I was just having my, by now, annual ponder of heading somewhere warmer for a week or two now that we are into Autumn. Cheap flights to Malaga, take the bikepacking gear, that type of thing. As an aside I tried to work out how much it would cost to avoid air travel, using trains and ferries. Over £800.

Now, I know I’m not entitled to a wee trip abroad but, even discounting the travel time, it’s little wonder folk still choose to fly. Governments could apply a 100% “carbon” tax and it would still be much, much cheaper than the alternatives.

There are some interesting videos on YouTube about the cost of flying. Wendover productions is the channel.

You are right though flying is very cheap per mile.

I think they should introduce quotas bit like tax. Personal allowance “free” then increasing cost on certain thresholds. Same with car mileage.

Carbon offsetting isn’t the answer but I think planting trees is better than doing nothing.

I’m planting trees to offset CO2 for my new shoe brand.

https://treesforlife.org.uk/groves/g9181/

I’m pretty sure shoe trees have been done before Brant 😉

it’s tough.  It’s way cheaper to fly on a lot of routes (e.g. back to Edinburgh from Brussels).  I would love to take the train instead but the price is prohibitive.  As much as possible I avoid it but it isn’t always possible.  I like the idea of an ‘allowance’ as it might make companies look a bit more closely at some of the alternatives.  Unfortunately pricing is the only thing that seems to focus minds

it might make companies look a bit more closely at some of the alternatives.

Personal allowance would have to be different to business, also I think there maybe unintended consequences. E.g. just send more employees rather then one? Or it may mean for jobs like service engineers you only recruite people from outside the UK. Or again perhaps only people who will go away for 3 months at a time rather then 1 month etc.

Is there a good reason for not taxing aviation fuel?

The 2 answers that come around when talking climate change are, stop doing it, or tax the shit out of it.

Neither of those are a solution.

Planting trees isn’t going to solve anything. Growing trees might, though.

seosamh77

Subscriber

The 2 answers that come around when talking climate change are, stop doing it, or tax the shit out of it.

Neither of those are a solution.

Exactly. The world is highly interconnected these days, and anyone suggesting that either of those options will work is economically illiterate, or actively wants to plunge us into a second Dark Age.

JP

Brant – offsetting not working, why’s that? Not looked into it yet but had thoughts along those lines for an event that many will fly to. Ta.

or actively wants to plunge us into a second Dark Age.

As with most of these positions people take the lunatic fringe is at the extremes and sense is somewhere in a middle ground, ie we don’t ban planes and cars or tax them into rich-only use but the use of them could become the exception ie we do stop the majority of use, business class is seen as an old-fashioned luxury that only the old or infirm could justify, etc. Habits and norms can change, alternatives need use and support to become more viable.

business class is seen as an old-fashioned luxury that only the old or infirm could justify, etc

That’s no way to talk about CFH!  How very dare you…

I think there’s a huge amount of business travel that could be avoided by people making better use of technology live video conferencing, remote servers etc. Trouble is senior management still has enough dinosaurs who want face to face for everything.

Politicians for example…. Why don’t they stay in their constituency and parliament can be one huge video conference, that would have the added benefit of stopping the circus act as if you’re not talking you’re on mute!

Also, the impact of flying is relatively less bad the further you’re going, as take off and landing are the worst bits. So we, government, whoever, should probably look to reduce domestic flights as much as possible… But to do that we need a much better and cheaper rail network. And rail providers should partner up with airlines so when you book a long haul flight that’s got a change in London you get the domestic journey on a train.

The catch is, to make that kind of infrastructure improvement would need a huge amount of money and would like be very energy and resource intensive to carry out. To have enough money we need decent economic growth which in our current state means using more energy and resources and creating more pollution.

You might ask.. do we really need to stop flying. If we reduced CO2 from all sources other than aviation would that be enough? Given the effort required to reduce just domestic flights maybe it would be a better use of time, money and resources to plant millions of trees to offset the CO2 from aviation?

If world governments commited to reforesting all and any unarable land, would that be enough?

I see Ireland just commited to planting 440 million trees. Good for them!

We should probably all donate to local tree planting charities.

It’s definitely possible AND pleasant to avoid the plane and still go to the alps with your bike. See issue 127 for details. https://singletrackworld.com/2019/10/singletrack-issue-127-verbier-by-train/

It’s definitely possible AND pleasant to avoid the plane and still go to the alps with your bike. See issue 127 for details. https://singletrackworld.com/2019/10/singletrack-issue-127-verbier-by-train/

I enjoyed reading that, I’d LOVE to take the train to the Alps the problem whenever I’ve tried to plan a route isn’t the London to Alps bit, that seems, on paper at least seems reasonably simple with surprisingly few changes.

It’s the getting to London bit:

It costs more to take a train to London for me, then it does to fly from my Local Airport to Geneva.

It would cost about the same for 4 of use to take a train to London as it would to drive from my house to Morzine, that’s fuel, tools AND crossing.

To actually take the train, I’d have to use the tube from Paddington to St. Pancrass, dragging a bike bag and case. Which sounds like hell.

I could drive to St. Pancras and park, but that seems pretty counter intuitive and would cost £300. I think there’s a Park and Ride in Kent, it’s about £50 a week, but it’s a 400 mile round-trip for me and at what point do you wonder whether if you’re really making much of an environmental saving.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Brit side of Eurostar was designed mostly for Travel between London and Paris.

Yes, agree. The UK public transport side of the equation is pretty dysfunctional at best. If you lived close to London then all is pretty sweet. But out in the sticks and the costs and logistics can get silly expensive.

That said, I’ve put the costings in the article and for us coming from the North of England we were surprised at how close the numbers were to flying.

Airport parking and even the fuel to drive there is often a forgotten cost.

I thought the article was good, but the costings for the flight option was a bit high. You can get from Geneva to Bike Verbier by train for a lot less than£450 return.