Continuing our long debate, here is another entry.
It seems to me that there are four possible long-term outcomes of the conflict between preventing climate change and travelling long distances quickly:
- We come up with a way to keep flying without doing too much climatic harm. This could be sequestration of carbon from biomass, it could be carbon neutral fuels, it could be something unanticipated.
- We come up with another transport technology that is carbon neutral and just as good or almost as good as flying, such as very high speed trains.
- We cannot reconcile long-distance high-speed travel with the need to mitigate, so we essentially stop doing it. A few people are still able to get from New York to London in a day, but it becomes out of almost everyone’s reach.
- We cannot reconcile long-distance high-speed travel with the need to mitigate, so we choose not to mitigate and wreck the planet.
How does the choice to fly look, in relation to each possibility?
- It’s not your fault you lived in the era before green flying was possible. That said, it may have been immoral to choose a mode of transport you knew to be (a) unsustainable and (b) harmful to others. It may be laudable or morally necessary to minimize flying and/or compensate for your impact by purchasing offsets.
- It’s not your fault you lived in the era before non-flight green travel was possible. That said, it may have been immoral to choose a mode of transport you knew to be (a) unsustainable and (b) harmful to others. It may be laudable or morally necessary to minimize flying and/or compensate for your impact by purchasing offsets.
- Again, you are on the hook for choosing an unsustainable option - specifically, one that had to be harshly curtailed in the future. Of course, if you are (a) selfish and (b) desirous of seeing the world, the danger that flying will be either restricted or far more expensive in the future creates an incentive to do a lot of it now.
- Flying was hardly a laudable thing to do, but it probably didn’t affect the outcome. Once we get into a runway climate change situation, it doesn’t matter much whether emissions in year X were Y megatonnes or 1.5Y megatonnes.
The larger question of whether future outcomes affects the morality of present decisions must also be contemplated. It does seem a bit odd to say that an action in 2007 was right or wrong as a consequence of technologies developed later. This post really cannot provide any answers to these questions - though my position remains that virtually all flying taking place at present is immoral - but perhaps it will provide a new way to consider things.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
The basic problem with the way you approach this problem is you act as if you personally flying somehow causes the world to be wrecked. No. Rather, everyone acting as if their personal choice doesn’t matter causes the world to be wrecked. The fallacy is to move from the intuitive absurdity of the 2nd statement to the need to believe in the truth of the first.
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.
It does seem a bit odd to say that an action in 2007 was right or wrong as a consequence of technologies developed later.
Quite right. This post serves no purpose.
Whoa…
“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…
“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 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.
Will Greener Planes Fly?
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
So how bad is aviation for the planet? The show, Does Flying Cost the Earth?, starts by highlighting the importance of perspective in addressing this question. Three pie charts present the case. Concerned that your carbon consumption is out of control? Then worry about air travel: taking about two flights a year costs the average Briton 12 per cent of her individual carbon pie. Or worried about how governments propose to cut national and global emissions? Planes spew 6 per cent of the UK’s carbon dioxide, but only 2 per cent of the world’s. By 2050, that 2 per cent is expected to creep up to about 3 per cent.
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.
Samuel Johnson
“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.”
AskMetafilter
“If you believe in climate change, is it wrong to drive or fly?”
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?
First, no matter what data you use, two very simple variables make a big difference: how far you travel and how many passengers are in your vehicle. Air travel is much maligned as a source of CO2 emissions, and the Berkeley research confirms that airplanes do emit more than trains or buses per passenger mile. But the differences aren’t as large as you think, and the real reason air travel contributes so much to our collective carbon footprint is that we use planes for longer trips. That’s not to say you shouldn’t go to your Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving, but if she lives across the country, any means of getting over the river and through the woods is going to have a hefty carbon footprint. Likewise, designing bus routes and train schedules that fit rider demand—along with encouraging urban development that gives transit more appeal—makes a big difference, owing to the environmental downsides of traveling alone.
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.