To fly or not to fly?

Should we still be flying? It’s a loaded question and one that gets some heated responses

Is it frivolous to fly so much?

A few months ago I read a story by TV presenter Nicholas Crane, who gave up flying 10 years ago.

Nicholas was a travel writer for twenty years, which meant he spent the better part of two decades jetting around the world.

But following a particularly harrowing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society on global warming, he decided that his actions were damaging the environment.

Wracked with guilt, he saw only one solution: give up flying.

His article generated a huge response from readers. Some hailed him a hero. Others called him a hypocrite. A few even contested that flying has an impact on climate change at all.

It can’t be denied that carbon emission from airplanes are damaging. A return flight to India, for example, releases around two tons of carbon per passenger.

That’s about the same amount as each Indian produces in two years.

Three per cent of all carbon emissions are attributed to air transport – and although that doesn’t sound like that much, the percentage is likely to soar in the next few decades.

And it’s not just an issue of carbon emissions, either.

There’s the issue of ‘radiative forcing’. This is when plane vapour trails, or contrails, persist for hours in the atmosphere and behave in the same way as high altitude cirrus clouds, which trap warmth in the atmosphere.

So what do we do? The Bishop of London has argued that we have a moral obligation to be environmentally friendly. Jetting away for a holiday, he says, is a sin.

And yet we’re all flying more, thanks in no small part to the low-cost carriers.

In Europe alone, no-frills flights have doubled in the last five years. Perhaps we should be avoiding long-haul destinations and sticking instead to trains and cars and bikes.

Avoiding flying is certainly becoming a more popular notion.

The travel section recently launched a new Going green column, which focuses on European destinations which can easily be visited by train. It seems a sensible option – why fly when you don’t have to?

Alternatively, there are now a number of schemes which let us “off-set” our flight emissions, where you pay a company or charity to plant trees or invest in energy-saving projects in developing countries. This should, in theory, make your flight “carbon neutral”.