The Richmond Magazine

Covering Richmond Upon Thames and surrounding areas

	Fly now, pay later
Sarah Tucker

It seems that nothing will get us Brits out of the air. But as the world warms up, will cheap flights prove a costly folly? Our new travel columnist Sarah Tucker goes in search of the plane truth

I feel like a mini-weapon of mass destruction these days. By travelling to the four corners of the globe, and enthusing others through various media to do the same, I have the potential to wreck a place, disrupt its culture and destroy its often fragile ecosystem for good.

Worse, I can even send people to their death. I remember promoting Thailand as an excellent holiday destination for Christmas 2004, only to watch in horror as the Boxing Day Tsunami wiped the smile from a million faces. And I’m certain that I wrote about New York too, back in the vanished innocence of summer 2001.

Chastened perhaps by these experiences, I’ve become increasingly circumspect about what I write and where I publish. After all, it’s not as if I can put an NB at the end of each article, stating that only intelligent, high-spend, low-impact, caring and appreciative individuals need apply for airline seats. It simply doesn’t happen that way.

Of course, one has to keep things in perspective. Thankfully, each year over 70% of us will go to the coasts of southern Spain, preferring this little Britain to the rainforests of Costa Rica or the gorillas of Uganda, however much types like me may enthuse about exotic climes. But there is no room for complacency, and the current prominence of the global warming issue has heightened my concern about the downside of foreign travel. I have this growing sense that, by sharing the golden eggs of discovery, I may actually be killing the goose.

Every day reams of paper land on my mat, cheerfully expounding a particular tour operator’s environmental, eco-friendly, caring and sharing approach. The fact that the operator concerned has just destroyed a few sizeable oaks in the process – the paper is never recycled – would appear to have been totally ignored. Irony, one surmises, is not a specialism of the average travel firm.

Reading between the jargon-loaded and frequently incomprehensible lines, the operators seem no less confused than the rest of us. How, for example, is charging a little extra each time we fly supposed to counteract all the rubbish discharged into the atmosphere every time a plane takes off?

There is a lack of clarity about what aviation taxes are achieving, and indeed whether air travel should be penalised at all. Even the lowly cow, it seems, produces more carbon emissions than a large Boeing jet. According to Travel Watch – an organisation promoting environmentally friendly travel – cows produce 4% of the world’s emissions, planes just 2%. Yet to my knowledge there are no proposed carbon taxes for farmers – although I wouldn’t put it past Mr Brown.

Still, a figure of 2% is significant enough. At present, we are taxed £5 for every short-haul flight and £15 for long-haul. Yet if we are really serious about using air taxes as a weapon against global warming, why not have punitive charges for frequent flyers, or the Royals, or City financiers and celebrities who use their own private jets?

In any case, it’s by no means clear where the money actually goes. If it is channelled into environmental projects, who monitors and measures it? Chris Martin of the band Coldplay once sponsored a forest. Unfortunately, all the trees died.

To be fair, the travel industry is trying. Eco-breaks, eco-islands, eco-country houses and eco-spas abound. You can even play eco-golf, if you really must, although quite what that entails is not abundantly clear. The problem is that it’s all skin-deep. Anything with ‘eco’ in front serves primarily as an excuse for self-exoneration: a chance to indulge in a fantasy trip without the nagging fear that one is indirectly killing polar bears.

Ultimately, any serious attempt to prise the public out of the departure lounge runs straight into one big snag: people like their foreign holidays and they are not going to give them up lightly. Recently I conducted an extensive vox pop around Richmond. Everyone I spoke to was most resistant to the idea of abandoning the air. Nor were many willing to face up to the link between flying and a warming world. Like the rest of us, they preferred to place the blame elsewhere. China, India, the Government, the Americans, outdoor heaters, cows: anyone and anything but themselves.

These are the obstacles confronting politicians as they attempt to change hearts and minds. In Britain, the problem is exacerbated by our obsession with finding the sun. Year after year I am asked more questions about where the weather will be ‘good’ – for which read ‘sunny and warm’ – than any other subject.

As a nation, we are not long-term in our thinking. We suffer from short political memories; our financial markets are geared towards short-term gain; and in all things we are encouraged to live now, pay later. We are fundamentally selfish – and nowhere does this betray itself more than in our attitude towards overseas travel. Forgoing the car is one thing; losing the foreign holiday is another.

As global warming gathers pace, I have no doubt that we will one day pay a price that is infinitely more exacting than a £5 tax at Heathrow. The only question is when. Judging from the accumulating evidence, it may well be sooner than we think.

Printed: October 2007, Written by: Sarah Tucker

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Picture by Sunset, courtesy of Rex Features Ltd