262: Is it OK to Fly in a Climate Crisis?

Christiana: [00:01:26] 80%.

Tom: [00:01:27] 80%. 

Paul: [00:01:27] Of the world population.

Tom: [00:01:29] Yeah. So the first thing we should say before we start this episode is that even having a conversation about whether or not we should fly provides the implication that we have the choice to choose to fly.

Christiana: [00:01:40] It's an incredibly luxurious conversation.

Tom: [00:01:42] Which is an incredibly luxurious conversation. Christiana, you want to give us any more detail on that?

Christiana: [00:01:48] No.

Paul: [00:01:51] Luxury is its own truth. What are the actual percentages?

Tom: [00:01:54] Well, actually, I think first of all, we should go to what our listeners said about flying, and then we'll talk about the impact. So we did a survey of you, the wonderful listeners, to Outrage + Optimism. The results of that indicate just how complex this issue is and how difficult it is for many of us to grapple with what the reality is. So 21% of you said, yes, it's okay to fly, 21% of you said, no, it's not okay to fly, and 58% said it's maybe okay to fly in some circumstances. So that is really indicating the complexity of the issue and how much many of us are struggling with it. So I think we're going to get into the statistics about how bad this is for the climate. But first of all, as is now a bit of a tradition in this series, maybe we should talk about our own relationship to flying.

Christiana: [00:02:36] Paul?

Paul: [00:02:38] What a privilege to start. I actually, didn't fly much as a kid. We'd holiday in the UK, but did do, wanted to see the world in my 20s, did began to do some business travel in my late 20s early 30s. I actually remember then, I suppose when I got into climate change much later in my life, I was about 35, I started to consider flying and I became overwhelmed that although it's only something like a sort of 3 to 4% of global emissions, it's such a gigantic part of your own carbon footprint. I became profoundly impacted. I had a friend who was working at the Carbon Trust at the time, who said an economy flight to New York was equivalent to his entire emissions from everything else in his life that year. One economy return flight to New York. And I thought, okay, that's the scale of it. And I'll just break this down for a second because it's probably helpful for people if that ticket costs, say, £600, about £200 would be the kerosene for the airplane, the fuel. But it's untaxed. So actually it would be the equivalent in the UK of pulling into a petrol station and putting £800 worth of fuel in your car. So you can see the sort of gigantic numbers involved. So anyway, I kind of thought in 2001 I would stop flying on holiday and I kept that up for 16 years. Now I did fly on climate change business. I did not ever attach any kind of holiday to my climate change work because we were building a global organization, and I thought, if I attach holidays, I might start introducing frivolous flying, as it were. So I kept it to a minimum. I went on amazing train journeys all across Europe. I've been to Stockholm, Berlin, Venice, Florence, the south of Spain. All on trains had wonderful journeys. Talk about privilege. It's about three times the price of taking an aeroplane in second class on any train.

Tom: [00:04:26] And requires plenty of holiday time from your.

Paul: [00:04:28] And requires plenty of time yeah, but I mean, of course we do have devices. And I got to see countries and, you know, there is a whole narrative that says the more you reduce carbon from your life, the more your quality of life increases. Trains are fantastic. But at the age of 2016, I was just I turned 52 and I was kind of becoming cognizant of my mortality. And I kind of thought, well, actually, there are 1 or 2 places I would like to see, you know, using an aeroplane for, for non-work related purposes. And so I, I broke my 16 year sojourn and I have done some flying for pleasure since then, but I think it's it's something that we all need to acutely attend to in, in the right way, which is what we're going to talk about. What about you two?

Christiana: [00:05:16] Well, I'm going to pull the card of being the oldest person here.

Paul: [00:05:23] Only just.

Christiana: [00:05:25] Well, significantly, I would say, because when I think of my flying experiences, I actually classify it into three phases of my life. When I was a child, I remember not flying, but going to the airport, especially to pick people up during the time in which flight was such a technological wonder and was such an extraordinary experience that women would fly wearing hats and gloves. And, and that's what I remember going to the airport and seeing all these women get off or get on flights.

Tom: [00:06:08] Please tell me you still honour that?

Christiana: [00:06:09] Sorry? Of course. And high heels. But but, so I remember that as a child that it was like this amazing, amazing thing. So that's sort of my first chapter, I would say. Then I then I have a second chapter where flying was sort of democratized, although absolutely not because of what we know, 80% of. 

Paul: [00:06:35] The jet set. 

Christiana: [00:06:37] People have never have never set foot. But it did become something that was somewhat more common and, and was pedestrianised to the point where when I fly now, I fly with athletic shoes right. And most people do. I was, I was watching the other day and everybody's wearing, you know, the most comfortable clothes. 

Tom: [00:06:59] Pyjamas often.

Christiana: [00:07:01] Basically. So, so and, and during that second phase of my flight memory here, I did do an extraordinary amount of flying, especially when I was working at the UN and was responsible, ironically, for the for the agreement on climate change. And it was my duty to talk personally to every single government in the world. And so I did an extraordinary amount of flying. And since then I have made and especially over the past two years, this I just thought, I just honestly, I don't want to do it anymore. A because it's not good for my health. B because it's terrible for emissions. And I have organized my flying now into amalgamating things, tasks that I have to perform in regions. This recording is a very nice example of that. We are recording this quite differently to our usual podcast. We're recording this in the same room.

Paul: [00:08:12] Yay!

Christiana: [00:08:13] Together in London, because the two of you live here and because I was coming to your birthday, Paul, and to quite a few other things that I have to do in Europe that I then organized around this trip. So what I see is that, A I have cut a lot of flying because I'm just saying no to things. And if they insist I'm doing my interventions on zoom, that's one way. The other way is to put things together and do longer stay, stay away from home times than I used to. I used to fly back and forth, back and forth because I wanted to keep touch with with home and those at home. And I don't do that anymore. So this time, for example, I'm in Europe for five weeks. Is that great, well, certainly for emissions it's better, not great for my personal life, I would say. But, so what I'm trying to say is this is a journey that we're all on. There is no perfect way of doing this. I wouldn't say just because I have made those adjustments to my flying habits. I wouldn't say that that's what everyone has to do. We have to respect where people are as a baseline, and my expectation is that all of us would then continue to improve in terms of reducing our emissions from flight, because, as we've pointed out, for those of us who do fly, it is the most important part of our emissions. So I honestly, I cannot come down with a hard hammer on flying because for me, there are some things that are work related that are important and are much more effective if they're done in person. And secondly, my daughters do not live in Costa Rica and I will fly to see them and to spend quality time with them.

Tom: [00:10:22] No, very nicely described there, Christiana. And I think what you've put your finger on is this is about relationships, connection, family for many people that in our globalized distributed world it's necessary sometimes to get on a plane to maintain, Paul wants to come in.

Paul: [00:10:39] Tom, we'll come to you now because I want to hear your story, but I just want to share that there's someone we all know in the climate change movement who's a wonderful person. And she does the exact reverse of what I said I did for 16 years. She'll only travel on family because she's between two continents, but would never fly on business. And it's just to say, you know, when she says that, that also makes perfect sense to me. You know, we were all we're all looking at this, this problem through different portals. So what's your story Tom?

Tom: [00:11:04] So I mean, in terms of my own relationship, I flew a lot as a child. My dad, as I think I've said on this podcast before was a petroleum geologist. So we flew around the world to places like Indonesia and Southeast Asia and Latin America and Australia, lived in different places. So I kind of grew up with that psychology of being a citizen of the world and going to different places, and it's something that I've always valued about my worldview. And as I grew up, I began to become aware of the climate crisis, and I began to be aware that this was one of the major causes of all the challenges that we were facing. So I've drawn that much more into my own consciousness. And for the last decades, I have been much more mindful about trips. So I will fly for work if I feel that it's meaningful and important. But when I do, I do what you just described, Christiana. So I will fly, I just came back from four and a half weeks in the US. Now that had a big personal family cost to be away from my kids for four and a half weeks, but I really made the most of one trip across the Atlantic to actually visit all the different places I need to go to and see everybody and what I try to do, it's not always possible as I try to do two trips a year, one in the spring and one in the autumn, and then I make them longer. I go and see everybody that I need to see, to try to get more efficiency out of the usage of the carbon that I need to emit in order to fly.

Tom: [00:12:25] Now, from a personal point of view, having grown up with that worldview and now having children of my own, I have to say I struggle for various reasons. One is my wife's father lives in the US, so for her to see her dad necessitates us getting on a plane. But also, I work really hard to try and reduce my emissions in my life, installing solar panels, electric car, zero emissions tariff, spending the extra money that I'm privileged to do to enable that we have as close to a zero carbon lifestyle as we possibly can at home. But I also feel like what aeroplanes and air travel have facilitated for us is a deeper cultural engagement in different parts of the world and deeper understanding of what people are facing, and that is something that we should applaud as humanity. And I think it's made the world a more interesting and a more connected place that have allowed cultures to fuse. And I, I enjoy that part of modern life, so I really regret that it's so damaging. I'm happy to not eat red meat and I'm happy to not drive a petrol car. And those are things that improved my life. But I do find that travel, cultural engagement, taking my kids is an important part of life. And that's maybe is my own expectations. That's maybe indulgent, but it's a it's a challenge and probably one that people relate to. So I try to minimise it. But we do sometimes get on a plane for family reasons or to see parts of the world.

Paul: [00:13:50] Yeah, I mean, Richard Fulford, one of the listeners said, don't travel excessively. There is a voice that will be in with many of our listeners, the 21%. 21%. That's a fifth of our listeners said it's not okay to fly. And those people are people who are making potentially quite significant sacrifices. They're doing that very mindfully. And, you know, I'm.

Christiana: [00:14:14] For which we have huge respect.

Paul: [00:14:14] I that that's really the point. That's exactly what I wanted to say. You know, I've told my story. I'm not gonna repeat it. I have enormous respect for people who are able to be stronger than me.

Tom: [00:14:27] Yeah. I'm not sure I'd phrase it quite like that, because it's not necessarily like an indulgence. I think there are, there are inherently positive things about the world being more interconnected that I would celebrate, even if I never got on a plane.

Paul: [00:14:41] I'd love to hear the stats about the actual contribution. And then, but either before or after that, I'd like to tell a tiny story about airplanes. Which one? You go first.

Tom: [00:14:52] Okay. So let me do this quickly first. So the figure that the airline industry puts out, and this is scientifically accurate, is that 2 to 3% of global emissions come from the airline industry. Now, for reasons that we will probably get into later to do with radiative forcing and contrails, which are some of the elements that make measuring the actual global warming impact of the emissions from aircraft a bit more complicated.

Christiana: [00:15:14] Sorry Tom, what is a contrail?

Tom: [00:15:14] Contrail is the white things you see in the sky after a plane's gone past.

Paul: [00:15:18] And they are actually water vapor clouds created because the water vapor is sticking to the tiny particulates of the emissions.

Tom: [00:15:24] Correct, sometimes ice crystals as well, I think, depending on the height. But yes.

Paul: [00:15:27] But I want to say that I know even more, but I've actually run out of things to say.

Tom: [00:15:30] So anyway, so when you take that into account, it's actually just a little over 4% of total global warming impact from human activities can be attributed to airline emissions. So there's a little bit of a nuance there, but that only tells part of the story. So, as we've said, it's relatively a smaller amount of the total impact on climate. If you think that transportation is 30%. Food is around 30%. The fact that airlines are somewhere, depending on how you calculate it, around 4%, can make it seem like it's less. However, it is one of the toughest sectors to decarbonise and for probably all of us and many people listening, getting on a plane is the biggest part of our carbon footprint. And if we want to be responsible, we have to acknowledge that. And as you pointed out, Christiana, 80% of the global population has never set foot on a plane. But we are living through a period which, again, is something that we should applaud, in which many parts of the world people are getting somewhat richer. So there is an anticipation that demand for flying will grow, it has grown fourfold since 1990 to 2023, and it's expected to triple again by 2050. This demand for flying is continuing its upward path. So even though airplanes are getting more efficient and need less fuel, the emissions are still going up because of the growth that we've seen so far and the anticipated growth. So it might well be that we actually see flying as one of the largest contributors to climate change in the coming years. So it's crucial that we get on top of it from a technology and from a behaviour change perspective. So those are the numbers. So that's what you wanted Paul.

Paul: [00:17:08] Perfect. I think you framed it exactly. And I mean I haven't got a lot to say about the future of flight, but I think that electric airplanes are very real possibility. They're already flying. There's the potential for hydrogen and other fuels. There's lots of a lot of people have talked about airships for a long time. You know, airships 2.0, if you will, which could be very, very different. The problem is the economics of aviation tend to gravitate towards incredibly expensive airplanes that are almost, you know, look identical to each other because we've kind of perfected the design. But I just wanted a tiny framing about and I don't think we can deny this. So I'm just going to throw it out there. The miracle of powered flight. I mean, it's true that people have been messing about in balloons for a long time, but essentially when you go up in a hot air balloon, you go exactly where the wind wants to take you. There's nothing you can do. So although it's kind of flight, it's sort of kind of like it's a trick. It doesn't really achieve anything. The Wright brothers. We all know the Wright brothers kind of invented the first powered airplane using using fossil fuels. And only story that I know about them is that when they when their airplane got a little bit better, they thought, well, how are we going to publicize this, so they went and flew it around Manhattan Island one or two times. No need for a press release. Absolutely everybody was kind of like, what is that, and last one I've got for you is just it's an air show. And it was in Reims, in France in 1909. 500,000 people came to that air show because, of course, it's very hard for us to comprehend now. Aeroplanes are sort of ubiquitous. You know, the water comes out of the tap, the airplane is in the airport, but this technology is completely mind blowing and changed the world. And so much of the of the sort of extraordinary, for better or for worse achievement of the last century and a bit, was made possible by aeroplanes.

Tom: [00:19:04] 100%. 100%, yeah.

Paul: [00:19:06] From from liberating and connecting people across the world to the sort of ghastly bombing of cities in World War Two. Aeroplanes. Aeroplanes. Aeroplanes.

Christiana: [00:19:15] Yeah. I, as you both pointed out, one of the gifts of flight is that it strengthens the interconnectivity of the world. People, cultures, products. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I don't think that that's going to let up. I think that's just going to get more and more interconnected, more and more, more tightly woven. Now, next to that, I think we've also said this is perhaps the most divisive.

Tom: [00:19:55] In the environmental movement, yeah.

Christiana: [00:19:56] Truly, deeply divisive issue among climate people and in the environmental movement. And I can understand that, that it is incredibly divisive. I also wish to say that what I think is necessary is to separate the action, or the act of flying from where do the emissions come from, it's from the burning of the fossil fuel. So it's not that we have to demonize the flying or, you know, me spending time with my children or you interconnecting with other cultures, Tom and and Paul. The problem that we have is that the fuels that we're using for these airplanes still continues to be fossil fuels. And contrary to eating, where we have full control of what food we put in our mouth. With flight, with respect to what I would say, the proximity of us as individuals, being able to make responsible choices. The proximity in eating is immediately because we make that choice. But the proximity of us being able to make a responsible choice around flight is very far, because we do not define what fuels are being used. So what what I think is important to understand is, sadly, this is a sector in which there is very little individual incidents in, other than for those people who say we're not going to fly and hugely respect that position. But if your position is, I want to fly, but with less impact. There's very little incidence if not zero incidence that we can have on that. We can't move that needle. That is a needle that needs to be moved from the systems perspective. And there there is already some not enough investment into alternative fuels. There has been investment into reducing the emissions of airports because much of the machinery to move airplanes around in airports is now electric, hopefully clean electricity. There has been a maximization of routes so that airplanes don't use as much fuel as they used to in unthoughtful routes, so there has been.

Paul: [00:22:29] With a notable exception of the the Russian airspace being closed to the west and the west being closed to Russian airspace. That's a nasty one, but sorry.

Christiana: [00:22:37] Well, and there there are many other exceptions. You can't fly over, you know, over military areas, etc. but.

Tom: [00:22:44] Can we just dig into the fuel bit in a sec, because, yeah, because I think it's worth I think what you just said is very interesting, but finish your point and then I want to make a point about fuels. Yeah.

Christiana: [00:22:51] Go ahead.

Tom: [00:22:51] So you're exactly right. I think that this is in a minute, I think it'd be good for us to get into the case for flying and the case not for flying, but I also feel like it's important to double click on that point about sustainable aviation fuels. So for those who don't know, that is an alternative jet fuel that can actually cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. It does have a low carbon footprint. It's usually made from plants that have absorbed CO2 in their lifetime, and then released back into the atmosphere when it's combusted. It can come from lots of sources, like algae and hydrogen, capturing CO2 from the air. The only trouble, it's five times more expensive, right. So that is the challenge and there's not enough of it. So we know that there are various different players out there, corporate players who are trying to buy as much SAF as it's called sustainable aviation fuel as they can, and it's just not available. So we will see a drop in that cost. But I should also point out that we have a big demand for land. And there is a question and this would come if we did this at scale that actually, to grow the appropriate crops, we would need two thirds of the UK's agricultural land to grow enough crops to actually provide sustainable aviation fuel to the UK's aviation industry.

Christiana: [00:24:01] At the current maturity of the terminals and that is not.

Tom: [00:24:02] At the current maturity, you're right, and the cost curve coming down. 100%. There's no free lunch in any of this, right. So it's just worth setting that stuff out. And we should talk about the arguments for and against flying. But I interrupted, you were in the middle of a flow. Maybe you can remember what you were saying, maybe you can't?

Christiana: [00:24:16] No, no, no, I think I had come to the end of my point, my point is that.

Paul: [00:24:21] Separate them.

Christiana: [00:24:22] Perhaps. Yeah. We have to separate the activity from the fuels behind the activity. And the reason I think, why this is so divisive is because we have very little agency other than deciding not to fly, there's very little other options that we can take. Whereas with food we can have many sort of middle ground options, you know, with with other, with other choices in our life, but with flying, unfortunately, we're sort of, you know, up against the wall. Either you fly with the damn fossil fuels that that fuel the the flight or you don't fly.

Tom: [00:25:02] Well, what about offsetting? Because that's been the classic one. So maybe we should talk about that. So the question that has been around for a while, and I mean it's almost as controversial as flying itself, is if you fly, should you offset it. And is that really an equivalence.

Paul: [00:25:17] Well, on offsets we actually have a listener came in to us, SV82T, interesting name, train when you can, but when you have to take a flight, offset your emissions. Now offsets is a is a is a huge issue. We could do a whole mini series on the integrity. So many different types and unregulated market. Christiana, what's your view on that?

Christiana: [00:25:40] Well, I have been abundantly public for many years that I am an offset proponent. I think it is important because I come from a developing country, and I have seen the benefit in developing countries of receiving funding for projects that otherwise would not be funded and that do reduce. I was furthermore on the on the board of the CDM when that existed.

Tom: [00:26:09] Clean development mechanism.

Christiana: [00:26:10] Clean development mechanism which used to regulate the international market. And I am a proponent, I am a proponent because I know that the methodologies were rigorous. Heaven knows how much we worked on that. I'm also fully aware that sometimes, but not always, those offsets are not very credible. I don't think that we did justice to the carbon market by throwing it out or throwing out the baby with the bathwater, because I think we should have strengthened that instead of just throwing it out and now having voluntary. But coming back to flying and offsets at the height of my flying history when I was at the UN, I did feel really badly about all of those emissions. And so what I did is I asked the Secretariat to please set up a carbon offsetting program that we all in the Secretariat could use and anybody else could use, and it was with the rigor of the Secretariat. They chose very, very serious emission reduction projects in developing countries. I had the secretariat quantify my annual emissions at the height of my emissions because of my flight. I then multiplied my annual emissions, calculated by them, to the assumption that I will live to be 110, just because if you're going to offset, you better offset much more than what is realistic. And then I multiplied it. 

Tom: [00:27:47] I think 110 is realistic.

Christiana: [00:27:48] Well maybe, maybe not.

Tom: [00:27:49] There you go.

Paul: [00:27:50] Earnestly to be hoped for.

Christiana: [00:27:51] But then I multiplied that times ten.

Tom: [00:27:55] Probably 1100 is probably out of range.

Christiana: [00:27:59] And I just want to say honestly, that's the attitude that we should be having toward offsetting to offset one ton for one ton that you emit is frankly not enough, because that one ton that you chose could actually not occur. So for me, if you're going to offset offset abundantly and generously and do so to make sure that you have completely covered and over covered your emissions, and that you are investing in high quality projects in developing countries who need that investment.

Paul: [00:28:38] I think that that is a very well made statement, Christiana. I notice that there are raging debates about offsets that go on, and I don't particularly want to go into the details of them now, what I would observe is that there's a sort of broader point for me, which is, let's say, for the sake of argument, there are kind of good things and bad things different. As you said yourself, some offsets are not credible, some are. I noticed that behind all of this, behind almost this whole series, is this idea that governments sort of make rules for society, but they've not arrived yet those we're kind of living without rules. There was that book, Lord of the Flies, where the children, you know, they find themselves in an island and there are no adults, and their behaviour becomes unsupervised and almost dangerous to each other. I feel we're a bit like that. We're trying to act like governments, you know, we're all treating ourselves as governments. What would the rules be. And that's what's so heartbreaking about this, because the issues of equity, for example, in things like health services or education, how we divide up our roles in society through taxation and such like it's all been sort of personalized and that's really hard because you're kind of sort of living the modern geopolitics of yourself, which is very hard to do.

Paul: [00:29:53] But just one last thought, very positively, we've talked about alternative airplanes and all the rest of it. Elon Musk is a bit of an innovator. He has a company called The Boring Company. People for quite a long time have been talking about putting trains in tubes. I was actually 14 years old, I think. I went to a lecture where they said to send a train at 200 miles an hour is seven times the energy of sending a train at 100 miles an hour, because wind resistance increases exponentially. And the point about tubes, whether they're above ground or below ground, is if you suck the air out of them and put trains in there, you can have trains traveling at thousands of miles an hour with very, very low energy consumption, quite possibly on maglev. So there's no physical resistance. So we may not be so far away from thousand multi thousand mile trains get you from London to Los Angeles in, you know, an hour or less.

Tom: [00:30:45] It would be a big tunnel.

Paul: [00:30:46] With very low emissions.

Tom: [00:30:47] You going to be able to dig a tunnel under the Atlantic?

Christiana: [00:30:49] London to Los Angeles. Under the Atlantic.

Paul: [00:30:50] It's not impossible from an engineering perspective. It would be very expensive to do.

Tom: [00:30:54] A lot of emissions.

Paul: [00:30:56] Not if it's a renewable or nuclear powered digging machine.

Christiana: [00:31:00] Okay.

Paul: [00:31:01] This is probably not something we're going to see in our lifetimes, but I'm just telling you.

Tom: [00:31:05] But the point you're making is that there will be technological leaps that will actually make these things easier, which I completely agree with. I would like to just because, I mean, we've been talking around this topic, we've been taking a lot in from sustainable aviation fuel to offsets to other things. And I want to bring it back to the listener. We've had lots of listeners. We mean, clearly, from the statistics I shared earlier, listeners are really grappling with this and they're grappling with the challenges in front of them today. So let's sort of like work our way towards the end of our episode by summarizing first the arguments against flying and then second, the arguments why you would get on a plane at this moment.

Christiana: [00:31:37] And do so in the context that both are valid.

Tom: [00:31:41] Both are valid, both are.

Christiana: [00:31:42] Both are valid.

Tom: [00:31:43] But we need to be informed and understand the challenges that we're facing.

Christiana: [00:31:43] There is no judgment, there's no judgment. We have shared our personal biases here, but we're not imposing our bias on anybody, on the listener. To the contrary, I think the call here is for each of us to thoughtfully decide what flying we want to do, what the consequences are, and what you want to do about that, but, yes, I agree that we can summarize.

Tom: [00:32:10] So, I mean, the first reason why, if you care about the climate crisis, you would not get on a plane is because it's probably your biggest impact. If you want to be responsible and you want to be part of this decisive decade, that is going to determine so much for the future of humanity, then one of the biggest things you can do in terms of reducing your own personal footprint is simply not to get on a plane, and you can do what Paul Dickinson did. You can get on a train, you can go around beautiful parts of Europe. You can still have holidays. There will be a cost associated.

Christiana: [00:32:39] If you live in Europe.

Tom: [00:32:39] If you, yeah, thank you, good point, yeah, yeah. It's not that everyone can just go around Europe.

Paul: [00:32:42] It's very hard if you don't live there of course.

Tom: [00:32:43] Yeah, you can go, you can live, but you can visit the wider area around where you live, maybe. I mean, that's true. That's not always the case even certain parts of the world don't have trains. But slightly messing up my argument here.

Christiana: [00:32:53] Most actually don't have European trains.

Tom: [00:32:53] So if you happen to live in a certain part of Europe, then you can take the train. No. You're right. This is this is a real challenge.

Paul: [00:32:59] You can enjoy the experience I had of sitting at dinner on the sleeper train, four of us around the table. We just went round, why are you on the train. I talked about climate change. Somebody else had been in an air crash and was very frightened of aeroplanes. Somebody else had a medical condition, couldn't get on them. Fascinating conversation.

Tom: [00:33:13] So, so so that's the big argument, right. Why you wouldn't do it. Any other arguments as to why you wouldn't go on a plane? These are all valid approaches.

Christiana: [00:33:18] That's it, that's it. And and that will continue to be a valid argument until we can have emission free flight. That's going to be a long time. 

Paul: [00:33:30] Or emission free travel at that speed.

Tom: [00:33:32] Yeah.

Christiana: [00:33:33] Yeah.

Tom: [00:33:33] And why if you are a person who wants to live a good life in a climate crisis, would you ever consider getting on a plane given that we know it's the largest part of our personal impact.

Christiana: [00:33:46] Me, number one priority family.

Paul: [00:33:51] Me number one priority, globalizing a system I believe had potential to have significant emission reductions, way beyond the. Now, I know everyone says, oh, well, my flight's going to be offset by the impact of, but I genuinely believe that.

Tom: [00:34:07] Yeah, I think there's one other thing that I would bring in there, which is that the environmental community, I think, has taken a view that our role is to minimize harm rather than maximize opportunity for transformation. And sometimes what that has led to is what critics would call a sort of hairshirt mentality, you know, don't live in a warm house, don't get on a plane, don't have a holiday. And I do think that there is evidence that that has turned certain people off engaging with the environmental community. It can make it seem like it's not for them. It's based on sacrifice. It's not something that they want to engage in or that they see themselves in. So it can, and this isn't a criticism of people who don't fly, but I have witnessed that it can sometimes have a deleterious effect on the desire to actually get more people engaged in this movement. That's not an argument for flying, but it's an argument for how you approach the issue.

Christiana: [00:34:59] It's an argument for not blaming people. 

Tom: [00:35:02] For not blaming people. Exactly.

Paul: [00:35:03] Which has come up more than once. And I think is really at the heart of this. I think it's the blaming people that's the problem. I think role modeling, you know, whatever behavior you want, sharing without judgment is actually very powerful and very attractive. Oh, they don't fly. They take the train. Oh that's interesting. Maybe I'll take a train next time. Whereas the kind of like you know you are, I know better. It's the I know better is when the backs get up. I remember someone was saying to me kind of, well, you know, you lot, you know, and of course, like, I'm just like a little humanoid on the surface of a planet. They're a little humanoid on, you know, there's not a you lot and a me lot. There's an us lot.

Tom: [00:35:43] All right. So unless anyone has anything to add, I think that that probably brings our episode to a close. This has been a tricky one, right. There's as we've said all along in this series, there are no clear, hard and fast answers to any of this stuff. We're all grappling with it. We're trying to make sense of how we can live well at a time of enormous consequence.

Christiana: [00:35:59] And we each have to make those decisions.

Tom: [00:36:01] And we each have to make those decisions, but do reach out to us. Let us know what you're struggling with. Let us know what you thought about this episode and all of the episodes in this series. This is all about a dialogue with you, the listeners, as we collectively try to make our way through these difficult issues. So thank you for listening and we'll be back next week.

Christiana: [00:36:15] Bye.

Paul: [00:36:16] Bye.

Tom: [00:36:21] So a big thank you for listening and we hope you're enjoying this series. These episodes were sparked by questions from you, our wonderful listeners, so we'd really love to hear whether you feel like we've answered your questions, whether you now have even more questions. We'd love to keep this dialogue going with you online and in future episodes as we navigate these difficult issues. So please do get in touch and let us know what you think.