Here is a more controversial issue. Someone said that we should take a pledge not to fly short distances, but flying long distances must be permitted because there is no substitute.
On the one hand, a pledge not to fly short distances is better than no pledge at all. On the other hand I will try to argue that such a pledge only aims at marginal improvements and avoids the needed qualitative changes. To explain why, let's first look at plasma TV's. Per square inch of screen, they consume about as much energy as an old-fashioned vacuum-tube TV. Nevertheless they are considered a big step back in energy efficiency -- because the flat screen makes screen areas possible which were out of reach for the old TV's. The same argument applies to flying. The speed of airplanes makes trips feasible which would have been out of reach, or perhaps a once-in-a-life-time affair, without airplanes. This is one of the reasons why air travel is so harmful: not only because of the emissions per mile, but also because air travel leads to many more miles per trip. If we do not fly, this forces us to re-arrange our entire consumption bundle, which may not be a bad thing. When Kevin Anderson took the train from the UK to Shanghai, he carefully planned so that the time on the train was not wasted. On the way back, he wrote an entire paper, and he says that the pleasant environment without interruptions helped him greatly with this. The designers of modern trains should take this into consideration. It may be necessary to fight for this. In the 1960s, trains in Europe had seats which could easily be converted into couches if the compartment was half empty. More modern trains no longer allow this because they want to sell sleeper compartments. With modern tourism, we fly around the world and then have very little contact with the society we are visiting, we see them mainly through the windows of taxis and hotels which are unaffordable to most natives. Traveling more slowly and more consciously is the kind of lifestyle change which comes with a de-carbonized economy that represents not a worse quality of life but arguably even a higher quality of life. If academics are less mobile, this will also lead to better video-conferencing and other tools to work together at a distance. To repeat, a low-carbon life will be qualitatively different. It does not have to be worse. But if we continue with business as usual until our traditional ways of doing things simply no longer work, then life will not only be different but also much worse. Hans G Ehrbar _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
