Appetite is outpacing
The trouble is that individual abstinence won’t make any difference.
…for a small, yet growing, number of travelers, the problem with air travel goes way further. They are giving up flying because of its impact on the climate.
“I choose to stay grounded because it aligns with what is true,” said Dan Castrigano, 36, a former teacher who in 2020 signed a pledge not to travel by air. “The climate is breaking down.”
The last eight years on earth have been the hottest on record. Sea level rise is accelerating, and extreme weather events are happening more often than ever.
And a tiny fraction of the population deciding not to fly won’t make a dent in that. What might make a dent (if it’s not too late, which it probably is) would be to shut down flying altogether. That’s not going to happen. We can’t do what needs to be done, so everyone is screwed.
Air travel accounts for about 4 percent of human-induced global warming, and the United Nations warns that airplane emissions are set to triple by 2050. Planes are becoming more efficient, but our appetite for air travel is outpacing the industry’s environmental gains.
And appetite overrules information about airplane emissions and global warming. Appetite wins every time, until everyone explodes.
“A lot of people think that what you do as an individual doesn’t matter much. But the thing is, what we do as individuals affects everyone around us, and changes norms,” said Maja Rosén, 41, the president of We Stay on the Ground, who gave up flying in 2008. Ms. Rosén, who lives in Sweden, now travels primarily by train.
True, it does, but not enough.
The drawback of flying is that the energy density of batteries for electric jet engines is not currently sufficient to provide enough power to fly. We’re not going to stop flying, we have to engineer our way out of this.
And the problem with not flying is the long time mobility of our species. My son lives half a continent away. While I am working, visiting him means flying, because I can’t take the time for a train (though when I visit him in the summer, I use Amtrak).
Once I retire, that shouldn’t be as big a problem, but the fast pace of our society, one that anyone who wants to survive by making enough money to eat is expected to adhere to, makes not-flying impossible in some situations.
Zoom helps, but for some reason, a lot of people don’t want to use Zoom. I understand, because I have held many meetings over Zoom and there are some things missing. I can’t imagine trying to run a worldwide summit by that method. It’s very difficult to get the sort of sympathetic hearing; everyone shuts down. My students would tend to keep it on and go somewhere else during class, so the attendance was marked but they weren’t there. Since things are recorded, people believe their presence is not required, I started making them leave their camera on; all I ever saw was their ceiling, because they would put their phone on the table.
I think Mike is right. We’re not going to stop flying…until we reach the point where we can’t fly any longer, whether it is economical, climate induced, or just the total collapse of systems (from environmental damage, much of which is not climate change, and most of which is being ignored right now. How many people are paying attention to the decline of flying insects, for instance? That is crucial…but people ONLY want to talk about climate change).
And we’re lucky if people are even willing to talk about that. Climate change is but a small part of the complex of interlinked, cascading disasters we’ve initiated and continue to fuel. These are themselves the result of a series of stepwise historical developments and processes that have combined to increase our numbers and our impact. Not all of them are immediately material; some are philosophical and conceptual shifts that gave licence to pathways that other mental frameworks may have prohibited. Any of them on their own would have been a major change, but their concatenation has produced a potent force for destruction. In roughly chronological order, some of the big ones are:
The development of settled agriculture: This was an assertion of, and commitment to the imposition of human monopoly over the productive capacity of a landscape, replacing a pre-existing, dynamic habitat with a limited , impoverished one intended solely for human use and benefit. This shift in attitude presages and underlines much of what followed.
The development of colonial empires: Us and Them on a large scale, where hinterlands are conquered for the benefit of the centre or homeland of the conquerors. Control is imposed and resources are extracted.
The “discovery” of the “New World”: This came in two phases, separated by tens of thousands of years. The first humans to arrive in North and South America from Eurasia most likely triggered (or at least assured) the extinction of the Ice Age megafauna, who were, unfortunately, lethally naive when it came to the new, human predators. The second wave, from the Vikings onward, resulted in the devastation of the indigenous societies that had evolved in the preceding millennia. The disease caused human catastrophe was probably inevitable, given the introduction of diseases to which North and South American peoples had no immunity. Even if Europeans had been completely benign and altruistic in their intentions, any contact at all would have still been devastating. The rapacious greed and territorial ambitions of the colonial powers made things that much worse, actively destroying many of the societies already weakened by rampant disease and its attendant disorder and chaos.
The rest of the big turning points I’ll list more quickly.
The exploitation of fossil fuels and the development industrial production methods.
Medicine, public health and the reduction of childhood mortality.
For the last five hundred years the synergistic acceleration of our technology has allowed us to exploit and appropriate more and more of the living and non-living Earth for our exclusive use. Even if we “cure” global warming, we’ll still be an out of control global society pushing beyond the natural limits that the planet had established over billions of years. We’re like some sort of collective Wile E. Coyote, just after he’s careened off the edge of the cliff, obliviously sailing along until he happens to look down. Some of us have been looking down for some time. Soon to come, the inevitable cloud of dust as we hit the canyon floor.
And some of these were good…for humans…but didn’t lead to much of a change in our thinking. Human numbers increased rapidly following the industrial revolution, and led to increased disaster, especially since so much was fueled with coal initially.
Now we seem incapable of recognizing most of the issues. In fact, the vast majority of suggestions to deal with global warming are inherently problematic to the ecosystem. They are proposed with only humans in sight, trying to ensure we can maintain our ‘lifestyles’ without undue sacrifice. Many of them will continue, maybe even accelerate, species extinctions and destruction of the systems we all depend on.
Many humans don’t think it matters. What did the snail darter ever do for us? The thing is, we don’t even know all the species we rely on for our existence, and one of these days we’ll dismiss one that will be catastrophic for us as it sets up a domino effect that will reverberate all over the human population. You can remove one screw from an airplane wing without problem. If you continue removing them, the plane eventually will lose the wing.
This is the argument I use for people who are too anthropocentric to bother giving a flying fuck about other species. Unfortunately, most of them shrug and assume ‘science’ will fix it – by which they mean, engineers. If ecologists don’t understand ecosystems, how the hell can we expect engineers to?
RIght – there isn’t going to be any free lunch on anything we try to do now.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Appetite is […]
We can always terraform Mars. I’ve watched enough Star Trek episodes to know how easy that is.
There are so many dominoes falling that who would ever see it coming? We’ve disrupted so much and so many of the Earth’s systems that there’s been no chance for healing or recovery. I wouldn’t doubt that North America was still readjusting to the loss of mammoths, lions, and ground sloths when European humans showed up to interrupt the process further. The continent is still rebounding from its release from the weight of ice from the last glaciation; the community of living beings has had no chance to rebound or recover because we haven’t yet stopped our own churning rampage. The burden is still there, without the equivalent of a biological isostatic rebound to commence. There has been no respite or pause within which recovery could possibly occur. It’s more like the biota has been beset with a series of severe illnesses in quick succession with no chance to get through any of them before the next one hits. Deforestation; agriculture; urbanization; desertification; pollution; erosion; resource extraction, climate change, extinctions. One thing after another. There’s no going back, but what lays ahead?
I recall coming across the rivets-in-the-airplane analogy in a book by Paul Ehrlich. I know that no analogy is perfect, and the airplane parallel is an attention getter for a species so wedded to its technology. I used to deploy it myself on occasion. But screws or rivets (if made correctly) are manufactured, identical, and replaceable; species are none of those things. Each is a product of billions of years of evolution and biogeographic accident, that, wondrously, live, grow, and work, together to create a functioning biosphere. If Lovelock’s Gaia does not exist, then life on Earth is doing a damn good job of mimicking her. It’s going to be a long time, if ever, before the robot Maria in Lang’s Metropolis will be ready to fill Gaia’s shoes. And humans aren’t just along for the on this allegorical flight; we are more than merely passengers observing through the window as things unfold. Imperfect as it might be, something a bit more visceral is in order.
A better comparison than removing rivets from a plane might be someone randomly removing cells, organs, or limbs from your body. The more you are willing to surrender, the more money you (or possibly someone else, it’s not very clear in the fine print) are paid. How much do you want or need the money? How much are you willing to risk? How much can you afford to have excised before you become ill? How much before you die altogether? Once you’ve said yes to anything, and the cutting begins, can you afford to ask yourself “Is it worth it?” The farther you go, the harder it is to admit it was all a horrible mistake. Even worse is to have it done to you without you ever having said yes. Like it or not, we’re all in on this auto-cannibalistic, omnicidal Ponzi scheme.
The question we’re not asking ourselves is “What are you trying to save?” The wrong answer is going result in untold death and misery for billions of beings. The right answer we result in somewhat less death and misery. We’re past the point where any way forward is painless and cost free. Mike Haubrich is right; there is no free lunch on the menu, and we’ll be paying plenty whether we order anything or not. So will the rest of life on the planet. I’m in the process of reading Michael Mann’s The New Climate Wars: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. I know that we have to start from where we are with the tools at our disposal, and that Mann is writing for activists trying to create change and win the support needed to do so, but it seems that he’s suggesting this can be done while saving more of our current way of doing things than is wise or healthy. I haven’t finished it yet, so he may yet pull a panda out of the hat. I guess I’d be writing a different book….
Derek Jensen uses a slightly different airplane analogy. Civilization is murdering the planet. Our choice is to try to crash civilization before it finishes the job. The question becomes how we do this in a timely fashion that leaves enough of Life remaining to allow sufficient healing and recovery for the whole to continue. The trip will end in flaming wreckage in any event. It’s a stark choice, but we are in dire times where all of our choices are stark, because we failed to make better choices when we had the chance. We can’t have our Earth and eat it too. Civilization is not worth the whole world, but it might well be the price we’ll pay.
Enjoy your flight.
YNnB, the first time I heard that analogy (before I read Erlich), the person making the analogy specified the plane was in flight, meaning it wouldn’t be possible to replace the screws until they landed. I think it’s a better analogy that way. We are in flight on the Earth around a blazing hot ball of fire, and we are doing what we can to destroy the planet we depend on. Earlier generations (way earlier) could at least use the excuse that they didn’t know. We are long past that. Now there is no excuse, not even a weak one.