Secondly, you can’t discuss the environmental impact of getting around without considering the infrastructure that makes travel possible. We have a tendency to focus on the environmental impact of the things that move—the cars, trains, and planes we see getting from point A to point B. But Chester and Horvath found that in some cases, construction is the biggest polluter. Roads were responsible for more particulate matter than tailpipes, for example. For rail travel, operating the trains actually accounts for less than half of a system’s greenhouse-gas emissions. The implication: Making concrete and asphalt in a more environmentally friendly way can be just as important as getting vehicles to run more efficiently. In other words, it’s not just the road you take, but what it’s made out of, too.

If you believe climate change is real, bad, and man-made: does that mean it’s wrong to take a flight or drive a car? Are there any reasonable excuses?

“There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.”

This is where the exhibit first makes an inevitable compromise on thoroughness. Captions fail to make it clear that the pies show carbon dioxide only and omit other greenhouse gases. But partly because of those other gases and their intensified effects at high altitude, the IPCC estimated in 1999 that air travel accounted for roughly 3.5 per cent of the human-caused greenhouse effect in 1992, a figure predicted to climb to 5 per cent by 2050, though with large uncertainty. More recently, the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution suggested the 5 per cent should be revised to 6–10 per cent.

Fuel-strapped airlines need a new approach, but technological fixes are hard to find.
By Christopher Flavelle
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2008, at 2:24 PM ET

If you care about the world, or fish stocks, then why are you putting your clarity of conscience above them?

This is the ultimate problem with minimize-my-personal-harm based morality - it puts your own clarity of conscience above the solution of the problem. What if the solution to the problem can be brought about only by yourself being part of the problem?

Basically, morality based on the rightness of individual choices is totally useless here.

“Not flying re-enforces the false ideal that the world can be saved through personal consumer choice”?

Thats quite an assumption that I would argue… you have to start somewhere, and personally, to avoid being a hypocrit, it is best to start with oneself and set an example, no? It certainly would help buy-in, as many of the skeptics and deniers like to point to Al Gore’s ginormous mansion and all of the jet-setting he does… Not to mention its the premise of something like Project Porchlight, which does make a difference.

Certainly your fish example is just as absurd… Overfishing is what is causing the problems, so if you overfish and use the profits to help ban the practise, at that point its too late (if you completely deplete the stock), or at best, a worse problem than when you started. The true solution is to not overfish in the first place. The problem, which you mention, is you are only one individual, how do you get everyone to not overfish?

“Ergo, choosing not to fly is a failed moral act because it can never bring about what it claims to.”

Failed on the societal level, perhaps, but on a personal level it does exactly what it sets out to do, but ultimately that depends on your own conscience and what you deem to be “right” and “wrong”. If you can look at yourself in the mirror after flying Canada to New Zealand, then great, and if you ponder over it in guilt, then maybe you shouldn’t fly…

Quite right. This post serves no purpose.

No matter how much you don’t fly, you only make a difference insofar as one less jet flies. And even then, one less jet, this doesn’t seem like much.

What would matter is if your choice actually did convince others not to fly. It seems unlikely that more than 5 or 10 percent of the population will ever act on this kind of higher moral ground. Ergo, choosing not to fly is a failed moral act because it can never bring about what it claims to.

Put differently, the problem is treating morality as the study of how not to commit evil. It’s as absurd as choosing not to fish because overfishing is killing the cod stocks. Who would ever believe this to be an effective solution? Rather, fish as much as you can, and use the profits to lobby the state to ban fishing. Or, something else perhaps less hypocritical - but anything but choosing not to act because of some moral higher ground.

Not flying is just that - not moving, inaction. Inaction is a morality of resentment, of hatred, of “I’m better than you because of this logic”, which condemns rather than brings about solutions.

Not flying re-enforces the false ideal that the world can be saved through personal consumer choice.