Should scientists fly?
My response – Hell yes, if they need to. Why, I know scientists who use computers, have watched a TV, and even driven a car.
I know some that have even taken a shower.
We’re not in trouble because scientists fly to do research and attend meetings.
We are in trouble because we’ve been burning coal and oil for 200 years, and because giant corporations knew 50 years ago that this is a problem we needed to address, and they made a conscious, deliberate decision to sacrifice the next 50,000 generations of human children, as well as a good portion of the living species who share the planet with us, to maintain their wealth and power – to squeeze that last million into their bloated bank accounts.
If I thought that by not boarding a plane, I could stop the plane from flying, that would indeed make it an actual choice. Such is not the case. We live in a world where people fly, use computers, drive cars – and we need to move to carbon free technologies to power that civilization efficiently – of which there are an expanding suite of economical choices.
Sara Myhre in Scientific American:
There is a great deal of public concern about when, and where to, climate scientists fly.
“Why do you fly?” they ask us.
“Where do you fly?”
“If you think climate change is a crisis, how can you ever fly?”
“Don’t you know,” they plead, “that the single most damaging choice to the climate system an individual can make is to fly in a commercial airplane?”
Irony notwithstanding, it is indeed climate scientists who established the carbon footprint and flagged the damage done by flying. And in doing so, we (and I mean that term loosely, because of how nebulous and overlapping the fields of climate are) have characterized the true damage of hyper-consumerist and highly mobile lifestyles—lifestyles exhibited by most of us in the developed world, including myself and my friends, neighbors, family and academic community.
Indeed, the complicity of flying is held up as a Rorschach test as to whether publicly-facing climate scientists understand the moral math of climate change. The culture wants to know: Are we crisis actors pantomiming alarmism, whilst we profiteer and jet around the globe to our fancy meetings? Or are we noble ascetics who have purified and aligned our carbon footprint with our rhetoric? This dynamic—of finger-pointing, grandstanding, condemning and shaming—is an ongoing toxic hamster wheel, which further erodes and discredits the public trust in the good-faith actions of climate and earth scientists.
No other clade of experts who hold expertise on a public health and safety crisis is held to this standard. Do we demand to know from pediatricians their vaccination schedule for their own children? No, of course not. Do we interrogate oncologists about whether they have ever smoked a cigarette? No, of course not. Then, why do we feel that it is within our purview to require the flight itineraries of climate scientists?
Perhaps because it is true that commercial flying is the most damaging decision in terms of discrete carbon emissions that an average individual consumer can make. This means that “to fly or not to fly” is one of the fundamental levers that individuals can pull to reduce their personal carbon footprint. If climate scientists truly cared about bold climate action, why would they continue to fly and contradict their public advocacy? And if climate scientists want to be public messengers about the urgency of climate action, don’t they need to align their words with their public actions to demonstrate integrity?
This is the dizzying wormhole of nuance and moral crisis through which climate scientists are interrogated. We are scapegoated by the entire culture. Scapegoating, of course, is the psychological technique of transferring guilt to a weak and easy target, so that the scapegoater herself is relieved of feelings such as shame or guilt. Climate scientists are an easy target both for political bad actors who want to discredit the science and for activists hoping to reveal the moral compromises made by seemingly ineffective public leaders.
To be direct, many scientists in the field are often bamboozled and immobilized themselves, caught between the science they communicate and the middle-class familial and professional expectations of their lives. Radical action is hard, and the payoff seems to be small. Individual actors must make complicated and personal decisions. For example, how do I tell my brother that I can’t come see his new beautiful baby in California because I no longer fly for familial reasons? How do I tell the National Science Foundation that I cannot travel to attend an elite communication summer school because I will only fly once a year for work?
I become deeply concerned when we begin to dictate who can, say, fly to their mother’s deathbed. Or who can fly to Hawaii for vacation. Or who can fly to which scientific meeting and where. My concern is not because of limitations on personal freedom. Frankly, I’d like fewer personal freedoms—for example, my freedom to buy AK-47s or my freedom to buy unchecked political influence. This isn’t about personal freedom. This is about the failure to indict the true centers of decision-making and power.
Why would we ever consider climate scientists an appropriate target for our outrage and action, when multinational corporations and gutless political leaders are making out like racketeers from heating the planet? Oil companies, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have generated multi-billion-dollar profits in the first quarter of 2018 alone. Moreover, actual elected leaders are trafficking in science denialism and propaganda in public institutions, wherein the existence of snowballs discredits climate warming and rocks falling into the ocean cause sea level rise. These are the exact targets for where our public outrage and grief should land.
There are very, very bad actors in this space of climate accountability. The problem is, these actors are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet, a cabal of mediocre and violent men who gatekeep our collective action on climate. To indict them publicly and directly is to court both the reality of the political and partisan moment of our time and the implied threat of an army of corporate lawyers. It is easier, quite frankly, to point at climate scientists as dubious and self-conflicted agents of alarmism, rather than prosecute the political and economic centers of power.
This is why climate action is about moral courage. Yes, we must have the courage to align our personal actions with our understanding of the science, through decreasing and stopping our flying. But, more importantly, we must have to courage to speak truth to power, despite how this might change our public or professional standing. Climate action is one of the most fundamental social justice movements of our time. No more and no less, our choices now to act as brave stewards of planetary life, despite political realities and institutional denialism, will change the trajectory of the planet forever. It is worth it.
‘To fly or not to fly’ is symptomatic of our dilemma. If we can’t give up flying, what chance have we of giving up other ‘rights’ we enjoy? (Such as the ‘right’ to have as many children as we wish to, another toxic subject.)
I myself have stopped flying* to conferences (e.g., skepticism, atheism) for my personal amusement for that very reason, and praise road shows like The Unholy Trinity for bringing the speakers to the audiences, but there is great educational value for professionals to gather to learn and share information and ideas.
________
*I still fly to visit family multiple times a year, and consider that my biggest carbon expenditure.
Occasionally economists come up with some good concepts. Marginal cost seems a good one here–I am assuming it is was originated in economic.
I have no problem with people avoiding flying as much as possible but just what is the marginal cost in terms of emissions for one climate scientist to fly somewhere?
There seems to be over 4 billion passenger flights a year. Unless every plane flies with 100% occupancy before the scientist books a ticket there is essentially no marginal cost.
The extremely minimal cost (in emissions) of adding one flyer is not enough to rationalize a climate scientist not flying in professional business when that business may enable the scientist to better fight global warming.
It seems you haven’t done the math on this. What’s the point of uninformed speculation?
There certainly is a marginal cost, especially since many flights aren’t filled to capacity, and it’s much larger for first class flight. How does it compare–mathematically–to filling up a bus or train? (I not-so-uninformedly speculate the ecological cost there is much less.)
But of course there are 2 larger questions, 1 that Peter hints at but doesn’t make explicit, and 1 he doesn’t mention. 1 is about whether we should focus on personal changes or realize that those won’t make even .1% of the difference we need, so we need to focus on political change that will bring all of society’s impact down to sustainable levels. The other is that whatever the improvements in impact of flying, the best ground transportation is better, and flying of whatever type is going to be elitist and both reveal and exacerbate inequality we can’t afford any more.
You can read more details in the article and discussion here: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/life-after-oil/how-far-can-we-get-without-flying-20160211
There certainly is a marginal cost, especially since many flights aren’t filled to capacity
Since that was my point, I do not understand your objection but I may be misinterpreting “marginal cost”.
I’d much rather talk about useful things like taking power away from those who spread the conservative frame of individualism, competition and objectification. But I realize to get there we have to talk about this so people realize how relatively unimportant it is to talk about this.
I don’t think you were misinterpreting marginal cost. I take it as the increase in emissions that each additional passenger causes a flight because the plane’s weight increases when s/he boards. I do now suggest your logic is off, though I said nothing explicit about it before.
You: “Unless every plane flies with 100% occupancy before the scientist books a ticket there is essentially no marginal cost.”
Maybe I’m misinterpreting your comment, but here’s my take.
If every plane were 100% booked the scientist either couldn’t buy a ticket or couldn’t use it, so there’s no point in comparing that to anything. So the first part of the sentence is meaningless. That leaves only the second part, which is not true. Whatever the occupancy, an extra scientist flying adds weight to the plane and thus makes it use more fuel. Obviously not much more compared to the plane’s total, unless it’s a very small plane and a very large scientist with very heavy baggage (actual baggage. Emotional baggage has zero marginal fuel cost). And the fuller the plane, the less proportional marginal cost each scientist constitutes, however, the absolute amount remains the same. That puts us in the dilemma of wanting full planes, which cause airlines to schedule more flights which we want full to reduce the waste, which causes more flights… and so on. There is no single, instant point at which we go from 100% occupancy to 0% so we get the maximum use. Airlines use pricing systems to fill planes but that causes more people to fly, the exact opposite of the direction we need to be moving. In any case, there is both an emissions and opportunity cost, whether flights are full or not. That cost is much lower on a bus or train….was my point.
The opportunity cost occurs to me because a person’s impact is virtually always directly related to income. No matter how green someone thinks they are (usually very small marginal improvements–recycling, a few degrees difference in house temp., hybrid vehicle, etc.) income and wealth determine our individual ecological impact. If you spend your money on flying you’re not spending it and your vacation on cooperatively turning your neighborhood into an edible forest garden or raising quail for eggs and angora rabbits for wool in your apartment, eg. Those things, by the way, are likely to return the investment many fold over time, which raises income which increases the damage you can do… (Multipliers have to be considered, too. Where is your investment money?)
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/1/16718844/green-consumers-climate-change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ
While we may want to make the personal changes to experiment, demonstrate, inform, inspire, and avoid having to get angry about the too-familiar conservative troll tu quoque accusation…
In the end, the one thing to remember from any of this is this:
It doesn’t matter what personal lifestyle changes we make IF we don’t also take power to change politics and economics so everyone lives a drastically lower impact way of life.
Let simply go back to living like a peasant of the middle ages and before for all you folks who want to save the world. The lord and masters like Obama and Hillary need to fly to go to their homes in the warm climes and to Paris for the night life and restaurants, the rest of the world should live in mud thatch huts if lucky and kiss their sacred feet before the lords and masters get in their vehicles to drive to the airport. That is the twist of this post.
CO2 increases do warm the world, how much is in dispute. MODTRAN shows the increase from 1600 to today from increased CO2 is 1/3 of a degree Fahrenheit which is far below other warming forcing like changes in solar output and changes in earths tilt and orbit.
Not to rain on anybody parade of righteous hypocrisy but if the little ice age and the medieval warm period to say nothing of the ending of the last ice age occurred without much change in CO2, perhaps CO2 is not much of a force multiplier of solar energy.
Our actual problem and it is real, is the exploding number of humans on this planet. You cannot increase forever the number of rats in a box and you cannot do the same with humans.
Setting aside your arrogant dismissal of the scientific consensus, not knowing for sure how much CO2 increases temperature doesn’t justify not acting to reduce emissions. Best estimates differ, but most of the risk lies with the higher estimates- unless we know they’re wrong (and we don’t know that) we’re gambling with the future of civilisation. And those costs (even discounted by a probability distribution) make it clear that serious and rapid action is the rational response. If you want to invent excuses for not taking action, you’ve got to do a lot better than this.
The working humane and ethical and honorable solution to the population problem has been known for many decades.
Empower women, educate and enable worthwhile careers, allow them control of their own bodies and access to family planning in all it’s forms.
There will be some that wish to remain baby factories, but evidence shows the majority will choose to have fewer babies. We see that in the developed progressive countries, the birthrate falls and immigration is pursued as an interim measure as productive life span increases to maintain a worker and tax base and consumer base.
However on your side of the fence that is blasphemy and not to be countenanced, Preferable to just slaughter “the others”
Ted: I just tried to reproduce your results in MODTRAN and was unable to. If I increase CO2 from 280 to 400ppm I need to increase temperature by 0.4 C, i.e. 0.7 F using a tropical atmosphere to bring the outgoing radiation back into balance.
However that ignores the water vapor feedback. If we include that in MODTRAN by holding the relative humidity fixed then the temperature change is more like 0.6 C or 1 F.
Could you clarify exactly what calculation you have done?
Our problem is the outrageously outsized impact of the very few very rich, and those on a curve approaching it. The richest 7-10% emit half of human greenhouse gases but that group is not growing through birth. The poorest 6 billion emit only about 20% of the GHGs and only among the poorest part of that group of poor is there any significant growth in numbers. Only among those who have essentially no effect on climate or any other global ecological problem is there growth in numbers. The climate crisis is being caused by rich people.
And growth rates are slowing; by 2050 our numbers are expected to peak and then decline, but because of the rising death rate from climate catastrophe it will almost certainly be sooner and fewer than expected. The lie about “exploding numbers” is being used to scapegoat those poor people of color who aren’t causing this problem, while it excuses those who are causing it and lets them continue destroying civilization and the biosphere with impunity.
If you have 4 things–a roof, a bed, food in a refrigerator and clothes in a closet–you have more than 85% of people on Earth have. So everyone posting here is very likely in the richest 10% of people on Earth; many are richer.
The lives of the rich have to be changed and it won’t be by personal choice; it has to be political change to build clean safe renewable energy, reforest and regrassland the planet and transform chemical industrial agriculture into small-scale low-meat organic permaculture. We need to do this under the umbrella of a global emergency climate mobilization, nationalizing fossil fuel, agrochemical corporations and banks and dismantling them as we build useful replacements. We need to build high speed rail and other rail networks that hook into freight and commuter hubs of light rail, buses, jitneys and other public transport. We may need to prohibit flying, and owning personal transport if those don’t happen naturally. We need to reduce meat eating through taxes, price regulation, rationing and other means, and move forward on a hundred other tasks through whatever peaceful means are needed.
1) CO2 emissions from air travel are just 2.5% of total emissions
2) Jetfuel could be produced via the Sabatier ( http://volewica.blogspot.com/2015/01/storage.html) and Fischer-Tropf processes (or cheaper more efficient processes such as this one: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410611/natural-gas-to-gasoline/.) It would be expensive because of the energy loss when water is electrolysed, but it’s perfectly feasible to have jetfuel which is made via wind or solar power. Raising the price of air tickets because the fuel has become more expensive is prolly a good thing–though not for airlines. So perhaps we could phase it in slowly: 5% ‘green’ jetfuel this year, 10% next year and so on.
3) The biggest emitters of CO2 are electricity generation and land transport (60%-ish in total) We should work hard to reduce these emissions because that would have a much bigger effect than even halving the emissions from air travel.
4) Stop eating meat and cheese. This would have a far bigger impact than stopping flying.
5) My 5 kW of roof solar panels produce twice as much electricity as I use. That extra green electricity is offsetting my occasional usage of air travel. And I would be happy to pay twice as much for my air ticket if the jetfuel were carbon-neutral.
“4) Stop eating meat and cheese. This would have a far bigger impact than stopping flying.”
Oy. Stop eating vegetables. Vegetable farming in the U.S. is responsible for more GHG emissions than livestock farming.
Eat only meat and cheese and you will reduce GHG emissions by an amount double that of flying.
And you bean eaters with all your methane emissions should be the most ashamed of all.
Sigh.
Sigh back atcha.
A well-planned vegetarian diet will reduce emissions from the typical USer’e meat-fish-cheese-egg-centered diet. For most people, even the best meat centered diet they can reasonably and sustainably get (along with everyone else) will be worse than the best low-meat or vegetarian diet.
Just some of the things not considered that should be:
Like a lot of transported stuff, meat not grown in the US is not included in some studies as impacts by USers.
We don’t eat lettuce for calories; it has almost none. So comparing its emissions/calorie to other foods is silly–and manipulative. What it does have is fiber, vitamins, phyto-nutrients, although it’s a lot lower in everything except water than most fruits and vegetables and that’s kind of a dumb way to store or transport water, so it’s kind of a dumb thing to be eating a lot of. Comparing any 2 items by emissions per weight or per calorie can give some information; it can also be wildly misleading when not considered in the context of a healthy, ecological diet. When SAD people in the US change to good plant-centered diets, their emissions decrease.
By far the healthiest diet for both people and planet is a plant-centered diet grown organically in uncontaminated soil onsite or within easy walking or bicycling distance, with small numbers of animals used in service of the plant production and producing small amounts of eggs and milk, and even smaller amounts of meat–often one meal per month per person. (And small amounts of other products). And to head off the usual pickpickpick of dishonest trolls using made up straw person broccolishit arguments to beat each other with, yes, of course some people can’t grow their own, some need more meat, blah blah etc. etc.. Let’s be intelligent and civil about this and besides allowing the best diet for everyone, let’s allow the best argument for everyone.
Part of this disagreement is unnatural personal attachment to inappropriate things but a lot is (also in the context of unnatural personal attachment to inappropriate things) short-sighted, selfish industry propaganda, the inevitable result of the Wetiko-infection addiction to more, and the resulting delusion of scarcity that leads to competition over the bountiful biosphere. We have to take a healthier, longer view. If we insist on diets inappropriate to our eco-region or designed to indulge a few rather than feed many, we’ll reduce the chances of civilization’s survival. If we expand that system we’ll doom ourselves. We’re already pushing every boundary there is, let’s not push both diet and flying into unhealthy and unsustainable levels of greenhouse gases for the sake of undeserving narcissists, especially while we’re pushing concrete and steel, shipping, even electrical generation, beyond safe levels into destruction for the sake of undeserving narcissists.
You need to stop attaching moral judgements to what other people eat. There is nothing morally wrong with eating meat or cheese. You don’t want to eat them? Fine. But to go on and say that meat eaters have a “Wetiko-infection addiction”? You have lost the plot.
When I said that vegetable farming generates more GHG than the entire livestock industry (which includes beef, dairy, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys, etc) I wasn’t blowing smoke. Those numbers come straight from the FDA.
Now, the U.S. is incredibly efficient at raising livestock. All those “big factory farms” that people love to rail against? They are way more efficient, on a GHG emission basis, than small family farms. And U.S. farms are way more efficient, small and large, than subsistence farmers.
It is subsistence farming that generates gigantic GHG emissions relative to output, largely because the numbers include the burning of forests to make agricultural land.
There are, it seems, a thousand articles on the evils of meat where the authors constantly confuse and misappropriate the statistics of subsistence farmers and those in the U.S. It’s a fracking joke to read these screeds when you know what the numbers actually are and see them misapplied.
The despicable movie Cowspiracy, for example, lies and distorts like crazy. It takes a lot of its statistics from a report by the UN – the FAO report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow”. They use it to criticize the meat industry in the U.S.
Here is the kicker: That FAO report (yes, which has its own flaws) was written by scientists who were definitely NOT criticizing the U.S. meat industry – they actually were recommending its efficiencies as a model for the rest of the world.
Is there room for improvement in the U.S. agricultural and livestock industries? Yes, there is. And when we electrify our transportation system, and figure out a way to make fertilizers without large GHG emissions, we will see the emissions of the food industry go way way down.
But, if you live in the 1st world right now, eating meat, milk, and cheese is not the unethical act you are trying to paint it to be. Most, if not all, of the carbon of a cow comes from CO2 scrubbed out of the atmosphere by grass or another plant. They are formed from water, air , and sunlight. Beef cows in the U.S. graze on grasslands mostly unsuitable for raising crops besides grass. Those grasslands are not fertilized. They are not irrigated. They are not spread with pesticides. It is not GMO grass.
There is a lot to be said about making a whole lot of nutritious food from grassland. Especially since, as I said, the entire livestock industry makes less GHG’s than the rest of agriculture put together.
There is no time left for ripoffsets. We have to do everything we can all at once, for the rest of our lives if we want to have any hope of avoiding the collapse of civilization into chaos and violence within the lifetimes of people already born. If you must look at that way, your solar electricity is a tiny part of what you owe for having a house, probably driving a car for many years, and doing all the other destructive things you’ve done. Or you could look at as just something you can do to avoid utter destruction, and not flying is something else you can do to avoid utter destruction. There’s actually no end of things you can do to help avoid utter destruction, but they’ll all be useless if you don’t help change the politics of the US enough to change everything about what the people who will never do those things do.
I would certainly not criticize a Climate Scientist or any one else for choosing to fly on a fossil fueled aircraft. However many meetings can be conducted using technology these days without the need to attend grand international conferences, many businesses employ linked tele/video conferences (across time zones) to cut down on costs and time. That apart, I hope to see more and more airports striving towards low or non-carbon energy use and renewable jet fuels, like Canada’s Edmonton international airport. Also hope to see fervent activity on the electrification of aircraft taxiing systems, bio-fuels, hydrogen power and shorter range ev/hybrids.
Canada’s Edmonton International pledges support to renewable energy and cleaner fuel.
https://www.internationalairportreview.com/news/70001/canadas-edmonton-renewable/
This one is very difficult.
Understanding that science is a social activity is key to understanding how science works. Scientists have the same psychology and the same cognitive biases as everyone else – and N years of training and experience do little to mitigate that. Scientists working in isolation are therefore hopelessly unreliable. Science works because we don’t work in isolation – we are constantly critiquing eachother’s work, informally, at meetings, through peer review and through grant review. If you take the social elements out of science, you kill science.
On the other hand, I seem to be able to work quite well without going to meetings, without meeting my collaborators in person. Many of my co-authors I have never met in the flesh. I collaborate by email, by google doc, by skype, when I absolutely can’t avoid it by social media, and only rarely by face-to-face meeting. There are also quite a lot of people with whom I cannot effectively communicate in this way (for whatever reason), and so I don’t collaborate with them at all.
By comparison with my colleagues, my working practices appear to be atypical, and so I am very hesitant to suggest that others might be able to work the same way I do. So, while there is a possibility that if you shut down most international scientific meetings, people would adapt, there is also a strong possibility that you substantially reduce the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the scientific process. Scientific progress may stall, and achieving vital advances may become much more expensive.
Or it might not. It would be an interesting experiment if a discipline were to adopt a policy of all international meetings being e-meetings. Climate science might not be a good candidate given the stakes, or maybe it is an ideal candidate given the optics.
If all business travel ended, and only e-meetings were allowed, it wouldn’t do squat to solve our AGW problem. Why?
Because, as I keep repeating to the sound of crickets, the thing that we must do – the *only* thing that we must do – the only fracking thing that will save humanity’s butt – is to build and deploy renewable energy farms so we can turn off the machines that burn fossil fuels. And, do it fast enough to make a difference.
Our individual behaviors are not the problem. It is only our collective behavior delaying the inevitable construction of a new energy system that matters.
testing to see if I have been blocked
This is a classic case of Cognitive Dissonance…. mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.
Take responsibility for your actions, understand the consequences and live with it….. aka grow a pair… Do what you have to do, be prepared to pragmatically and reasonable defend your actions and behavior should the need arise. And be prepared to be held accountable… if not in this life than in the next.
Al Gore has a big house, ergo, climate change doesn’t exist.
Scientists fly to conferences, ergo, climate change doesn’t exist.
That’s the “issue” here – in the small broken minds of climate deniers, pointing out a supposed hypocrisy, no matter how small or unavoidable, is a substitute for reasoned debate.
As mentioned above, a scientist who flies to a conference generates four billionths of 2.5% of global emissions. So what?
Everything we do on this planet increases GHG emissions somewhat. We should not beat ourselves up for our behaviors which generate GHG’s. Once we build ourselves a true 100% renewable energy system our behaviors won’t do squat anymore.
The only true behavior which we should condemn is delay, obfuscation, corruption, and poor reasoning when it comes to building our energy future.