Can You Fly and be Green?

The long haul travel and airline holiday business may seem a strange industry to be involved in if you are an avid green supporter and a member of Friends of the Earth, like our MD Mike Collins.   He doesn’t think so…

It seems on the face of it from all of the national press coverage that I am dooming the planet by encouraging people to travel the world.   Like many people – especially those with children who will exist on our planet long after us – I take this very seriously.

It’s undeniable that emissions from aviation are a contributing factor to climate changing gases increasing on our planet and we should be working responsibly to try to reduce this.  That said though, let’s get this into some sort of perspective.  A recent report suggests that air travel around the world contributes 2% of human CO2 emissions and 3.5% of all climate changing human activities.

Whilst we should of course be working to reduce this, there is a whole load more issues, industries and activities that our press and governments are ducking that need to be equally urgently addressed.  In fact, many should take priority, given their enormous and long term impact on climate change.  For example, I have just received my Friends of the Earth membership newsletter that reliably informs me that the meat and dairy industry worldwide contributes 18% of the world’s climate changing gasses.

This is down to non-organically reared animals, fed on genetically modified foods from soy imports from South America, the need for which is driving a huge amount of deforestation.   An unrecognised knock on effect that none of us really anticipated from the promise of GM foods or bio fuels or  an inconvenient truth well hidden by the powers that be because of political, economic and financial interests tied up in the whole global industry?

Maybe it’s just my paranoia, but all the focus on air travel (in my opinion) is a calculated “diversion” tactic away from those other entrenched industries , energy generation methods and other practices that are the real source of the change we’re enforcing on this planet. They’d rather we didn’t focus on those and pick the “easier” target of aviation instead.  We take our customers to many destinations such as East Africa, the Caribbean , Borneo and Malaysia where they can experience new cultures, gain an insight into just how beautiful and fragile the natural world is, be inspired to protect it and contribute to tourism (responsible, ecologically sound tourism)  that is a major industry helping to improve the lifestyle of the local people.

So long haul air travel is arguably doing a lot of good for our world as well as contributing to some of the damage.  If we work on repairing the damage while having a major effort to reduce those other areas, then we will make inroads into slowing the rate of climate change, but targeting aviation or long haul travel  alone isn’t going to do it!

This is why I can be Green and still Fly.

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