To think flying off on holidays is immoral?

[RedTriangle]

Anyone planning to fly off on holidays?

“Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice”
nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

I live near an airport and there is a steady stream of planes landing and taking off. It feels ominous now in light of the recent WWF report talking about life on earth being wiped out.

There are posts on mumsnet on the section about long haul travel where people are talking about flying off with their families to Thailand or Mexico etc not thinking or not caring about the impact! Future generations won’t be jetting off and living lives like this as we will have destroyed the planet and they will be scrambling to survive.

My parents have booked a weekend in Spain! They regularly do this and they will be long gone while future people pay a terrible price.

I think it's immoral to try and shame people that do fly on holiday.

If I used public transport to get to work, it would take two buses and about 45mins if I was lucky. For a 10 min car drive. And then to go and see my horse after work, more buses and then a very long walk, so rather than getting to the stables in half an hour and feeding him at 4, my poor horse would be still standing there at 5 no doubt waiting for me. I'll stick to my car.

People have been pushed to longer commutes partly for affordable housing. Local shops closed, so you have to drive and time constraints mean a weekly not daily shop.

Back years ago your grandma would have walked to the shops daily, grandad would work near enough to walk and pop home for his lunch.
Now people have hour + commutes, unusual working hours and kids in one place, work in another and home in another.

SantaClarita, you should keep your horse at home and ride him to work, obviously

Virtually all the claims made in the link have been debunked.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/07/12/scientists-challenge-magazine-story-about-uninhabitable-earth/?utm_term=.29d32107de21
But carry on virtue signalling.

gingham

Only a fool accepts that scientists are acting impartially in research.
They are usually employed, in this case probably by Government.

I haven’t got time to read all of that article gingham, but I agree with the scientist who says there’s no need to exaggerate climate change.

The number of people on here and elsewhere who are now feeling totally helpless to the point of apathy. No wonder!

I don’t know. I’ll need to go and get myself a degree so I can understand all this.

I’m not virtue signalling - i’m just really sad about it and worried about my children. I can’t stop thinking about it.

In the past I've traveled by bus London to Aberdeen, 10+ hours each way or 55 minutes by air each way. Only slightly cheaper on the bus and ok if you have time to spare. Which method pollutes more ? I'm currently on holiday, I looked at local prices to drive and be cold, compared to somewhere warm by air, guess where I am ? When I was younger I enjoyed local holidays. I am older and I can afford to go to more exotic places (that were never even on the radar) Do I think that is immortal no. I can think of worse things that are immoral

For a moment I thought you were talking about Holly from Geordie shore missing the first few episodes because she was flying off on hols...

OP you're clearly quite anxious about this... But your maths doesn't add up.... 3 cubic metres per leg per passenger? Doesn't begin to ring true I'm afraid. Grab your calculator and check.

You do sound incredibly anxious op and I understand why! It’s very anxious-making.

I went through something similar a few years ago and I was beside myself. My husband was ready to send me off to a psychiatrist tbh as I kept crying about it.

But, we don’t have any choice but to plough on in the best possible way we can. There are so many reasons to be hopeful. Not that we can go on forever. That would be silly. But we can make things as good as possible for as many as possible. Please don’t despair completely. That serves no purpose.

The way I got through it was reading more about it. I don’t know, it just made me feel like I was doing something positive by understanding better.

for you though. It’s a horrible feeling.

I expect the human race is doomed now as its all gone too far. Few people want to make the drastic changes needed and we also have the developing world who probably feel that they haven't had their turn yet.

you hate public transport you could move somewhere more convenient and get a bike.

Haahaaa! You are very funny.

Tell me where I’m scolding and virtue signalling again?

Um, I never addressed you personally. I made a general statement, you are the one who made it personal

If you are on unsentimental you are presumably a mother? Pro creating is far worse forced he environment.

If you can fly long-haul you're not on a low wage, are you?

Not necessarily. I know plenty of low wage people who, usually once a year, to visit family abroad. Usually the cost is provided by their families.

Neither of us are high earners but we still fly long haul because we choose to cut down elsewhere and save for it.

Yes donttalk. In case you’ve missed it, I said sorry for coming across to you as chippy. I had wrongly assumed you were addressing me. My mistake .

racecardriver have you read back through the thread? Did you see the (quite long) discussion on population?

On the one hand I feel a bit crazy to be so anxious about this as I look around and everyone else around me is living happy enough lives, not agonising over the use of plastic or apples imported from New Zealand or advertisements for cruises to the Antartica.

On the other hand I wonder are those around me deluded - conusming so much junk as we march blindly off a cliff.

I keep looking around me and at all the stuff I and my family are consuming, all the journeys we do by car etc and now I just see pollution and destruction instead of happiness.

I remember when it snowed last year and all the shops sold out of bread and milk for a few days. People were clearing the shelves in the supermarkets and filling their trollies and everyone was out for themselves. It just felt like society could break down so quickly and my children (as adults) could be fighting to survive.

I hoped when I had children that they would have happy lives but I’m not sure what’s facing them after reading all those articles. I was rwading how we are in the middle of the 6th great extinction and humans are facing doomsday!

I hope I’m just in the grip of some irrational anxiety - I hope my fears aren’t real.

Well, not that it’s good news, but even the less optimistic predictions talk about the world being uninhabitable (aka doomsday) by the end of this century. So, your dcs will be in their eighties at least. I don’t know how old they are obviously.

I suppose, in some ways, it’s good we are the ones who have the opportunity to do something about it. Future generations won’t and past generations didn’t.

Something needs to push people out of using their cars every day.

Cheaper, more convenient, efficient, reliable public transport. We had it once, apparently.

I got all 4 of us nearly 400 miles on one tank of diesel. This was a UK holiday. Roughly 60 quid with cruise control and a lot of it on motorway. Took about 8 hours with a couple of stops to go to the toilet, stretch our legs and eat our packed meals. The same trip by train would have been extraordinarily expensive and taken ages, IF it had been running smoothly. Again, this was a UK holiday. In October, before the English schools were out on half-term. The price of the hire of a 3-bed caravan (my kids are a boy and a girl) was over £600, the difference for a 2-bed was negliable. Plus food from Lidl, £89 in total for 4 including two teens. That's about as cheap as it gets.

If you are having one or two flights a year, to places that cannot be reached by train, then seems reasonable to me. I would not fly from London to anywhere in the Netherlands, Belgium or most of France as the Eurostar/TGV/Thalys is there.

What is wrong in my book is driving cars very short distances (unless disabled anything under a mile should be walked), or for meetings at work that can be done by conference call, and in particular large 4x4s for climbing the north face of the High Street.

I can't see us being free to travel post brexit, businesses will have to take conferences online and holidays will probably be very expensive and available to the rich, like the 70's.
I can see many parallels from the 70's to now.

You're right OP, but changes will take time. I agree the vitriol against your post smacks of guilt.

There's a great book by Mike Berners-Lee called 'How bad are bananas?', which goes through the carbon footprint of everything. A return flight from London to Hong Kong in economy is equivalent to 340,000 disposable carrier bags.

People can justify or make excuses all we want, but until we do feel guilt then people won't change.

George Monbiot (who once said that flying across the Atlantic is worse than child abuse - although he has taken some long-haul flights in his time) and Mayer Hillman are with you, OP. I don't think that no-one should ever fly on holiday, but we need to recognise that it does have a big impact, not just in terms of CO2 emissions but also in terms of the noise of the airport, the need for extra runways, air pollution, impact on local residents, impact of transport to the airport, etc. And yet flying is usually cheaper than taking the train, even within the UK. Most flights are taken by a relatively small percentage of the population.

I find it both fascinating and alarming that some people are talking about climate breakdown (for example the Extinction Rebellion movement that is planning protests for later this month) whilst other people are either uninterested, unaware or apathetic, or are worried but feel that individual actions won't make any difference.