Don’t fall for the airline propaganda

For all its green rhetoric, Labour has a blind spot about air travel. The recent Climate Change Bill, for instance, doesn’t include aviation in its carbon reduction targets. The Treasury has also dismissed Tory calls for domestic flights to pay tax on fuel, saying that would be inappropriate in a multilateral context, despite the fact that the US, Japan and India already levy such a duty.

Ministers are apparently happy to follow the line peddled by the air industry, which is that flying is only a blip in global warming and that making airlines pay for the pollution they create would infringe our human right to cheap flights (read this pdf). But air travel is not negligible as flights make up 5.5% of the UK’s carbon emissions: a proportion that is expected to grow to 25% by 2050 (pdf link). And these figures underplay the contribution of air travel to global warming, since the emission of pollution at high altitudes has a significantly higher total impact on anthropogenic (man-made) on climate change (link). Forget the airline propaganda: the most effective thing most of us could do to reduce our carbon footprint is to cut down on flying.

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It’s the rich who are really benefiting from the artificially low prices of air travel. The average income of people using Stansted Airport is £47,000 per year – and it’s supposed to be a budget airport! Low-skilled people and people on benefits, despite making up a quarter of the population, only took 6% of the flights whilst the top quarter of the population took almost half of all flights. (Civil Aviation Authority)

75% of those who use budget airlines are in social classes A, B and C, while people with second homes abroad take an average of six return flights a year. Most of the growth, the government envisages, will take place among the wealthiest 10%. (Civil Aviation Authority)