To fly or not to fly is never a question asked within a vacuum, the impact of your actions are much more complicated than an immediate crime such as murder. It is about short-term and very long-term impact and also the problem of collective action.

Yes flying is carbon intensive, but not that much more than driving a car, going on a boat with an engine, taking the train, and even taking a bus although using a lot less carbon still uses energy. The question is therefore not whether to fly or not, but how much carbon emissions are you willing to spend while traveling, unless you are cycling or walking for instance. How much carbon emitted is acceptable to you and society when traveling, where is the limit? If this is a moral question then this relates not only to ‘how we travel’ but ‘if we should travel at all’. The limits here are even more complicated as they are not quantitative but questions whether we should travel large distances for leisure and holidays, only for work, only for emergencies etc etc.

Traveling is not only about carbon emissions of course, but time and money for instance. Many people have no time to travel by bus or train or cycle even if they wanted to and also visit far away places for whatever reason. The choice for many is therefore to travel large distances by flying, or do not travel to these places at all. This I assume was the choice your Green Party friend had to make. The infrastructure for travel alternatives simply is not there (I agree with you that this is terrible). However for many people the choice to ‘travel or not’ is harder than the choice to ‘travel by train or fly’.

Secondly, and bizarrely, I have found out that traveling by bus and definitely by train is often more expensive than flying. For those of us who can afford to take a more expensive option perhaps this is okay. Many people instead decide to fly and donate the money saved to renewable energy projects. I personally think this is a token gesture at current carbon offset prices, but if they were increased maybe this would work, of course a carbon tax would solve this to some extent if it were high enough. What it would not solve is the gross inequality in this world.

If I spent £40 on a flight, and saved £100 because I did not go by train then I could give that £100 to feed several starving children, or provide several immunisations saving lives immediately. Or I could give £140 to these causes, possibly save more lives and just stay at home. Doesn’t this choice sound strange, doesn’t it sound sick, but these are the silenced choices people must make everyday in this society. ‘To fly or not to fly’ for moral reasons is a question that is related to an endless number of other questions, none of them easy, but why should they be.

I agree with reducing flying, and your arguments in your blog post. I have taken similar steps to you about flying, and perhaps avoiding factory farming as well which is more damaging to the environment than flying in the long-term and certainly more damaging to animals in the short-term. I’m not really sure what my argument is or what I am trying to say in this reply. It just seems that people have so many moral choices to make that they are not necessarily abdicating their moral responsibility when they fly but rather setting their moral limits differently or choosing one equally moral action over another.

I’d like to end with some comment on the global socio-economic system and how inequality in all its forms is the route of all our problems, something like that edited into a snappy one-liner.

His electoral pledges to nationalise the mining industry etc seem little more than hot air to appease his support base of poor, rural Peruvians, but on the other hand, big business appears to dislike him, which makes me think he must be doing something right!

As a side note, one of the stumbling blocks in the climate
change debate is measuring “virtuousness” in terms of calculable carbon emissions. This is a highly rational and empirical way to measure something as abstract as virtuousness. The argument is made that since people in rural India or Guatemala who know nothing about climate change have lower carbon footprints, then they are more virtuous. Empirically this is true. But this is also problematic because it is then normally used as a reason for why those countries can afford to INCREASE their carbon emissions. If we take motivation to action as the moral indicator, that might be less specific but potentially more helpful in actually getting anything changed.

However, this works both ways. When the US (for example) wants to avoid a climate change treaty, its media points to somewhere like China and says “look, they WANT to increase the carbon emissions so much”, anticipating carbon emissions that have not yet happened and essentially pointing to a supposed moral “character”.

My point is not to champion one or other “frame”; it’s instructive to point them both out and watch how they work, and how the language is used to fit the objectives of the user.