The more unpleasant or expensive it is to fly the better. It’s unsustainable etc. Let’s hope it gets worse.
Can you just confirm for the rest of us that you:
1. Have disabled the air conditioning in your car to discourage long journeys. Actually, you probably shouldn’t even be driving at all with that attitude.
2. Don’t have a gas or an oil boiler.
3. Don’t use the internet (computers use energy too).
4. Don’t eat any out-of-season food.
5. Don’t use ferries.
6. Don’t use diesel trains.
7. Don’t use any short-life medication delivered from outside the UK, and would reject it in future.
8. Don’t use mass-produced electronics.
9. Never eat meat…
10. Have a front lawn, not an off-road parking space.
I could go on but won’t. Unfortunately aviation is part of life and people will need to fly. Those of us who do the driving do it in the most economical way possible (reduced engine taxi, continuous descent profiles, reduced flap landings, taking minimum required fuel etc etc), but there’s always going to be an environmental cost. The goal is to minimise it, but I’m not convinced that never leaving cycling distance of your home town is the answer.
The quickest way to reduce air travel would be to invest in affordable train travel powered by electricity. When you can take a family of 4 to Greece for less than an off-peak advance single ticket to Skegness for one person, you’re going to have a problem.
Hello Flaperon, a response for you. Your attitude is a bit confrontational but I think I can offer you some satisfaction. Sorry for pressing your buttons.
So firstly I meet your conditions 2, 5, 6, 7 and 10.
I live in a house solely heated by fire wood gathered as a by product of already occurring forestry activity. My hot water comes from this source also.
I am a civil engineer who has worked in renewables designing and building hydro electric power schemes up to 1MW capacity. I now work as a forestry engineer - hence the access to firewood, not as easy to achieve for some, so I suggest others go for a passive house.
I don't drive much for my own purposes, just a bit of hillwalking, but don't often need to go far. Six thousand miles a year maybe? Lifelong cycle commuter (until covid made me work from home).
I do use mass produced electronics but as examples my NAD amplifier I bought in 1999, and I have only just replaced my Mesh desktop from 2007 - due to capacitors on the motherboard drying out - I keep computers and laptops going for a long time by using linux.
Guilty of liking a steak. Thinking of going veggy for my fiftieth.
Hope you're making an effort!
With all the slack Waderider is picking up I feel less guilty about my own carbon emissions. Probably averages out to normal between the pair of us. Cheers mate.
Grand, I feel pretty smug. We'll gloss over the big car and the penchant for fillet steaks.
Your attitude is a bit confrontational
Sorry. Entirely my fault - had been awake 36 hours straight and just tested positive for COVID. Again.
Hope you’re making an effort!
Yep. If you disregard the dinosaur-sized carbon footprint of my job I have an EV charged from solar, a heat pump on order, and a willingness to pick an argument with people sitting in their cars with the engine running while they play on their phone / eat their lunch / sleep.
I sometimes wonder how shit people's lives must be to have so many holiibobs at any cost. The stress of travelling/being treated like cattle was bad enough before all this. It just ain't worth it. I suspect it's all a massive keeping up with the Jones' / doing it for Insta exercise.
TBH some people do have shite lives and look forward to a week in Benidorm,where the beer is cheap and the sunshine plentiful.
It's a crappy job. Stressful, shift work, poor management, dealing with the 'general public' i.e. fekkin eejets all day. Usually minimum wage. High staff turnover so low skilled / low experience workforce.
There's certain airports that I won't use any more (Manchester being top of the list). I've found that smaller regional airports with less daily flights seem to be bearing the brunt better. Newcastle is my current favourite, and its actually closer to the family than Manchester.
Unfortunately aviation is part of life and people will need to fly.
I sometimes wonder how shit people’s lives must be to have so many holiibobs at any cost.
There are needs and there are wants. The two do rather get conflated. A lot of business and leisure travel rather blurs that line. In the business world you would hope the last couple of years many organisations have worked out who can be done without travel and the grey line has seen a bit of focus. In the leisure world I see it a bit like meat consumption - we have gone from a society that ate meat as a bit of a luxury maybe once a day or 4 or 5 times a week to an entitlement to have meat as part of the meal package 3 times a day. One foreign holiday every couple of years became annual, then it became 2 or 3 times a year. If it's not expense that drives people away from this model, it'll be inconvenience.
Flaperon's list of 10 objectives there are all pretty reasonable goals. The glaring issue with it is that it implies one would need to absolve yourself of all those sins before needing to consider your air travel 'wants' at number 11. I don't know the science well enough to rank order damage but I'm pretty doubtful air travel slots in at number 11. Does short hop air travel (say Manchester to London or London to Paris) do less damage than a diesel train equivalent?