Academics say flying to meetings harms the climate – but they carry on
nature.com
nature.com
"We Should Improve Society Somewhat refers to a panel from a comic by Matt Bors in which a medieval peasant says "We should improve society somewhat" while a modern man, emerging from a well, replies, "Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent." "
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
They don't make it easy. Last year I had a reimbursement rejected because I took a two-night train option instead of flying -- the finance office considered this a vacation. Any time you do anything other than fly you need to provide comparison data showing that flying would've cost more. But those who fly even when the train is reasonable (for a normal person) face no such requirement.
I tried one of those online carbon calculators which spat out 1.4 tons CO2 for a round trip west coast to east coast trip (SF / NYC). The average American emissions are at like 10x that, so while it's significant, depending on how many long-haul flights you have per year, it may still matter less than your day-to-day transportation, what you eat, heating your home, etc.
We don't "absolutely have to" do anything. Our comments contributed to climate change, but we did it anyway. Living contributes to climate change, but we don't stop. All of us are choosing some acceptable threshold for our lives.
How can those two numbers be combined? Most of the worlds population never fly, and that's why it's a relatively small fraction of global emissions. But it's still a very sizeable portion of the emissions of people who do fly, and that makes it relevant.
It's the same as saying: is it really important that people in Belgium cause large CO2 emissions? It's such a small country, barely 1 % of global emissions, there's no point to them reducing their emissions. But that's a fallacy (obviously). All emissions can be decomposed into small sets and dismissed as irrelevant.
The important question is: how much benefit does these emissions cause compared to alternatives? And, would these emissions fit in the global co2 budget?
But is it academics flying to conferences important? And is viewing academics as being somehow "accountable" for work-related emissions useful?
Certainly a minority of people on the planet fly. But the people that fly regularly also are likely to live in a way that overall uses more carbon -- eating more meat, owning/driving personal vehicles, using AC more etc. Even for them, even if you believe that professional travel is the responsibility of the individual, perhaps their biggest opportunity to reduce is by a change of diet, or something else. Again, it would help to have figures on how many conference-flights per year the average academic is doing.
Is it important to the rest of us? From quick searches, it sounds like ~12% of air passengers are on business travel, so talking about personal and tourist travel seems close to an order of magnitude bigger opportunity than reducing work travel. And even then, of work travel, how much is from conferences vs e.g. sales people and consultants going to meet with customers?
Is the implied alternative to traveling to conferences doing everything online? Then how does stopping conference travel compare in emissions to doing all instruction online and dropping the commutes of university faculty on a day-to-day basis?
This article seems more like a "gotcha" than a valuable insight. A lot of people think emissions need to come down sharply, but we're all stuck in systems that make this quite difficult. Academics are not special in this regard, and I am not convinced that conference travel is even the most important source for that small group.
I hope that no would think of similarity with the US because it lack sane alternatives. Driving for i.e two days wouldn't be less harm and wouldn't be possible because you will waste couple of days in traveling and will cost more of the limited money for travel in grants. And I really hope that one day the US will have a good train system.
If I’m going to take days instead of hours, I want better than 34% more efficient.
https://www.amtrak.com/travel-green
I’m actually posting this with the ulterior motive of having someone respond with better carbon numbers for Amtrak, because I have not been able to find any.
The page you linked says up to 73% less carbon emissions, but it's hard to know what that means. I don't believe they actually mean that an Amtrak train emits 27% of the emissions of the worst commerical air travel option in the US, that sounds too high.
Perhaps they realized one fewer booking doesn't prevent the flight from happening - or change anything except inconvenience themselves?
Even if 100% of academics committed to taking the train or heck, walking to conferences, nothing is different other than a lot of wasted time. Time that might be spent much more productively doing something else.
The hypocrisy is the only real problem. But, we (both the US and UK) tolerate celebrities and politicians that fly on private jets to events just to scold us about the climate.
Ah, the good old "collective action by individuals is useless because individual action by individuals is useless" canard.
The "do something, anything!" crowd needs reality checks from time to time. Consider yourself checked...
Yes, that is useless and lazy nihilism.
OP is arguing that observed preferences are far more reliable indicators of what people actually value than what people say to surveyors/the press/reddit/HN. That's not "nilhilism", it's just a fact. Presumably, academics travel to conferences because they're getting value out of it, and they deem that value worth whatever costs they believe it incurs.
Which of course means that we can solve climate change by dividing the earth into smaller countries, all too small to have any positive effect by cleaning up their act :)
This climate change thing really has become people's new religion. Deny anything that doesn't align with the religion. Commit to meaningless gestures. Say your three hail marys. Who can suffer the most in the name of our lord? It makes you a better person, don't you know?
These aspects are more meaningless because of the way other humans behave, but it's all a question of degree. It's insignificant whether you urinate into someone's locker at the gym, so we can all do that every day, right?
I'd been keeping my used batteries and motor oil for a special trip to the recycling center, but I just threw them in the river behind my house, because it turns out nothing we do matters because climate change actually can't be fixed unless we fix corrupt multinational corporations or governments or China, or maybe climate change is all a hoax, or whatever lets you sleep at night and feel morally superior to all the other sheep. Thanks for the inspiration, friend.
This is a gross misreading of what they said. They said that one particular collective isn't big enough.
OP is trying to force a very narrow utilitarian framework in which actions are evaluated based only on their immediate consequences. By that logic, nothing any ordinary, median individual does will directly have a measurable impact on climate change.
The fallacy is that these kinds of boycotts and self-restrictions, which are part of the "religion" OP is objecting to in other replies, is the way to get large numbers of individuals to change their behavior collectively in ways that do measurably impact the bottom line. If demand for air travel drops, fewer planes will burn carbon.
The other fallacy is that utilitarianism is only one way of considering how to act ethically in the world.
Oh, that's right. Still nothing.
You are hyper-focused on a meaningless gesture that you were told to believe by people who continue to fly private jets around the world - like the academics this very thread is about. Seriously... let that sink in for a few moments. You should suffer, while they enjoy the lavishes of life. Kind of like a tv megachurch evangelist.
If you want to be principled and refuse to ever fly again - fine. It doesn't harm anyone but yourself. The world won't even thank you for this meaningless gesture and countless wasted hours. Just don't stand on a busy street corner shouting "repent" into your megaphone.
Also what's "far less efficient means", please be specific. Most of these people are not going to take solo car trips super long distances.
The UK is not isolated, and will never be. In this implausible scenario, people fly into France, drive to a ferry, cross the channel by boat, drive to the train station, etc. Increased traffic, idling, etc all adds up.
People still have business that needs to be done and they will do it. Evidenced by this hypocritical academics.
And when travel is harder, people travel less.
This fiction that air travel is so awful is really counter productive.
I see a pretty significant dip on this chart, at least.
If you check levels, you'll see no impact. Therefore we must conclude that either:
1. Emissions do not affect measured levels (carbon cycles are complex so this is possible).
2. Emissions data is wrong.
3. The tiny reduction in emissions was just too small to actually show up in measurements.
You're the one who seems hyperfocused on this. You come off like an evangelical atheist.
> Just don't stand on a busy street corner shouting "repent" into your megaphone.
Sir, this is an article about a survey.
I don't know how you expect people to pay twice the price and take twice the time to travel somewhere.
Prices are information. Tax externalities.
It's good to realize that you are almost certainly a nobody. Your life will probably have no measurable effect on the world. And that's good, because the world would be a terrible place if many people could change it individually. But when a million nobodies make a choice, the world may change.
You should act in ways that would be good for the society if everyone did the same. That's a pretty universal idea in moral philosophy. You can find it in most philosophical traditions and most religions. Utilitarianism fails on a large scale, because individual choices have a major effect on the individual but a negligible effect on the society. But if everyone makes choices that are individually good, everyone may come off worse. Civilized societies depend on people occasionally choosing the right thing over the thing that benefits them.
To be a human, you need moral agency. It's not enough to be a utilitarian automaton reacting to incentives.
Modern airliners approach 100mpg per seat.
About the same as four people in the average American car (25mpg at four people is 100mpg per seat). Compared to say, your average truck driver (like, 10? 15?), it's absolutely spectacular.
A good European train can technically do 400-500mpg per seat, so 4-5x, but load factors tend to be much lower, I believe around 80-85% for planes vs 40-50% for intercity trains.
Given that then, in the real world conventional trains are about 2-3x more efficient than planes. High speed trains lose a significant amount of that advantage - can't beat physics (air resistance).
At the end of the day, long distance travel is simply expensive however you cut the cookie. There's nothing particularly special about air travel.
For instance, a feature where you queue up for 30-60 second 1:1s with the speaker after a talk would be cool.
And then basically chat roulette for the hallway sessions. Would be cool.
Since governments are paid extensively by all the CO2 producers who have made it all about personal choice rather than government intervening in industry to fix their direct production of CO2. The outcome of this crisis are now a foregone conclusion, 1.5C is done and onwards to 2C. We are now choosing what type of dystopia we want and the one we are choosing still tracks towards 6C and its a bad choice.