flying or not flying

[Frazzled2207]

I posted in AIBU and got a whole world of responses and i was hoping for some more from the greener end of the spectrumwww.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3482688-to-not-want-to-go-by-train

in a nutshell, both husband and I are very climate conscious - he doesn't want to fly any more and I am ok with reducing flying but not giving up completely (yet). Opportunity has come up to visit friends in europe this summer. Flying is far easier and cheaper - around £300 for two hours. Train would take about 14hours in total and cost over £800. We could break the journey which is doable but that would cost even more.

Just wondering if any couples out there having the flying vs not flying arguments and if any compromises have been reached. At the moment we are risking really falling out over this and I'm wondering how other couples have got round this if they have.

I have said I'll train it one way but not both. It's partly cost but also convenience - we have two small children. And also the money saved can go towards getting the electric car etc sooner so we can make very good use of it.

In the past I have taken the train to Barcelona and Innsbruck for short breaks, but it did take longer and was much more expensive than flying. That was before I had children.

My husband would be totally on board with not flying for about the next 10 years, but mainly on the grounds that taking young children through airports is not a pleasant experience to say the least. However, I am not sure if he would find a long train journey with children any more enjoyable. Is it a sleeper train?

Your decisions about flying are important. Please consider helping campaigns for society as a whole to tackle climate breakdown. You are invited to Friends of the Earth's campaign planning meeting with Chris Saltmarsh of the national student campaign People and Planet, this coming Wednesday

13 February 7.30 at
Friends Meeting House
77 Church Crescent
Muswell Hill N10 3NE

43 or 134 bus from Archway/Highgate, or from Friern Barnet

Chris has a good article in The Ecologist about People and Planet’s climate campaign asking Barclays to switch its investments away from harmful fossil fuels. He has also recently written about the school climate strikes, inspired by the remarkable Swedish sixteen year-old Greta Thunberg:

We urgently need progress to reduce the severity of climate breakdown.
Among the other issues we will discuss on Wednesday are

a proposal for a campaign against single use coffee cups, and for cafes to refill water bottles (to be considered in the light of the plans of Plastic-free Haringey).

Tim Root
Co-ordinator, Muswell Hill & Hornsey Friends of the Earth
[email protected]

It’s obscene that the price of a train ride is so much more expensive, isn’t it? The problem is that the negative externalities (the cost of environmental damage) are not factored into plane tickets, so they are artificially cheap in a way.

To be honest I think your compromise sounds very respectable. Maybe speeding up the purchase of a greener car could sway your husband in the end.

We ration it, I managed 10 years without flying at all and have had four short haul holidays with the kids over twenty years, so averaging one flying holiday every 5 years, we're going to try to stick to that rough schedule.( Or fewer). We are actually planning to do a European break but train with DS3 but the traveling will be the main part of the holiday with multiple stops etc.

I've said no more flying for me. But it does make it difficult when you're faced with the situation you describe - when it would be cheap and easy to fly, not cheap and easy to travel by some other means. You need to be an angry little greenie like me NOT to fly, and that's no good - it might make me feel better, but me not flying is a drop in the ocean in comparison with the reductions in CO2 we've got to make.
When I was at uni doing my planning course, our transport lecturer used to inveigh against what he termed "hypermobility" - the increasing propensity for us to travel greater distances.
To me, there's two big questions: a) what is wrong with our current social and political set-up which drives us towards environmentally unsound ways of travelling? b) why is it that we feel we've got to travel so much, anyway?
Anyway, I'm really glad this discussion is happening. I know that for the sake of my kid's future I'd LIKE everyone to give up flying - I know that while flying is cheap and going on hols without flying is expensive, they won't - but I'm glad it's becoming something that people are talking about.

I like this idea
Frequent Flyer Levy
The more you fly the more you pay. So many industries fashion/entertainment etc are habitual fliers. It's really wasteful.
afreeride.org

I've flown less than 10 return flights in my whole life and I'm nearly 50, mostly European destinations. Once to New York.