{"id":2414,"date":"2019-09-09T15:40:07","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T15:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2414"},"modified":"2019-09-09T15:40:07","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T15:40:07","slug":"a-strategy-to-fly-as-much-as-you-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2414","title":{"rendered":"A Strategy To \u2018Fly As Much As You Like\u2019 ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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photo: Juhasz Imre<\/a>, Creative Commons<\/em><\/p>\n

Greta Thunberg and XR have re-energised the public fight against climate change and facilitated a new and additional protest movement.\u00a0 The call to recognize a \u2018climate emergency\u2019 has resonated with many politicians, especially those \u2018closer to the ground\u2019\u00a0 but for that energy to translate into faster, bigger, more profound change it needs to become instrumental, meaning that it needs to bear on dis-aggregated, less rhetorical, more granular targets. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a proposition for a campaign bearing on aviation – DAC-only flying – to effect rapid and significant change in response to the \u2018climate emergency\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this project, governments should impose a legal obligation on commercial aviation to offset carbon emissions using DAC (Direct Air Capture of CO2) technology, either with certificated credits granted for carbon locked into rock such as basalt, or, by using liquid fuels created by drawing CO2 from the ambient air (or both together).\u00a0 This would prevent commercial flying using fossil fuels free from offsets, or offsets which we cannot be certain will remain effective (eg tree planting).\u00a0 Flying with commercial airlines would be DAC-only.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Within the same system, the aviation industry should be made to invest, to pay for DAC technologies, so incentivising airlines to scale up these technologies and reduce their cost.\u00a0 The directed, focused development effort and attendant commercial risks would then be vertically integrated: airlines would in effect own their own fuel supply systems, although they would not need to become DAC technologists themselves.\u00a0 By ramping the introduction and level of the requirement, the trend-breaking impact on aviation R&D and business models could be as severe or gentle as it needed to be.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

At present the aviation industry is nowhere near a path to sustainability.\u00a0 This proposal would convert offsetting from a voluntary practice that mitgates the impact of individual decisions to travel by air, into an end-game mechanism bearing on corporates, to rapidly contain and shrink the carbon footprint of aviation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Rationale<\/strong><\/p>\n

Air travel has long been an effective no-go or slow-go area for policy-makers attempting to coax their colleagues, governments and voters into taking meaningful action to reduce climate-changing \u2018carbon\u2019 pollution.\u00a0 Many governments \u2013 ours in the UK being only one good example \u2013 have long made top-line political commitments to significant de-carbonization while simultaneously planning to expand air travel as it was assumed to be essential for economic growth, and voter happiness.\u00a0 Air travel is a famous example of a behaviour which shifted in the lifetimes of older people alive today, from an activity restricted to a tiny elite, to a larger \u2018jet set\u2019 elite, to become mainstream and problematically cheaper in cash terms than more sustainable alternatives such as the train.<\/p>\n

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For decades, even the most dogged campaigns to oppose airport expansion have struggled, especially on climate-grounds. \u00a0Back in 2006 I proposed<\/a> that not-flying for the climate would become the \u2018new save the whale\u2019 as a socially testing issue, and it would become fashionable not to fly.\u00a0 Well maybe it is, only 13 years later!\u00a0 In reality, self-imposed restraint from flying has been confined to the most committed individuals and organizations, not even adopted as a norm by the majority of \u2018ethical\u2019 NGOs, and until recently, widely ignored as an option even among academics<\/a>, and with breath-taking incongruence, even by many climate scientists.<\/p>\n

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An at least-vague-awareness of the climate impact of flying is however very widespread.\u00a0 The \u00a0discomfort very many people feel when deciding to fly, is resolved by drawing on a wide spectrum of motivated reasoning, such as citing compensatory behaviours in the personal climate-guilt register such as \u201cI do a lot to recycle\u201d, \u201cI\u2019m now vegetarian\u201d, \u201cI buy renewable electricity\u201d,\u00a0 to specific balancing investments such as \u201cwe bought an offset\u201d or even higher ethical purpose [ethical excusers or Ethcusers] \u201cas a campaigner for [ A\u00a0 ] I will make a greater difference for humanity by taking this flight than spending X time going by [sea\/ rail\/ bus\/ camel\/ bike]\u201d.<\/p>\n

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This has attracted quite a bit of campaigner or advocate attention, aimed at finding ways to get people to voluntarily give up flying.\u00a0 That is necessary and important but as a political catalyst not in itself a reliable and rapid delivery route to end the aviation problem.\u00a0 To achieve that we must confine and bind the dynamic driving aviation expansion and drive out the emissions.\u00a0 The problem is cheap fossil fueled flights unconstrained (indeed encouraged) by public policy.<\/p>\n

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Proxies and Decoys<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The air industry has of course titrated its PR efforts and investments in alternative fuels and technologies to try and maintain the equilibrium and hold the spectre of trend-breaking regulatory action at bay for as long as possible.\u00a0 Like other sectors before it, the industry has tried to maintain a focus on comparative metrics of efficiency, per passenger emissions etc, which allow it to continue business growth as usual, and draw attention away from ballooning emissions.\u00a0 Like the tobacco industry it has promoted \u2018choice\u2019 framing and offered the somewhat-less damaging options while signing up to vague commitments to be responsible. \u00a0\u00a0These proxies and decoys have enabled it to continue growing and polluting while industries such as power generation have been slowly ensnared in carbon reduction.<\/p>\n

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Now, with climate change indisuptably happening all around us, and Greta Thunberg and XR raising the level of social activity,\u00a0 flying is being more seriously questioned.\u00a0 \u00a0Numerous reports<\/a> attribute Thunberg\u2019s influence to a rapid increase in demand for voluntary offsetting and governments are creeping towards more taxes.\u00a0 Yet experience with many other sectors, such as the spread of organic food, \u2018green investment\u2019, and sustainability certification for fish and forests, is that elective action can build a vanguard, prove concepts and, if values dynamics are engaged<\/a>, transition behaviours from innovative to mainstream to \u2018normal\u2019 but it can take a long time. \u00a0If regulators stand back, it will also leave an unengaged \u2018tail\u2019 of unsustainable practice which can be very large (eg the great majority) while generating \u2018best practice\u2019 examples that can be gamed by politicains who want to avoid taking regulatory action.<\/p>\n

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Contain and Shrink<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I suggest that we need to convert offsetting from a voluntary practice that mitigates the impact of individual<\/em> decisions to travel by air, into an end-game mechanism to rapidly contain and shrink the carbon footprint of aviation.<\/p>\n

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This is a vast subject but a handy reality-check on the sustainability trajectory of the aviation industry was provided by Evan Davis\u2019s BBC programme The Bottom Line<\/a> on the future of commercial aviation, broadcast in July 2019 [see excerpts below, at the end].\u00a0 Talking to three experienced industry insiders, Davis\u00a0 gradually drew out confirmation that the industry is not on any credible trajectory to coming good on even its own climate commitments.\u00a0 I thought two telling points were the low volume of air travel that is for business, and the impact of the Swedish fylgskam<\/a> or flight-shaming movement, which has \u2018stagnated\u2019 air travel growth in Sweden in around 18 months<\/a>.\u00a0 As on so many previous environmental, Sweden along with California, still often acts as a pathfinder.<\/p>\n

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Davis mentioned that only 26% of travel at Heathrow Airport is for business.\u00a0 The vast bulk is recreational. \u00a0Viewed with one assumption this makes the present air-travel business look politically unassailable but if you see it otherwise, as a social behaviour on the move like the real and rapid shift to eating less meat in the UK, \u00a0it could indicate political vulnerability.\u00a0 In addition, while policy wonks think about tech and statistical sectors, the public encounters this through airline brands that, like banks, are often resented.<\/p>\n

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However, unlike eating every day or doing food shopping every week, the personal social touchpoints of flying are, for most of us, few.\u00a0 Most people in most countries don\u2019t fly very often (Swedes fly a lot).\u00a0 This makes campaigns which rely on social contagion rather harder to sustain. \u00a0\u00a0On the other hand it also means that \u2018doing the right thing\u2019 can be relatively low cost in terms of personal investment, especially if some<\/em> flying remains a possibility.<\/p>\n

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Re-Purposing Offset Technologies<\/strong><\/p>\n

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It’s true that until recently, many long-term climate campaigners (me included) have resisted devoting much attention to carbon-capture proposals and the wide range of speculative ideas for planetary geo-engineering, and I think, for good reasons.\u00a0\u00a0 For example because many proposals were for devices attached to continued or new use of fossil fuels in electricity production (eg Carbon Capture and Storage).\u00a0 In other cases they included vast and uncontrollable manipulation of ecosystems, such as ocean fertilisation.\u00a0 And in nearly all cases they could divert public concern and attention, and thus political attention and action, away from regulation and investment change required to decarbonize economies in proven ways such as switching to renewable energy, raising efficiency and cutting waste.<\/p>\n

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Actual climate change is now happening as anticipated by models and other science but far faster than was widely expected.\u00a0 What we feared to see in the second half of this century is already happening today.\u00a0\u00a0 Movements like XR<\/a> and Rapid Transition<\/a> are partly inspired by this realisation but to exert change-making pressure they need dis-aggregated targets, instrumental campaigns rather than just protest, and propositions more granular than \u2018nobody is doing anything\u2019, \u2018the system needs to change\u2019 and \u2018we need deep adaptation\u2019.\u00a0 Aviation offers one such opportunity.<\/p>\n

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Air travel contributes a small part of the overall pollution causing climate change but it is growing rapidly and hugely important both politically and psychologically.\u00a0 It\u2019s been largely untouched by the mainstreaming of \u2018mitigation\u2019 carbon-reduction measures that have been transforming electricity generation and biting into vehicle emissions (electric cars etc) and other sectors.\u00a0 Not only that but it\u2019s been aspirational, emblematic of the \u2018innocent\u2019 pre-sustainability world in which air travel was associated with freedom and enjoyment, holidays and tourism, and business success, built on untramelled climate pollution.<\/p>\n

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Over-Ripe For Disruption<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The aviation model is over-ripe for disruption, and in many ways could be far easier to deal with than other sectors such as land-use and farming or domestic energy use and terrestrial transport, for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n

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