I haven’t flown for several years. The reason is anthropogenic climate change. I miss it, despite Skype, because getting up high, seeing distant people, and getting to new places are things I love. I look forward to flying again, which I will do very rarely until I’m satisfied that if the rest of the globe were able to, and decided to, fly tomorrow, any adverse environmental effect could be avoided or neutralised. I’m not rabidly anti-flying – I like it that families and friends can be with each other, for example. I’m in favour of reaonably cheap flights. But couldn’t cleaning up flying move a bit quicker?
So I went to the fairly recent Spiked debate titled ‘Save the planet, don’t see the world’ (23 May 2006, subsequently referred to as Save the Plane). I wanted to see the lie of the land. Spiked often features Daniel Ben Ami, an articulate proponent of accelerating ourselves out of this mess rather than timidly curtailing ourselves. I find his attitude astoundingly cavalier, and there we are.

So a friend (who is on secondment from the WWF to Virgin Holidays) and I go to this debate. 2 of the panellists are from scientific backgrounds, one of whom to his credit decided to take a different, psychosocial angle. Unsurprisingly – the scientists are in favour of limiting flights. The other two I hardly know how to describe. One was Peter Smith, lecturer in Travel and Tourism from St Mary’s College (sadly I can’t check this). The other was Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. Both ideologues. Environmentalism could adopt a very conservative, anti-progress approach, and there needs to be a debate about this – you can’t have this debate without ideology. But putting the ideologues against the scientists was idiocy.

One avid pro-flyer reviews Save the Plane here: http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2006-01/seeworld.htm.
I dispute a lot of her account – although, as might be expected, air-travel-skeptics were outnumbered by those who have Spiked’s general perspective, there was a debate – and take a different position. I emailed afterwards:

2 panellists were obstructed in their efforts to move the debate in interesting directions by 2 others – plus other Spiked people and a minority of audience members – who put forward various bizarre, sweeping, unfounded points of view:

Global warming isn’t real. Scientists who say it is have hidden agenda.
Anybody who invokes the world’s poor as a reason to do anything is disingenous and suffering from guilt for being well-off.
Invoking the world’s poor as a reason to curtail flying equates to trying to keep flying for the world’s rich.
Cheap flights are an unequivocally good thing and if you don’t think so, you must hate poor people.
The only way to advance is to fund research into clean flights, and this can only be achieved with the profit from air ticket sales.
Famines are anthropogenic, therefore we can’t blame people for droughts.
To say flying pollutes is the same thing as saying people pollute. Saying that people pollute means that you must be a misanthrope.
If you’re against flying, you must be technophobic (and if you’re technophobic, then you’re certainly a misanthrope.)

Such a narrow set of points – mostly aimed at undermining the environmentalism argument and its proponents – but that’s only a tiny part of the global debate on this. I though most people had moved on to thinking about *how* to preserve flying with all its benefits, in an era of threat from greenhouse gases.

By all means mount a challenge to environmentalism – that’s why I came. You insinuate I’m cheesed off because I disagreed – that’s not true at all. Just make the challenge a good one. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to refute anthropogenic global warming, you’ll need to fight fire with fire – i.e.scientific reporting – not ideology. I reckon I could have done better myself – and I’m an environmentalist. As well as a technologist.

In summary, the reply was “not only do I think we can understand the climate, I think we can and should aspire to *master* it”. The mastery of nature I’m comfortable with relates to our material security. I think trying to understand climate is a very good idea while people are perishing in hurricanes and flash floods. But then there’s a fork in the road. Apply this knowledge to control the climate (Spiked likes this prospect), or hone our collective responses to climate? They might be mutually exclusive. Spiked’s notion is the most straightforward – fund scientists discover and operate the levers. I think this is a very ambitious approach. I’m fearful (thanks to the likes of Spiked and George Bush, fear is a taboo emotion at the moment, but stay with me) that it’s too ambitious to place all hope in. So what about honing our response to the climate. This could take at least 2 forms – biotechs modifying crops to cope in a range of extreme conditions, or refining our logistics and markets to redistribute our food surplusses nimbly, and protect living spaces. That’s my favourite, but I suspect it’s also the most complex and challenging.

So some of us might choose to express our optimism by continuing to fly, but there’s currently no guarantee a) that profits from our fares will be channelled into research and development or b) that a solution will be found. If there were such a pledge, I would probably fly again occasionally – I’m talking once every few years.

Which brings me to my favourite panellist John Adams’ (UCL) main point, which is about happiness and contentment in life. He contests that there is such a thing as excess and that unlimited flying is more likely to jade than fulfill us. Consuming more stuff and more activities is not the path to fulfilment in developed countries. To hold this argument up against Spiked’s Nietszchian notion of heroic endeavour may seem paltry and emotional. I’d argue that Spiked, by asking us to place ourselves in the hands of a few ‘masters’ on the basis of an uncertain promise to control the climate, is happy to play fast and loose with lives.

So I’m unconvinced. I’m still not flying.