Flying Less is Critical to a Safe Climate Future
Kimberly Nicholas and Seth Wynes
Air travel is extremely damaging to the climate. If aviation continues to fall behind other sectors in necessary emissions reductions, international air travel alone may account for 22% of global CO2 emissions by 2050. For individuals, flying is a disproportionately high-emitting activity (e.g., one roundtrip flight New York-London emits as much as two years of eating meat). For wealthy individuals, flying can constitute half of their carbon footprint; more for frequent flyers. Meeting climate goals will require less flying, especially from frequent flyers.
The policy challenge is that business-as-usual plans from the aviation industry extrapolate continued growth in aviation demand, without any plans to reduce absolute emissions. There are no viable technological solutions to decarbonize aviation at scale in the next decade, during which time global emissions must be halved (or more) on their way to net zero to avoid warming above 1.5°C, as the Green New Deal notes.
Air travel also shows how a small minority disproportionately accounts for most of the pollution: only half of all Americans flew in 2015, and less than 20% flew more than twice per year. Flights are currently artificially cheap because they are subsidized, incentivizing more travel.
Thus, the Green New Deal needs to reduce air travel to address both climate damages and economic inequality. Top-down policies to reduce flying and support zero-carbon forms of travel, combined with bottom-up personal behavior change and social movements to change the culture of high-polluting mobility, offer a way forward.
Technological Change Alone is Insufficient
Aviation is a difficult sector to decarbonize, and technological improvements are not expected to provide substantial near-term emissions reductions. Electrification is less promising for aviation than for land transport, since electric aircraft are projected to be limited in range. Biofuels risk competing for land use with other priorities like food production and biodiversity conservation.
Meanwhile, emissions reductions are urgently needed. A recent study showed that, to limit warming to 1.5°C, per-capita lifestyle emissions should be 2.5 tons/year by 2030. Our peer-reviewed analysis showed a single roundtrip flight (e.g., New York-London) would consume two-thirds of that annual budget.
Lessons from Sweden and the European Union to reduce flying
There is a rapidly growing social movement to reduce or avoid flying. Early adopters include scientists around the world, and a wide range of journalists, celebrities, citizens, and youth in Sweden, where the flight-free movement (in addition to a recently introduced flight tax) is having profound political and economic impacts, including revitalizing train travel and infrastructure investments. The movement is also sparking cultural change, highlighting new narratives and role models to counter the view of high-emissions travel as an inevitable part of the good life.
While current Green New Deal policy proposals focus on the “carrot” of building clean infrastructure such as high-speed rail networks, which could substitute for many trips by air, this needs to be accompanied by ”sticks” to make air travel prices reflect their true climate cost. One example is ending the aviation fuel tax exemption; there is currently a citizen’s petition to do this in the European Union.
A recent study found that the majority of Swedish citizens supported flight taxes and preferred them to voluntary offsets to avoid free rider problems, especially if revenues were earmarked for clean transport options. Taxes can both directly reduce demand by making high-emitting behaviors more expensive, as well as contribute to changing norms around their social acceptability.
Policy Options to Reduce Flying
Alternatively, a frequent flyer levy (with sharply increasing prices after the first flight per year) is perceived as fairer and receives more public support in international polling than tax options. However, frequent flyers were less willing to pay a flight tax; this group could be vocal in their opposition of such a tax.
National policies can also encourage local mitigation efforts tailored to specific regions and communities. Klimatklivet is a Swedish policy where the national government funds regional, local, and business programs that reduce emissions. To date, over 3,200 projects have been supported, saving 1.57 million tons of CO2e annually, at an average cost of $42/ton. The greatest emissions savings have come from transport investments such as supporting climate-smart commutes and cycling infrastructure. Such a policy would fit within the mandate of the Green New Deal by fostering economic innovation and creating locally-visible jobs and projects. Communities that benefit from these policies could offer a source of entrenched support that results in long-lasting, “sticky” policies.
A range of behavioral interventions should be tried to reduce flying at organizational and regional levels. In a recent expert perspective from which some of this post is drawn, we outline concrete suggestions, including informing travelers about the climate impact of their trips and changing the default travel mode away from flying in travel planning software (nudging); designing travel policies, supportive instructions, and digital infrastructure for reducing flying; and promoting local destinations via social modeling (e.g., media features) and local partnerships (e.g., local public transit agencies offering summer “staycation” tickets).
To reduce flying, governments should consider evidence for what works to reduce socially harmful behavior. Tobacco control best practices show that a combination of taxation, clean air laws, mass-reach communication, the cessation of pro-tobacco advertising, and well-monitored, evidence-based interventions have the best success. This implies governments should consider advertising bans or restrictions for high-emitting behaviors such as air travel, and run educational campaigns to raise awareness of the polluting costs of high-emitting behaviors, while highlighting low-emitting alternatives. Increased awareness may be important to generate public support for behavior change; public polling shows individuals who are more aware of the negative effects of air travel are more likely to support public policies to curtail it.
The challenge of reducing flying to help meet climate goals should be approached holistically, not just by providing alternatives, but also by providing motivations to adopt those alternatives. The ambitious goals of limiting planetary warming to 1.5°C requires that we reign in emissions from this runaway sector, but the Green New Deal offers the kind of visionary thinking that might make this possible.
Kimberly Nicholas is an Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, Sweden.
Seth Wynes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.