‘We need to resist the urge to fly abroad more frequently’

I am alarmed that, with this summer’s variable weather, airlines and airports want to capitalise by advertising their sunny destinations and that some users of Bristol Airport are reported to have flown to and from European beach destinations just for the day!

I have seen very little in the local media questioning whether flying out and back for a few hours in the sun is a good idea, or stating the scientific evidence that the CO2 and other harmful gases produced by increased flying will make the climate emergency worse in the long run.

At a time when people may be thinking of autumn holidays, Bristol Airport is gearing up for its second ‘peak‘ of the year in September, following the busy summer holiday period.

Flying is the main activity we do which adds most to climate breakdown. Fly more than once a year and you soon rack up your climate destroying activity. We should really be showing restraint here, not flying more often if it’s not necessary.

The Climate Change Committee – the independent body set up to advise government on climate change – has said that for the government to achieve net zero targets people should be encouraged to change their climate damaging behaviours, including flying less.

They have also criticised the government’s plan to reach net zero in aviation by 2050.

This is also an issue of social as well as climate justice. Less than 50 per cent of the UK’s population fly in any one year, and almost 90 per cent of the world’s population never fly – it’s just the richest 12 per cent that do.

The wealthiest UK citizens use more energy flying than the poorest use in every aspect of their lives. For many poorer people in the world their entire annual CO2 footprint is less than one return flight from Bristol to Mallorca (5-600kg).

And richer people flying more often means that poorer people around the world suffer the impacts of climate breakdown.

For those that think this unnecessarily gloomy and that we will soon develop aeroplanes which have low carbon emissions: most of the news on this front over summer has been of airlines having to row back on their sustainability hopes any time soon.

Air New Zealand has had to publicly drop its target of cutting its greenhouse emissions by a modest 29% by 2030 because of a lack of capacity to produce aviation biofuels. In fact, whether ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel should be called ‘sustainable’ has been challenged by tests which show that burning it emits as much carbon as conventional fuel.

Ironically, the truth is that if we keep adding to our carbon emissions by flying as often as we choose, then climate breakdown will make the places we currently like to fly to on holiday unliveable.

Extreme heat, driven by climate breakdown, killed nearly 50,000 in Europe in 2023, as the continent continued to warm faster than other parts of the world, according to scientists.

This summer has seen record breaking heat in Greece, heat plumes in most of mainland Europe, higher than ever sea temperatures in the Mediterranean, and even more destructive wildfires.

Ironically too, our erratic weather at home, which disappoints us when we have autumnal storms in summer or floods for months in winter, is due to climate change. So flying away from this will not help in the long term.

I know that some 24/7 readers will say that alternatives to flying to European destinations, such as rail travel, are often more expensive and, bizarrely, this is often the case.

Flying is unrealistically ‘dirt cheap’ because aviation is given huge tax subsidies and expects us to pick up the tab for the pollution flights produce. There’s no VAT on aviation fuel, whereas oil, petrol and diesel all have VAT added – so anyone who’s ever filled up a car with fuel has paid more VAT than EasyJet or RyanAir.

If we taxed modes of transport according to their carbon emissions – in other words, a carbon tax – this would give us a better understanding of the climate impact of our holiday travel.

A frequent flyer tax would also be fair and reasonable when we know this mode of transport is particularly harmful, and would work effectively in charging those who pollute more frequently while avoiding penalising those that take the occasional well-earned holiday abroad.

If we taxed flights fairly, we could use that money to subsidise rail travel to make it a more enticing way to get to holiday destinations. If airlines paid VAT there would be around £8-10 billion per year more tax gathered which could be used to fund more environmentally-friendly public transport.

There’s also the impact that increased flights have on those living under the flight path, with the September peak increasing their experience of disturbed sleep and pollution.

There are plenty of resources out there to help find the alternatives to flying, like chronotrains which displays the stations that can be reached within eight hours, as well as Flight Free UK and the Man in Seat 61.

So, if you’re looking at the calendar and thinking about an autumn break, please think about alternatives to flying – forget the plane, be kind to the planet and maybe holiday closer to home!

This is an opinion piece by Tony Jones, a Bristol resident and member of the Bristol Airport Action Network, a local group who have been campaigning since 2019 against the expansion of Bristol Airport.

Main photo: Chris Head

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