“All the necessary technologies and all the necessary policies to reach zero carbon are proven and waiting to go.” Paul Allen, Can Britain Become Zero Carbon?, Centre for Alternative Technology, 2018

“Consumerism – ever restless, never sated – threatens us with climate breakdown, helps catalyse a sixth great extinction, imperils global water supplies, and reduces the many wonders of the living world to the same grey waste.” George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage, 2018

I guess that most people would buy into the idea that it’s good to have a positive outlook.  That we need to be positive for our own mental health.  And that only when we are positive can we summon the energy to go out and make the world a better place, at least for those close to us who would otherwise have to contend with our miserable demeanour.

A difficulty in our culture seems to be that positivity means avoiding inconvenient truths.  As a result, when inconvenient truths are spelt out, by someone like George Monbiot for instance, the speaker comes across as unhelpfully negative.

In 2006, prime minister Tony Blair declared in respect of climate change: “unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible … there is nothing more serious, more urgent or more demanding of leadership”.  Two months later, his response was “a bit impractical actually” when it was suggested to him that he might show leadership by not flying his family to Barbados for holidays.  Pressed further, he remarked: “in the new frames for the aircraft, they are far more energy efficient”.  On which note, Emily Armistead of Greenpeace commented: “hoping for the best is not a policy, it is a delusion”.

Blair’s enthusiasm for new and improved aircraft was undoubtedly positive, yet it was little more than wishful thinking.  As subsequently noted by David Mackay, the government chief scientist and author of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, planes have largely been optimized in response to commercial incentives; and there is no prospect of their energy consumption being halved in future.  A plane that is flying optimally, so as to minimize its fuel consumption and carbon emissions, uses around half of its energy combating gravity and the other half combating air resistance.  Given that we are not going to take up less space in future (so planes will still need to push as much air out of the way when they fly), this means that even if we managed to slash the weight of planes, we would only be able to halve their fuel consumption if they flew more slowly.  Doing anything more slowly hardly fits with our modern lifestyle and values.

Tony Blair’s response, and subsequent government policy, provide an example of how optimism and positivity can get in the way of considered thought.  In the twelve years since he made his remark, there has been little public debate about the need to fly less.  Instead we now fly much more – in Britain, about ten times the global average on a per capita basis – and the carbon footprint of flying has grown inexorably.  (Indeed we need to fly more still, for the good of our economy, according to the government’s logic for a third runway at Heathrow.)  If the rest of the world catches up with us, flying could become the largest contributor to global warming of any human activity.

Ah but, says the optimist, we will have electric planes in the future.  They will run on batteries, which will be charged up using clean renewable electricity generated by wind and solar power.  This is the latter-day equivalent of Tony Blair’s remark in 2006.  In both cases, positive thinking seems to mean wishful thinking.

Not even optimists in the aviation world are talking about electric planes flying over oceans.  The Californian firm Wright Electric forecast in 2017 that electric flights will travel between London and Amsterdam by 2027, and European developers think hybrid planes (which use a battery in combination with normal jet kerosene, so are not fully electric) might be able to fly 1000 km by 2035.  That is less than 20% of the way from London to New York.  It is not clear whether it is even physically possible, let alone technologically possible, to develop an electric plane that can cross the Atlantic.

And so it will remain the case that each return flight from London to New York will emit into the atmosphere a tonne of CO2 per passenger for at least the next couple of decades and probably throughout our lifetime.  Or two tonnes, or more, if you include the extra (bad) effects of releasing CO2 at high altitude.  Two tonnes per person is still the climate scientists’ view of the average annual emissions of greenhouse gases allowed per person in the long run if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.

So it is difficult to escape the logic that if climate scientists are right, we will simply have to fly much less.  And yet, such is the cultural bias towards positive thinking, one cannot reason thus without being accused of being negative and scare-mongering, like the author of Out of the Wreckage.

Optimism is an unhelpful attitude if it leads us to assume we can carry on as we are without a radical overhaul of our way of life.  Paul Allen is simply mistaken, unfortunately.  In the world of aviation, at least, the necessary technologies are not only not in place, but not obviously possible even in theory.

What about biofuels?  In a previous blog post, I have shown how a fairly simple calculation can demonstrate that Britain would have to devote at least a fifth of its entire land area to tree planting solely for the purpose of offsetting the carbon emissions from flying using biofuels.  Or alternatively borrow someone else’s country for the purpose.

Flying is not the worst

The writer C.S. Lewis was fond of observing the following quirk of the human psyche: things that are either good or bad are easily displaced from our attention by the best or the worst.  It is what allows bad news to be buried.  In the days before the end of apartheid in South Africa, Barclays bank came in for extensive criticism for its dealings with the regime, even though other banks like NatWest were (nearly) as bad.  Today, the airline industry is rather like NatWest: it flies under the radar, so to speak, with respect to climate change because other sectors – the food industry, energy sector, road transport – are bigger contributors to global warming and other environmental decay.

Without re-hashing the statistics and arguments from other posts, suffice it to say that in Britain in 2018 the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions is the aviation sector.  And if the rest of the world copies us …

We need to change our way of life, a necessity exemplified by no other predilection as well as that for foreign travel.  For this change to have any chance of happening, we need a new story of human happiness.  As George Monbiot writes: “holiday and airline companies have worked hard to persuade us that living the dream means travelling the world, seeking novel experiences; but I suspect that what many people want above all else is a strong sense of home”.

How can we convey that “sense of home” with a gentler way of life?