Travelling without planes
So, having signed up for the exciting Metageum conference in Malta this November, the question of travel arises. More specifically, how does this sit with my “no air travel unless essential” plan?
First off, why no air travel? Carbon emissions, of course. Jim Bliss, my ex-engineer friend whose head for maths makes me dizzy, on moving to Dublin last year, sat down to work out how much worse it would be if he flew to London rather than taking a coach. Turns out it’s about 31 times worse.
Merrick just did some more DIY carbon calculations, and worked out that - using aviation-friendly estimates - “every minute you’re on a plane is the same as a day’s worth of your electricity”.
If we can make our way briskly past the noxious climate change denial industry (and associated amateurs), accepting that this stuff is actually happening and that our actions have consequences, we usually come to the arguments for “tech fixes”. In many arenas, this is a fair argument - at least, it’s worth engaging with, even if you disagree with it.
Not so, unfortunately, with air travel:
… every other source of global warming can be reduced or replaced [...] without a serious reduction in our freedoms. But there is no means of sustaining long-distance, high-speed travel.
The industry claims it can reduce its emissions by means of new technological developments. But as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution points out, its targets “are clearly aspirations rather than projections”. There are some basic technological constraints which make major improvements impossible to envisage.
The singular nature of air travel in this respect means that we just have to travel less by air. Personal sacrifices in a matter like this, some may argue, are as nothing without widespread limits enforced for all. There’s a truth in that. Yet my general experience is that this argument is usually trotted out by people who (1) would be the last to support widespread enforced limitations, and (2) use it as a rationalization for totally disregarding personal morality.
The people I know who dedicate a great portion of their waking lives to campaigning for such limits also apply this sense of collective morality to their own actions. I think this is known as “integrity”. (Of course, no one’s perfect, and hypocrisy is the result of high ideals as well as a lack of integrity.)
What about offsetting? Surely if there’s no other way we can buy our way out of this one? Well, due to several important practical considerations, the short answer to that is, “No - deal with it”.
My trip to Malta may inevitably end up entailing air flight, if for no other reason than no ferry services seem to operate in November (I’m a good swimmer, but not exceptional). But it may be possible to include a pleasant jaunt through Italy as part of train travel most of the way, and discovering the best way to do this is made all the easier by this brilliant website:
The hobby site of “career railwayman” Mark Smith, it details concise and helpful information for anyone who - for whatever reason - wants to travel without flying. It’s geared towards British travellers, but does include information on travel within other countries that people originating elsewhere may find crucial. Most travel agents and other sources of information are insanely biased towards air travel, so sites like this are hugely valuable.
Mark is clearly someone who would be doing this with or without an impending climate crisis: “Many people would rather not fly, or like me, simply prefer a more civilised, comfortable, interesting, adventurous, romantic, scenic, historic, exciting and environmentally-friendly way to travel.”
Yet again, the philosophy of reduction, of intelligently scaling back some of the excesses of capitalist industrialism, is often more than it appears when forced through the growth- and speed-fixated filters of consumer economics. Frequently painted as a passé form of hippy “hair-shirt” self-mortification, reduction is often the path of choice for the true sensualist.
The fact that this philosophy’s most famed branch, the Slow Food movement, itself began in Italy as a reaction to fast food makes me even more inspired to take my time getting to Malta. See if I can find the perfect Pizza Napoletana…
Why not just admit to yourself that you want your cake and want to eat it? Obviously you value a megalith conference in Malta more highly than your views on climate change. Honestly, I feel like punching people who beat themselves up over this, just to save them the trouble. Be a planetary bastard and proud of it!
Joel - 30th May 2007 @ 0:38
Ah, for a mind cast in black-and-white!
Really, your punch would be a waste of energy cos I’m losing no sleep over this. And generally that’s because I’ve spent a little time while awake to think the shit through and find a good balance between moral ideals and day-to-day life. Rocket science it ain’t (though it helps when you’ve got trusted friends bothered to do the CO2 maths).
Anyway, I thought you’d be the train-across-the-continent, catch some good Italian cuisine along the way kind of guy. You never struck me as the get-there-quick-or-else type. I guess you might go by plane, though, just to annoy anyone who thinks that personal responsibility counts for anything… More wasted energy, though (in more ways than one).
Gyrus - 30th May 2007 @ 0:56
I never said I was averse to the train. I wasn’t expressing a preference for the plane. I wasn’t even talking about personal responsibility. I was talking about being true to what you believe and not fudging the issue to serve another master, since it’s only yourself you’re fooling, no-one else. Is this so hard to understand? If you want to go to Malta to look at rocks because the rocks down the road aren’t good enough for you, just go and forget paying lip-service to “responsibility”, because if you really cared one way or the other about the damage your journey would cause you simply wouldn’t go. I don’t give a damn what people do, but I don’t like to see intelligent people lying to themselves. I’d much prefer if the global warming issue was dropped as the trivial distraction it is, and instead some serious thought was given to the collision course our planet is inevitably on.
Joel - 30th May 2007 @ 5:20
I (polemically) assumed you were averse to the train ride because I couldn’t otherwise see why you saw my decision to take it as “beating myself up”! You seemed to miss the whole point of the post: the climate change position (whether you agree with it or not) and the pleasure-seeking position coincide.
As for your understanding of why I’m making this decision… well, it’s your understanding is the best place to leave it I guess.
I’m with you on the serious thought about planetary collapse (as you know). But in the end I can’t help but recognize that only fools think they know for certain what the future holds - which to me means acting now in a way you think will contribute to a better future, even though that future (like the planetary collapse one) isn’t certain. Is that so hard to understand?
I also don’t think things like this are clear, mutually exclusive choices between distinct “issues”, some of which are a distraction next to “the important one”. They’re all hopelessly intertwined. Every which way you look, increasing aviation is a bad idea, though. And I don’t see the choice as being either to hole up and be a self-mortifying puritan or to buy the Daily Mail and say, “Fuck it!”
Anyway, talking of wasting energy…
Gyrus - 30th May 2007 @ 11:54
Well, as you say, it’s all “hopelessly intertwined”, hopelessly being the operative word. It may be foolish to think you know the future, good point there, even for one who has invested his time reading oracles, but it is even more foolish to think that we ants are affecting anything at all. It is all a glorious projection of meaning.
But that’s what we do. Real ants move bits of dead leaf from A to B and keep the aphids down. We ants move a few thoughts from one place to another and imagine we are masters of the Earth’s fate. Whether with our deforestation or our late-on recycling, it is only part of this illusion to imagine we have any impact whatsoever. The best we could do after all these millennia of evolution is probably to jettison little vials of our DNA out into deep space, out of danger of the Earth being no more. Like the gigantic fruiting body we are, we should ripen and disperse into space and the singularity that awaits us. We are spores of something greater, never have been anything else.
I am generally in favour of the idea that it should amount to something, this experiment or accident. As for the rest, it’s not noble it’s mostly just posturing.
Joel - 30th May 2007 @ 13:53
I’m just an dyed-in-the-wool multi-perspective type. I know it looks like hard work to anyone who prefers to find a perspective and stick to it, but it’s like breathing for me. My hard work is usually fighting the idea that I need to find a perspective and stick to it…
That is to say, I totally appreciate the wide-angle view you’ve described so well. It’s great that people like John Gray are reminding our progress-obsessed Christian-hangover tech culture that in the end we are “as straw dogs”. I’ve little truck with people who take action against climate change as some straw to hang on to to save their illusions about our supposed mastery over nature.
As ever, all we’re doing is trying to adapt. I just don’t go for the idea that the fact that we lose in the end means we shouldn’t try hard to adapt and thrive (qualitatively, not necessarily quantitatively). We all die in the end, but it’s no argument for topping yourself (at least, not on a good day ;-).
Bringing all our options to the table, seeing that it’s all futile and acting well anyway, the perception of futility as the ground for acting well - that’s my position. On a good day.
Gyrus - 30th May 2007 @ 14:33
Yes, we each do our bit, every ant has its purpose. Perhaps the ant we crush in the bathroom, afraid it is the advance scout of a future infestation, had the job of making us feel guilty so we would reappraise our attitudes towards insect life. I don’t think any butterfly I thoughtlessly gassed as a child died in vain, all three of them before I decided it was cruel hobby.
I think the knack is knowing what our real job is in the scheme of things. To me, endless worrying over the tiny ripples we make in moving through the world is truly futile. Do it or don’t do it, but don’t get embroiled in these side-issues. A certain smugness in putting all one’s wine bottles in the recycling bin holds off for another day real thought about who we are and why we are here.
Probably humanity’s greatest achievement was getting off the ground and into the air, and from there to space. That’s where our destiny lies, in space. If we destroy the planet to send our DNA out into the universe then I expect we will have done our job. We have nature to thank for the template. It’s only like a plant withers and dies once it has spread its seeds. We should just shut up and let it happen, before we no longer have the resources to escape the Earth or before a huge meteorite hits us. That is the only seriousness about this adventure. We are already fossils in rocks. What’s important is the new seed. I for one have found it a joyful thing each evening for the past few weeks to see the International Space Station burning brightly as the sun sets. Have you been watching it? This is what we are about.
Joel - 30th May 2007 @ 16:06
We’ll have to agree to differ on the “endless worrying” bit. I give some consideration to these things and act accordingly. It’s not zero effort, but it’s quite distinct from being in a perpetual tizz (at least it should be). Again, I don’t see it as an either/or choice between smug environmentalism and stepping back to see the wider picture. For me, doing the latter prevents the smug part of the former.
I agree about about space (though obviously not enough to have been keeping up on the ISS - must look out for it!). My darker wide-view is that fossil fuels were life’s ticket to go there - and we’ve pretty much blown it. We’ve traded a Martian stepping stone to the stars for suburbs, endless toing-and-froing, and an oil-guzzling military system with which to kill each other over the last scraps of the oil we’ve wasted.
Ants… We do seem more like a social insect (or virus) than monkeys. A great book I just read quotes Lewis Thomas as saying ants are “so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies for wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse their enemies, capture slaves. … They do everything but watch television.” And their intelligent selflessness sometimes puts most of us to shame! Maybe we should ditch TV?
Gyrus - 30th May 2007 @ 16:29