The below is an extract from Spencer R Scott’s excellent essay “Climate Change Is Too Serious for Casual Flying” on Medium:
The truth is, my former self was attached to a certain type of lifestyle only sustained by the blindness to its effects. Flying is the most emissions-intensive action a private citizen can do to worsen the climate. By 2019, I had changed my diet, attended protests, rid myself of my car, grocery shopped at zero-waste stores, bought only second-hand clothes and yet flew 32,000 miles erasing several times over any emissions reductions I’d made. My boyfriend jokingly threatened to blackmail me because I received status on Southwest. An environmentalist with airline status. Like a vegetarian with a full stamp card at the local butcher. It’s truly embarrassing.
Throughout the process I was aware of the hypocrisy, but I trusted in carbon offsets to compensate for my emissions. Yet, the more I dug into offsets and the current state of our atmosphere, the more I realized offsets don’t justify the harm. Offsets are certainly better than nothing, but their exploding popularity is reminiscent of indulgences sold by the Catholic church. Offsets often provide a work-around for people and organizations to address their guilt without confronting their underlying behavior.
[…]
When I came to understand this I, like an addict, further bargained with myself. I resolved to align myself with the IPCC’s recommendation to keep warming below 1.5˚ C: humanity must half its emissions by 2030, and neutralize them by 2050. Abiding by that trend, I could fly 29,000 miles in 2020, 26,000 miles in 2021, and… the logic here started to break down.
“The question isn’t “how much can I get away with?” it is “how low can I go?””
Due to the emerging field of attribution science, whereby emissions are linked to discrete harms, I came to understand that the emissions created by the average American lifestyle throughout their life could cause the deaths of two future people. One can then imagine a single plane ride adding up to some sort of physical assault, an analogy physicist Peter Kalmus uses in his book Being the Change: “the harm it does is less immediate, but just as real”. If you found out your favorite clothing brand poisoned nearby drinking water, would you say “okay, next year I will buy 10% less of their clothing on my way to never shopping there again by 2050?” Clearly this was the wrong way to think about the problem.
Climate scientist and educator Katherine Hayhoe sums up our collective responsibility simply: limit our emissions as much as possible, as soon as possible, while limiting harm and suffering, especially to the poor and vulnerable already disproportionately suffering the impacts. The question isn’t “how much can I get away with?” it is “how low can I go?” (without causing counterproductive suffering).
And here, I finally came face to face with the plain truth I had been avoiding. Flying for non-essential reasons was no longer an activity I could enjoy. Once the blinders were removed, it became impossible for me to continue in a system I understood to be causing real harm. My dreams of an Argentinian beach-eclipse melted away.
For Spencer’s full story of his way to choosing a flight free life, continue reading here: