I am what the boss of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, affectionately mocks as a “cloud bunny” or “aerosexual.” If the question is “how do we fix flying after Covid?” then the shaming answer I’d like to give is: “Bring it back. Lots of it.”
And that is what’s going to happen. Covid hasn’t killed the flying habit, just temporarily repressed it. The yearn to travel is a fundamental—and civilising—thing. The Zoom trend might cut business travel, but don’t count on it. Even the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this autumn is happening face-to-face.
Air travel in China, the world’s second biggest market, is already close to its pre-pandemic level. Low-cost carriers will flood the skies with cheap flights as soon as border controls allow. Ministers are promoting staycations, but Britons will head abroad the moment they can.
But I also know that flying is a huge, under-taxed and under-regulated polluter and want us to do something about it. What should that be? For all the natty test planes running on electricity, or biofuel for jets, green innovations aren’t stopping the environmental harm flying does. From the plastic meal trays to the queues of taxis outside terminals, it devours resources. A return flight from the UK to the US west coast emits twice as much carbon as a typical car in a year. It’s thought that only 3 per cent of people on the planet fly often. But this group—people like me—eat up the carbon allowance of everyone else.
So what’s the answer? The trick is to find a way to manage the environmental consequences while not pushing the poor out of the skies. Cheap flights to sunny places should not be sneered at. Low-cost carriers operating new, efficient planes with every seat taken already do less harm per trip than big jets on long routes—and a lot less than private jets, whose users have thrived during the Covid crisis.
The obvious—too obvious—solution is to put a price on the damage flying does: a tax on jet fuel, for instance, or carbon price that includes long-haul travel. But there’s no hope that the world will agree a shared way of doing it. Heavily tax flights out of Europe and the risk is that everyone just goes via a loophole in Dubai instead. The growth will continue.
Why? Partly because Asia and Africa are catching up with the developed west, and many who have never flown will soon take their first trips. This points to a fallback that leaves environmentalists queasy. I don’t think we can curtail the volume of worldwide flying. But we might still reduce the damage it does.
There is already a UN plan that will bring in voluntary carbon offsets for aviation this year, and mandatory ones by 2027. The problem is that the offset market has a lot of holes in it. It amounts to a vague, unregulated promise to pay someone to emit less carbon somewhere else—“saving” a bit of rainforest, or paying someone to cook on a solar stove—but it doesn’t stop carbon emissions from the plane you are travelling on. We need to sharpen up the offset market by linking it to genuine sequestration, not offsetting harm but undoing it. This is possible: requiring every ticket sold to be linked to better management of farm soil, for instance, so identifiable carbon is demonstrably locked away. Aviation regulators need to insist on this as rigorously as they do safety standards.
Flying can also be made more carbon-efficient, by redesigning air traffic control to stop jets circling wastefully around Heathrow, and by cramming more people onto each flight. First class should be abolished. And we also need to push that new technology, which will not be elusive forever—Airbus is talking about synthetic fuels made using direct carbon capture from the air, which sounds magical but might be commonplace one day.
Until then, flight shame me all you like, but I’ll still see you at check-in.
