Ethics of Flying

[Jamie in Chile]

My latest blog is about how I can justify flying three times in a week while being an environmentalist that does a blog trying to convince others to cut their emissions.

To see how I try to justify this, click here:

https://www.veganforum.org/threads/i-fl ... eek.18546/

I found a lot of good vegan restaurants in Lima, Peru and one vegetarian restaurant once when I was too lazy to do a 15-minute walk to the vegan restaurant. However, I looked where the vegan restaurants are before booking the hotel. They were expensive by local salary and standards, but cheap by standards of a developed country.

In the US, I just went to the store and bought 3 days worth of food to save money. That covered all my food except for one Beyond Burger which I had to pay about $30 for as I was at Miami beach.

Note: I wrote this article for one other vegan forum as well, as then copy and pasted it to here.

[brimstoneSalad]

Hi Jamie, it's been a while!

Can you please post the whole article here in a quote so people can read without going off site?
Since it's your content I don't feel like I should repost it in entirety.

[Jamie in Chile]

Given I took three flights last week in less than seven days, can I still call myself an environmentalist and an activist and tell other people to cut their emissions without being a hypocrite?

I did take a lot of flights in the past for travel, family and work, especially from 2003 to 2015. In retrospect many of those flights were not really justifiable.

I think that, generally speaking, that you should not take an action or make a decision that causes more pain and suffering to others that any benefit to yourself. So how do long-haul flights stack up against such an ethical framework?

I once estimated you have to put 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to kill someone from climate change. This was based on dividing the total known emissions by the total estimated human deaths from climate change according to the WHO, Dara Intergovernmental Body, the United Nations and others. It’s a rough estimate, reality could be 10 times better or worse. An analysis from a PHD student was later published with a similar estimate of 4,434 tonnes per person killed.

A long-haul flight produced a warming impact equivalent to 1-6 tonnes of CO2e per person on the flight. If 10,000 t CO2 takes away a person’s entire remaining life then if you do the math one long-haul flight takes away a few days of a person’s life. Plus probably more days of related suffering as well as the death. It’s as if your decision to fly to Australia or Argentina or California will cause a person to miss out on their last few days of life, and another person to be sick or injured for a few days. Plus animal suffering and death.

This can be set against the net benefit of a long-haul holiday relative to the short haul holiday you would have taken otherwise. How much better is a long-haul holiday than a short-haul one after factoring the extra cost, jet lag, and slight unpleasantness of being stuck on a plane for a long time? Roughly speaking, and this isn’t a precise calculation, I’d say the net benefit is approximately fuck all.

I would therefore suggest that long-haul flights for holidays/most business cause harm and suffering to others for little or no benefit to you, and you shouldn’t do them.

That still leaves one other type of flight – flights to see people. George Monbiot called these love miles in a 2006 article. For example can I cause days or weeks’ worth of suffering to attend my sister’s wedding? I decided no for that one, and didn’t attend the wedding.

But what about this? Now that I live in Chile, can I take a return flight back to the UK once every four years in order to spend a lot of time with close family, friends and work colleagues? I have been doing just that and was based in the UK in 2015 for a month or so, 2019-2020 for 4 months, and 2023-2024 for 6 months. On the 2019-2020 trip, I was able to spend a lot of time with my grandparents for example, before they passed away shortly after. Perhaps the benefit of spending a lot of time with loved ones outweighs the suffering imposed on others?

Since I was in the UK for each of those trips anyway, I was then able to travel to and around Europe by train, with a low environmental impact. I’ve travelled around Europe loads in the last decade without ever setting foot in an airport.

Now here is where we get to the interesting bit. Was it also justified for me to stop off for a little holiday at Miami (where I took the above photo last week), US and Lima, Peru on the way back from the UK to Chile? It turns out that the climate impact of those three flights was very likely lower than just the one flight I would have taken anyway from UK to Chile. The reason for this is that UK-Chile flights are only available as overnight flights, which are about twice as bad for climate change because contrails produced by flights after dark trap heat trying to escape. I chose three morning flights where the contrails will likely have disappeared by afternoon. In the day time flights are not as bad for global heating because the contrails also reflect out to space heat from the sun trying to get in.

It turns out the large benefit of avoiding late afternoon or evening or overnight flights more than compensates for the extra distance (I travelled about 13,793 km from London to Santiago via Miami and Lima; 18% more than the about 11,630km of the direct flight from London to Santiago) and the small effect of additional fuel for more take offs and landings. Another benefit of 3 flights rather than 1 is that you don’t have to carry such a large weight of fuel. That London-Santiago flight burns even more fuel due to carrying all that heavy weight. Whereas none of the flights I took would have been as heavily loaded.

So I think I can just about justify the fact that I was in Chile in September, cycling around Amsterdam in November, at the Colosseum in Rome in January, in Paris for work in April, and strolling along Miami beach last week and then flying over the Andes a few days ago.

This is where we get to the tricky bit. I did all that. But you shouldn’t!

Remember – long-haul flights for a holiday gain you nothing. Cost a small fortune to be stuck in a metal tube for ages and then get jet lag which might not wear off fully until you’re almost ready to come back. If you live in the UK, just go to Paris or Amsterdam. If you really want adventure, how about Morocco, Turkey, or Iceland? If you really want sun, just go to the Costa del Sol. Or just wait until July?

Not sure what this blog is really? Confession? Bad optics? Transparency? A lot of fuss over nothing?

This article is taken from here. Can you just take 5 seconds to click on the link below, so I know how many people are reading this, and I can use this info to decide whether it's worth it to continue with the blog.
https://www.veganforum.org/threads/i-fl ... eek.18546/

Also:
I found a lot of good vegan restaurants in Lima, Peru and one vegetarian restaurant once when I was too lazy to do a 15-minute walk to the vegan restaurant. However, I looked where the vegan restaurants are before booking the hotel. They were expensive by local salary and standards, but cheap by standards of a developed country.

In the US, I just went to the store and bought 3 days worth of food to save money. That covered all my food except for one Beyond Burger which I had to pay about $30 for as I was at Miami beach.