To ask you to stop flying

[Walkingthere]

We are facing a climate disaster. Our children will have to live through it. And yet I overheard two women today discussing how many holidays abroad they had been on this year. Both over 60 years of age. Obviously it will not directly impact on them.
This is also very common in my social group, people jetting off 4-5 times a year. Mini-breaks, weekends away, European trips, long haul, hen do's, weddings, birthdays. It's unbelievable how much people are burying their heads in the sand.

We need to stop flying. Urgently. Now. My family have not flown in over 5 years. We used to travel a lot, before we realised the consequences. I am putting this here, to make people think, we all need to urgently reduce (ideally stop) flying now.

I have no family where I live. If I want to see them, I have to fly, unless I want to spend two days in a car, on a boat etc. So thank you for the suggestion but no, thank you.

However, how can you be ok with damaging children who are already alive now, is this country?

See, you're just prioritising your child over other children - which is normal and as it should be. Don't be so shocked when other people do the same.

What do you suggest those of us who live in a different country to our families do?

What do you suggest those of us who live in a different country to our families do?

Not quite sure how "my family live a flight away" really adds anything to the debate. It seems to rest upon some unwritten law of nature that everyone needs to see their family whenever they like .

I have family all over the world that I have either never met, or haven't met for years. But I don't see that's a justification for flying. Of course it would be nice. But it doesn't magically make my carbon footprint smaller as a result.

I am surprised this hasn't went to a certain newspaper.
I take a couple of short haul flights a year, and have never been on a transatlantic one.
But any flight I have been on has practically been full, which I think is less damaging than all the constant prvaite flights .
I am more concerned with people who are suffering serious illness, starving and just barely existing in war torn countries and in so much poverty .

No. No way.
I take three vital flights to the sun each winter for my health.
Only stopping when my health and old age prevent it.

Have you had a word with China recently

THE DAILY MAIL IS A SHIT NEWSPAPER THAT WOULDN'T KNOW A STORY IF IT TRIPPED OVER IT IN THE STREET

I am surprised this hasn't went to a certain newspaper.

I'm not

Whosorrynow except by just having children you are adding to the population. Over population. You cant offset having a child completely.

And we need smaller populations.

All this name calling is just absolutely unnecessary.

Even if we could actually suddenly drop emmissions to 0 (impossible), CO2 is there.

Imagine a fire.

There is a fire by a gas pipe. You try to turn it down as little as you can, but there will always be a bit of gas coming in, feeding the fire.
That's it. Nothing can be done about it.
But!
You have extinguisher and filtration system for the smoke. So you go in and keep making the fire smaller and smaller until it's tiny all that while the smoke is being filtered out.

Now our gas pipe (CO2 emissions) will always have some gas running through it and we should keep the gas on low. We cannot stop it completely even if we wanted to.
But we have extinguisher and a filtrations system - plants and we must utilise them.

JUST lowering emissions will not save the planet so calling each other dicks is really a useless exercise🤷‍♀️ Take that energy and go plant a bloddy shrub somewhere.

See, you're just prioritising your child over other children - which is normal and as it should be. Don't be so shocked when other people do the same.

We cant prioritize our own. So how do we do it fairly

Without making kids homeless?

Because that's you point. No benefits for kids.

So who should get benefits? Surely you mean withdraw all benefits?

I am just shocked someone who rather withdraw benefits to children and just shrug their shoulders about children being the victims.

But not other age groups.

@MsMustDoBetter "so it would need to be thought through and planned"????

What? There is no way of implementing what you suggest without severely damaging the tourist industry. How do you think through and plan taking away millions of tourists to, say, Cape Verde (who produce nothing) without destroying their only industry.

What do you suggest those of us who live in a different country to our families do?

Maybe don't move away from your families.

I understand that, but we can't blaze the planet in preference to sacrificing tourist industries.

So many people travel globally for work, is it really necessary, is there no other way?

If we behaved as global community, work and sustainability could become possible within developing countries. The reasons that this doesn't happen now are power and greed, the two things at the heart of capitalism.

I like my fancy holidays and consumerism as much as the next westerner, but we have a duty to find another way for future generations. It's not ok to burn up the planet and then say "so long suckers" to future generations. It just isn't.

I won’t stop flying as I go once a year. However, my brother and sister in law are massively into saving the planet and reducing the carbon footprint blah blah. Yet they go sky diving at least twice a month and those plane journeys are definitely not necessary 🤷‍♀️

HotChoc

Who makes more CO2? Someone who does 1 or 2 flights a year to visit family abroad or someone who drives to visit their family nearly on the other side of UK 6 times a year? 🤔
Genuine question.

dottyboxes What a stupid response. We live in a global world. My partner is Spanish and I'm English, so someone had to move away from their family. Do you suggest no relationships with people from other countries? We moved here for our daughter to have a better quality of life. When we lived in London, he had to fly to see his family. Maybe we should all stay in the same town we grew up in and get married to a local lad and then we'd never have to travel at all?

What do you suggest those of us who live in a different country to our families do?

Maybe don't move away from your families.

Stupid response - the world doesn’t work like that. My parents moved to the UK at the request of DF’s employer. They stayed in the UK 15 years before going home. I was at Uni in the UK so stayed here. DH came to the UK to study, his parents are in Canada and DSil moved from Canada to the US when her DH changed jobs. We fly to visit them regularly and will continue to do so. Our DT’s are at Uni but looking at jobs outside of the UK so in the future we’ll travel to see them.

the point is that globalization is clearly very bad for the planet (and not great for a lot in our society who are left behind in very underfunded and abandoned communities).

we need to have children and bring them up to be as clever as possible so they can invent ways that we can live sustainably, someway to travel that doesn't damage the environment

Priceless!

I love the holiday/flight adverts that I’m seeing lol

The rich and powerful, of course, would still be free to do whatever they liked... I don't often agree with you Reanimated but this is the absolute nub of it.