Anyone else know of anything?

Dave

The cost of air travel is in fact kept artificially low by means of an effective subsidy (to the tune of £300 PA per person in the UK in 2006 according to this FOtE article http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/uk_taxpayers_subsidise_air_10032006.html ).

The low cost of travel by air does not reflect lower use of energy. Aviation fuel does not get VAT or duty paid on it unlike all other forms of fuel, and air-travel is also subsidised because local authorities around the world pay airlines to fly to their cities to increase tourism.

This produces an un-level playing field for transport methods – the artificially low cost of air travel in turn makes alternative forms of travel less attractive, diminishing passenger numbers, which in turn forces fares up (just like supermarkets artificially low prices on basic commodities force up or out of business local corner shops).

The sooner this inequality is addressed, and transport costs reflect real costs, the better for the planet. Why should we be subsidising this extremely damaging transportation method (as an earlier poster pointed out, every tonne of carbon emitted high up in the atmosphere does 2 to 3 times as much damage as 1 delivered at ground level).

I, as a non-flier resent subsidising air travellers who are damaging the environment and using up precious oil and believe we should be imposing punitive taxes on air travel, not subsidising it!

@Annie A full car is not so terribly bad accross relatively short distances… not sure its got much scope on a journey to Russia, say. A train journey depends on many things, not just occupancy – is it electric / diesel? How fast does it go? If electric, is the electricity in the country its running in 3 quarters nuclear – like France – or 3 quarters coal – like China.

I just came across a site with the catch title; “It’s time to make the Transition” , advocating a street legal airplane: http://www.terrafugia.com ” a vehicle that uses super-unleaded automobile gas, and that will get about 27.5 miles per gallon flying at 115 miles per hour, which is better mileage than most cars get on the highway right now, and at nearly twice the speed. So from a fuel-economy perspective, it’s actually one of the greenest planes out there. And the Transition is such a light vehicle that the mileage should be quite good on the road. We are expecting between 30 and 40 miles per gallon.”

Hmm….Personally I think I stick to a pony (and an air-powered car, http://mdi.lu/english/cityflowair.php ..charged by solar-voltaics?)

Cheers,
The Perma-Max (Not same as Max with the 14/12 comment)

Just checked out how much it would cost to teach the “Training for Transition” course via video conferencing technology: £47/hour for the use of the equipment, with additional telephone/broadband line costs ( still awaiting quote), so at 15 hours, that’s £705, then double that, ’cause you need these facilities on both ends, that’s £1410, plus venue hire £200-£500, again times two, that’s £1810-£2410, then trainer’s fees £1000, Network fee(based on 24 participants)£240, miscellaneous expenses £100, so that comes to £3150-£3750. For a group of 24 participants, that brings the cost of Training for Transition to £131 – £156 per person minimum.
Any takers?

You assume that there’s a direct relationship between money cost and the amount of resources used. If only there was! The reason why air travel is much cheaper than rail is that a larger proportion of the cost of air travel is in fuel and less in employing people. It’s the very low price we pay for energy that makes air cheap in money terms.

Your point about embodied energy is a good one, but after considering airports, access roads car parks etc don’t assume air comes out far ahead. A railway track is a very economical structure in terms of number of people transported per metre width per hour.

If rail does have a greater embodied energy it pales into insignificance beside the twelve-fold difference between the global warming effect per passenger km of high-speed rail and air. (See my post of 9th Dec.)

I travel by train a fair bit but have some doubts over its efficiency.

I am not sure train travel over continental distances is lower energy than flying. Railways require a great deal of maintenance, they use land and TGV type trains use alot more energy than slow trains.

If airlines can make money flying people for much less money than rail I see a signal that air travel uses less resources than rail travel. I have yet to see a good study that considers all the energy costs of a 1000km journey by rail vs air. Planes don’t need a permanent way. For me low impact means less travel by whatever means.

I’m not a well travelled person and I’d love to go to these places. I’d love to see the Great Wall, the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef but I won’t fly. I can’t afford a cruise ship. I know from seeat61.com that I could cross to USA on a merchant ship for an affordable amount and I may consider that. I can’t afford a Rolls-Royce either. Or a 20 bedroom house. These days a lot of people expect what once would have been the privilege of the extremely weathy as a right: a winter break in Bermuda, a weekend trip to Rome, a two week holiday in the Maldives? Why not, as Seize the Day point out in their superb song mentioned above, “… when it’s cheaper to fly than to park at the airport, what would you do?”. Tha’s not to say either that the wealthy are any more entitled to these than the rest of us.

We have created the story of today’s world where air travel is just part of the backdrop, as normal as shopping at the supermarket or buying a 40″ plasma TV. As Joanne pointed out, once, when people moved to another country they were essentially “gone forever”. Now, it’s a minor inconvenience and no more. Once, the idea of being told that part of your work required you to be in Berlin for 9am to deliver a training program ending at 5pm and be back in the UK office at 9pm for the departmental board meeting would actually have been physically impossible and thus not even considered. Now it may be seen as essential. We have built many parts of our food systems, our relationships, our leisure time and many other things around the availability of accessible, quick, affordable travel to anywhere in the world. It’s like the oil woven into our lives and it’s no wonder so many people don’t want to let go.

My Mum, who is 82, has spent a single day in Boulogne in 1964. The rest of her life has been lived in the UK. She does not feel cheated.

In my view, in another 20 years at most, for the vast majority of the world’s population there will be no more flying (as it is for most of them already and has been all their lives) unless it’s by airship which I believe is the only viable model for future air travel. It’s only us rich people that fret over these choices – such are the stresses of our wealth.

At Green Architecture day here in Brighton a few years ago, a guy talked about rammed earth buildings and said that CO2 emissions from concrete manufacture at roughly double that of aviation. But aviation is the fastest growing source and there is at least something we can do about it. It’s much harder for us to do something about concrete’s CO2 emissions.

Ian said “You also need to consider that the aeroplane is going to fly there anyway, whether you are on it or not. Flying a 747 to Australia with two empty seats becasue TN decided not to fly makes such an infitesimal difference to the total emissions for that particular day, that the agonising over it is pointless.” Well, in that case there’s little point in changing any of our behaviour patterns if X is going to continue anyway because that’s what most people will continue doing. Not a very inspiring way of approaching the redirection of our futures.

I think that the Network should do ground breaking research in finding a superb way of videoconferencing to deliver top notch training and surely with all the electronic wizardry available today it can’t be that hard. High definition, document transfer, interactivity, surely only the physical presence is missing and for all that carbon on the table, it’s surely worth going for.

Those who have always been “green” and who can reduce their carbon footprint to very low levels get our respect. For many of us, however, transition isn’t easy. It can be a huge psychological and emotional struggle as some of these posts testify. For at alest some of us, few decisions as we move out of the hydrocarbon comfort zone are “no brainers”, especially when it comes to “love miles” or when you are the only member of your (much loved) family who really “gets transition”.

For the smoothest possible transition we need people who don’t currently think about these issues AT ALL to be engaged. Lots of personal stories, lots of examples of doing the right thing (like Rob’s jourrney to Austria), perhaps statements like the one suggested by Theresa above, will help to achieve that.

Lots of encouragement and persuasion to do the right thing, but not please a blanket Transition network “policy” of no fly, any more than a blanket policy of “no children” (if you haven’t already had some, presumably). And let’s, above all, not judge each others’ often painful carbon reduction choices too harshly…