How Far Can We Get Without Flying?

Many folk on Arran regularly fly to holiday destinations abroad, and some fly to and from other parts of the UK for business or to visit family. The SNP government wants to halve Air Passenger Duty and encourage more flying to, from, and within, Scotland. And yet this same government says it wants to cut Scotland’s carbon emissions! Most of these journeys could be done by train or ferry, but of course it would take longer and be considerably more expensive, because of the subsidies already enjoyed by the aviation industry. This is the great elephant in the corner of the room for many people who otherwise make some effort to reduce their carbon footprints in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, and for governments which try to do likewise.

Dr. Peter Kalmus wrote this article for Life After Oil, the Spring 2016 issue of YES! Magazine. Peter is an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and we reprint it with permission.

I’m a climate scientist who doesn’t fly. I try to avoid burning fossil fuels, because it’s clear that doing so causes real harm to humans and to nonhumans, today and far into the future. I don’t like harming others, so I don’t fly. Back in 2010, though, I was awash in cognitive dissonance. My awareness of global warming had risen to a fever pitch, but I hadn’t yet made real changes to my daily life. This disconnect made me feel panicked and disempowered.

Then one evening in 2011, I gathered my utility bills and did some Internet research. I looked up the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by burning a gallon of gasoline and a therm (about 100 cubic feet) of natural gas, I found an estimate for emissions from producing the food for a typical American diet and an estimate for generating a kilowatt-hour of electricity in California, and I averaged the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Environmental Protection Agency estimates for CO2 emissions per mile from flying. With these data, I made a basic pie chart of my personal greenhouse gas emissions for 2010.

This picture came as a surprise. I’d assumed that electricity and driving were my largest sources of emissions. Instead, it turned out that the 50,000 miles I’d flown that year (two international and half a dozen domestic flights, typical for postdocs in the sciences who are expected to attend conferences and meetings) utterly dominated my emissions.