and workers in their efforts. (Relatedly, earlier this year, Stay Grounded and the London-based Public and Commercial Services Union published a helpful discussion paper on a “just transition” that centers the well-being of workers in the effort to bring about climate-safe forms of mobility.)

Central to the challenge of downsizing aviation are the many parties invested in the maintenance of high-fossil-fuel emitting status quo. Just last week, The New York Times reported that New York City is preparing an “aggressive campaign” to lure back “big-spending foreign tourists.” The $6 million campaign by the City’s tourism agency (NYC & Company) involves partnerships with airlines such as British Airways (Europe’s second-biggest airline polluter) and major travel agencies abroad.

Officials in New Zealand offer a different path, or at least the beginnings of one. In February, the country’s parliamentary commissioner for the environment proposed that people departing New Zealand by air (including citizens) pay a departure tax to compensate for the environmental harm caused by flying. The next month, Air New Zealand’s chief environmental adviser voiced support for raising the price of airline tickets, saying that there’s “no going back” to pre-Covid levels of international tourism. The adviser, Jonathan Porrit, categorized air travel as a privilege, not a right. “I just don’t believe in the idea that the number of international visitors to New Zealand can grow and grow and grow without limits,” he said. “So, if a higher price for the privilege of flying to New Zealand puts some people off, good.”

Recent academic publications

Academic research and publishing on matters of climate change and aviation–and often in regard to how its relates to the academy–continues to grow. In addition to our discussion above of the article from Climate Risk Management, we provide brief overviews here of some recent publications.

Go to journal home page - Travel Behaviour and Society

An article by Agnes Kreil of ETH Zurich focuses on two research questions: 1) What normative arguments do academics make for and against reduced air travel in academia? and 2) What are their assumptions about the ties between academic air travel and ‘good’ academic work? To explore these questions, Kreil examines her home institution, which has made one of the strongest efforts of top research universities to decrease academic air travel and has set clear reduction targets. While the author finds robust support among academic professionals at ETH Zurich for reduced air travel, many expressed concerns. A “dominant narrative” that Kreil identifies is that reductions will harm academic work. It is a concern, she says, that is “tightly bound up with the internationalization” of, and rising competition within academia. She thus advises that reduction advocates take seriously the concerns underlying such narratives, while working to “redefine … what ‘good’ academic work means” in order to align “the goals of ‘good’ academic work and air travel reduction.” See: Agnes Kreil, “Does flying less harm academic work? Arguments and assumptions about reducing air travel in academia.” Travel Behaviour and Society 25 (2021): 52-61.

August 2021 – CNR-IRCrES

In a time of intensifying climate change and a global pandemic, new conference formats are emerging. A fully virtual conference, asserts a team of four authors, is sustainable and inclusive, but lacks the benefits of face-to-face interaction. In contrast, the hybrid model (an in-person conference at a central location that allows for virtual participation) tends to discriminate against non-fliers (due to an inferior experience) and also encourages flying. The authors thus embrace a multi-hub model, which is a combination of in-person and virtual interaction. Much of the article is dedicated to describing and exploring the multi-hub model (and variations of it) in detail. It helpfully considers the choice of location for hubs, the structure of the conference program across time zones, as well as matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also considers technical setup, financial issues, and the facilitation of virtual socializing and networking. See: Richard Parncutt, PerMagnus Lindborg, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, and Renee Timmers. “The multi-hub academic conference: Global, inclusive, culturally diverse, creative, sustainable.” Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (2021): 53.

An international trio of authors investigate the relationship between conferences, meetings, and workshops involving international air travel and the academic production (via publications) that result (directly or indirectly). They assert that because the benefits of in-person meetings in terms of knowledge production and dissemination are difficult to assess objectively, publications are “one of the most straightforward metrics.” The authors thus survey 211 marine biologists and oceanographers in 27 different countries, 36% of whom responded. They find that over 60% of respondents are willing to attend virtual meetings, and consider the trade-off worthwhile given the ecological benefits of remote participation. They also find “that scientific productivity decays with the number of meetings attended and that the less productive people exhibit the largest carbon footprint.” See: Laurent Seuront, Katy R. Nicastro, & Gerardo I. Zardi. “Heads in the clouds: On the carbon footprint of conference‐seeded publications in the advancement of knowledge.” Ecology and Evolution (2021).

Two fisheries scientists, Karin Limburg (United States) and Françoise Daverat (France), consider the shared and unique challenges they face in trying to transform their professional practices, particularly in relation to travel. Their essay ( “COVID, Climate Change, and Professional Travel: Reflections by Fisheries Scientists during the Pandemic.” Fisheries [2021]) takes the form of a “transcontinental conversation.” Within, they exchange their experiences and analyses regarding the practical obstacles to decreasing reductions in their work-related CO2 emissions. They also raising matters for all environmental scientists to consider in relation to mobility and participation in professional gatherings. These include matters of accessibility and equity–e,g, resource availability, familial responsibilities, and gendered divisions of labor. In the end, the authors together note that human populations and our economies are growing, putting us on a collision course with the biosphere. The violent climate events of 2020 are a stark warning of what is to come if we continue on this path.” A different, more sustainable path, they say, requires both systemic change and individual reductions.

Publication Cover

Large travel footprints are not limited to jet-setting academics. It turns out that Canadian medical students are also high-emitters. Each spring, thousands of them travel across Canada to interview for residency positions. An interdisciplinary group of researchers conducted an online commuter survey among the participants in the annual Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS) interview tour in 2020 to measure the flight-related carbon footprint. Based on responses from 960 of the 2943 participants (32.6%), the authors find that CaRMS -related flights emitted 4,239 tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents), an average of 1.44 tons per applicant. They also find that, were the interviews centralized in a single city, flight-related emissions could decrease by up to to 74.7%. And were the interviews conducted virtually, the resulting emissions would be at least at least 98.4% lower. See: Kevin E. Liang, Jessica Q. Dawson, Matei D. Stoian, Dylan G. Clark, Seth Wynes, and Simon D. Donner. “A carbon footprint study of the Canadian medical residency interview tour.” Medical Teacher (2021): 1-7.

Who “owns” CO2 emissions is one matter. Figuring out where they belong is another–especially when emissions involve mobility. Many cities, regions and countries thus do not include long-distance transport in their carbon accounting. This is especially the case for extra-territorial air travel. Kobe Boussauw and Jean-Michel Decroly, two Belgian scholars, help remedy this in their article (“Territorializing international travel emissions: geography and magnitude of the hidden climate footprint of Brussels.” Urban Planning 6, no. 2 (2021): 285-298). The authors research the geography and magnitude of the climate footprint of international travel with Brussels as a destination. In doing so, they estimate that international travelers added the equivalent of 2.7 million tons of C02 to the official climate footprint of the Brussels-Capital Region, which was 3.7 million tons equivalent in 2017. Not surprisingly, travelers from greater distances are responsible for a disproportionate share, a key reason being their reliance on air transport. People from the United States, for example, comprise 7.6% of all travelers, but they are responsible 21% of the additional emissions. In conclusion, the authors argue that territorializing carbon emissions associated with international travel is a necessity as failure to include them distorts debate about climate change mitigation. They also assert that a sustainable future is “one where jet aircraft will no longer play a substantial role.”

New book by Kimberly Nicholas on being human in a time of climate breakdown

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Review of Kimberly Nicholas, Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021).

By Joseph Nevins

Feelings are a not a subject one typically encounters in a book on climate change, especially a book written by an environmental scientist. But as Kimberly Nicholas, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, asserts in Under the Sky We Make, “this is a different kind of climate book, one that’s not only about the science.”

Nicholas presents the overwhelming scientific case for anthropogenic global heating in compelling and lucid prose for a non-specialist audience. She also shares many stories from her personal journey, contending that scientific understanding is not sufficient to meet the challenges of climate breakdown. We already have the technical knowledge we need, she insists. In addition, we must tap into “the strength of our feelings about what we most fear, grieve, and love.” Only by being fully human “can we start to head toward the solutions at the speed and scale we need.’

The ”we” that Nicholas invokes is differentiated by profound inequities in the people and places most responsible for the climate crisis and how the resulting harms are experienced. In terms of the resolution of that crisis, she says much depends on the United States—as the world’s largest economy and the biggest historical emitter of CO2. If U.S. Americans begin taking climate change seriously, it would serve as “an enormously powerful accelerator of climate action worldwide,” declares Nicholas, not least because of the global influence of the U.S. model of consumption.

At the same time, Nicholas emphasizes that power, wealth and privilege do not insulate us from the ill effects of climate change. The fires that devastated large portions of California’s wine grape fields “happened in rich neighborhoods, in a rich state, in the richest country on Earth.” This shows that “no one is safe in a destabilized climate”—an assertion that has proven painfully true as evidenced by this summer’s floods in Germany and Belgium, devastating wildfires in Canada and record-high temperatures in the U.S. Northwest resulting in hundreds of deaths .

Nicholas grew up in Sonoma, California on her family’s vineyard. And her grandfather was a highly successful industrial turkey farmer. She calls modern agriculture “the main driver of the biodiversity crisis.” The huge physical footprint of modern agriculture—human beings use about half of the world’s ice-free land to feed ourselves, Nicholas reports–and its chemical intensity combine to destroy habitat and poison wildlife, while intensifying the climate crisis.

Until fairly recently, Nicholas confesses, she was a very high-level consumer, largely due to her frequent flyer status: In 2010, her “peak flying year,” she took fifteen round-trip flights for reasons of both work and pleasure. Seventy-two percent of global climate pollution is due to household consumption, she points out.

Professor Nicholas implicitly rejects the position that producers are ultimately responsible for what we do. Producers and consumers “are part of the same system” and, thus, consumers, particularly the world’s top ten percent (which includes anyone in the United States with an income of more than $38,000 per year), have an important role to play. Drawing on the work of climate scientist Kevin Anderson, she notes that if the richest 10 percent of the world’s population were to reduce their emissions to the current level of the average European (still a high standard of living on a global scale) that by itself would result in a one-third cut in global emissions.

Nicholas says “responsibility scales with power.” Yes, there are certainly people and institutions with a lot more responsibility and power than she has, but she refuses to let herself (or her well-heeled, high-consuming readers) off the hook. Rather than “sweating the small stuff,” Nicholas urges hi-emitters to focus on big actions on the personal front. She thus calls upon herself and others to do their utmost to go flight-, car-, and meat-free. As she sees it (and she draws on considerable research to back up this position), such personal-level change is necessarily part and parcel of collective, systemic transformation.

Kimberly Nicholas, Senior Lecturer, Center for Sustainability Studies, Lund University

The transformation entails a shift from what Nicholas calls an exploitation mindset—one predicated on the domination of people and nature as well as convenience and efficiency (of a narrow sort)—to a mindset of regeneration. The Regeneration Mindset focuses on “working with rather than against nature and bringing out the best of ourselves and one another.” It is based on three simple ideas: Respect life; stop harming life; and strengthen life. These ideas provide key elements of the effort to “create a world we love rather than one we fear.”

At the time of this writing, climate-change-intensified wildfires rage from California and Canada to Greece and Siberia. This is a world of our collective making. But we can remake the sky under which we live. Through her captivating and inspiring book, Kimberly Nicholas has helped us see the necessity of doing exactly that, while providing many of the tools to do so. She also illuminates the beautiful potential of pursuing that journey.

End-of-2020 Update, Part 1

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It has a been a while since our last update, so we have a lot to share! As such, we are dividing this update into two parts. This first one focuses on developments outside of academia. The second part—which we’ll post in a few weeks—will concentrate largely on goings-on in and around the academy, not least in terms of new publications that speak to the concerns of the FlyingLess movement.

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Youth of Dehradun, India protest proposed expansion of the nearby Jolly Green Airport, and the associated felling of over 200 acres of forest, October 2020. Photo from @Youth4ClimateIn on Twitter.

Without question, the pandemic’s impact on the travel industry, and on passenger airlines in particular, has been devastating. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), there were 900 million fewer international tourists in January -October (2020) than there were during the same period of 2019; this constitutes a 72 percent drop in international arrivals, a decline back to 1990 levels.

Not all these arrivals happened through air travel. Still, the tourism drop serves as a good proxy for the decline experienced by passenger aviation. In late September, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) forecast  a 66 percent decline in air passenger traffic for all of 2020; And even though many airports saw an increase in passengers around Christmas, it unfolded in the larger context of decline. Thus, in the United States for instance, air travel on Christmas Eve was about 60 percent less than it had been in 2019.

The dramatic decrease has had large impacts on jobs. In the city of Boston, for example, Logan Airport (the 16th busiest airport in the United States) had a 61 percent decline in flights in October over the previous year and an 80 percent drop in the number of passengers. As a result, the Massachusetts Port Authority (MassPort), which owns and operates the airport, announced a 25 percent cut in its workforce in November.

For proponents of the passenger airline industry, the hope is that such downturns are temporary. Indeed, entities such as the UN’s International Civilian Aviation Organization (ICAO) , assert that a resurgence in air travel (of a supposedly “green” variety) is key to the recovery of the world’s economy from the coronavirus-related downturn. And among the privileged classes—those who enjoy air travel—there is a clear desire to return to the pre-pandemic normal.

One manifestation is the popularity of “flights to nowhere” during the pandemic. Another is a recent piece in The New York Times “Opinion” section—part of series of commentaries on what life will be like in 2021. The author, Tariro Mzezewa, a travel reporter, writes that she looks forward to her first post-pandemic flight, “to [sliding] into my window seat on the plane “ She also suggests that “perhaps” the biggest lesson from the pandemic“ is that instead of waiting 20 years to go on that big trip, go as soon as you can.”

These embraces of aeromobility suggest an ever bigger,  or more important, lesson: it will take a lot to dislodge the assumptions underlying a presumed “right” to fly, consume lots of resources, and generate large amounts of co2 emissions in the process among the hypermobile—even in the pages of a newspaper that regularly reports on the ravages associated with climate breakdown.

That said, there are signs of shifting attitudes as well as changing practices in various places. June, for example, saw Switzerland’s parliament vote in favor of a tax on all individuals departing from the country by plane, with the tax increasing n the basis of the distance and class of travel. (France is now considering even higher taxes on air travel.) Also in June, the Swiss government instituted a new rule, effective July 1, 2020, requiring that its officials travel by train rather than plane if the journey does not exceed six hours. The regulation is part of Switzerland’s mandate to cut CO2 emissions from air travel by 30 percent by 2030.

Around the same time, two deputies of France’s National Assembly proposed a law that would give individuals a “carbon quota” as a way of limiting air travel and flight-related air pollution. Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the government would “redevelop” night trains as part of a national effort to reduce co2 emissions, pledging to restore overnight lines between Paris and Nice, as well as with Tarbes in the Pyrenees, by 2022. Similarly, in Sweden, the government announced that it would launch overnight trains linking the cities of Stockholm and Malmö with Hamburg and Brussels, also in 2022. And in the United Kingdom, the rail industry’s High Speed Rail Group has called for sleeper trains to pass through the Channel Tunnel to allow for overnight, international travel as way of helping the country main in climate goals.

Such UK-based advocacy speaks to the findings of two surveys conducted in May by the University of Manchester and Cardiff University for the Centre for Climate and Social Transformation (CAST). They found that concerns about the climate had grown in the United Kingdom during the pandemic lockdown. In fact, many said that they intend to fly less for holidays and there was a marked increase in support for limiting flying for reasons of climate change. For CAST director Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, the results “highlight that policy makers need to act now to lock-in low-carbon routines that people have adopted during lockdown and avoid people slipping back into their old, high-carbon ways.”

Central to efforts “to lock in low-carbon routines” is the transformation of infrastructure. This involves efforts to prevent the expansion of airports and the building of new ones. (To facilitate such efforts, the Stay Grounded network hosted a webinar on “lessons learned” from anti-airport actions and campaigns. Below is a video of the illuminating event, which took place in November.)

But as the campaign to block the expansion of India’s Jolly Grant Airport reminds us, efforts that seek to prevent the expansion of airport infrastructure are not only a matter of climate change. They also concern the protection of habitat and biodiversity—the destruction of which, it turns out, is a key factor in the emergence of the coronavirus. The plans to grow the airport near Dehradun (in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand) is said to necessitate the felling of more than ten thousand trees.

On this front, London City Airport’s announcement in August that it had decided to put “on hold” its plans for expansion is welcome. However, the announcement made clear that the Airport intends to resume the expansion if and when demand for flying returns post-pandemic.

The refusal of many in the epidemiologically threatening times in which we live to alter their behavior to protect the well-being of all shows that we cannot rely only on individual goodwill in the fight against climate breakdown. As demonstrated by many deciding to fly during this holiday season despite official warnings of the dangers of travel for public health, strong regulation is needed.

In the case of aviation, this means altering the infrastructure that allows for flying—radically downsizing (and, in many cases, eliminating) airports in other words. A lesson from the Covid-related economic recession and the associated pain experienced by many is the sooner we recognize the need for downsizing, the better. Only through such recognition and appropriate action we will be to plan and implement a transition in infrastructure that protects workers as well as their families and communities, while responding adequately to the demands of intensifying climate change.

Christopher Hore, Alstair Chestermn and Drew Long of Extinction Rebellion hold socially distanced protest against expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport outside Leeds Civic Hall. 21 May 2020. Picture: Bruce Rollinson, The Yorkshire Post.