The Ethics of Long-Distance Flying

[Iam9man]

Almost all climate scientists agree that the planet is warming, that this warming is heavily affected by man’s activities and that flying is particularly damaging to the environment. My understanding of the latter is that it’s to do with where exactly in the atmosphere the aircraft’s exhaust gases are released that’s particularly damaging.

So if you more or less accept the above, how should we feel about long-distance flying? Is it something we should be cutting down, eliminating entirely, or enjoying whilst we still can? Is it ethically OK to fly long distance under any circumstances? If so, which ones?

 

Please note: this is a philosophical/ethical discussion. Whilst some mention of the science is fine, this is not a place to discuss whether global warming is “real” / caused by man or not / caused by Obama / caused by Leftists / etc.

Edited September 3, 2022 by Iam9man

[Iam9man]

I’ll start. I have ethical concerns about doing something which is known to be very damaging to the environment.

 

From a business travel perspective, many organisations/fora have decided to ignore all our learnings from lockdown and pointedly not making meetings/events hybrid or remote anymore. In-person attendance is expected/required, potentially in another continent.

 

From a personal travel perspective, there are many far-flung places I’ve always wanted to visit but never had the funds. Should I save those funds, I would love to visit them, just as others I know have been doing over the last ~20 years of cheap air travel.

 

From a family travel perspective, I have family on other continents whom I have never visited. The only time I see them is when they fly long distance to see me.

 

I honestly cannot square any scenarios with what I perceive to be the urgent environmental need to not fly long distance. I accept this will likely mean I will not do the personal or family travel, but I’m not sure where I land (pun intended) with business travel if it’s the only way of attending (which it frankly shouldn’t be).

[Anomaly Q3Xr]

I feel that we should be doing everything possible to cut down on long-distance flying. I don't think it is practical to eliminate it entirely, but we should at least try to minimise it. I definitely don't think we should enjoy it whilst we can. We should do everything in our power to eliminate the damage we are causing. I have flown in the past, the last time in 2008, and I refuse to ever fly again. There are a lot of places I'd love to visit that are thousands of miles away, but I would gladly make do without seeing them in person to do as little harm to the environment as I can.

[EmeraldIce]

A lot of us have family and friends living long distance, want to open our eyes to more of the world, or would like our children to do so. While I do care about the environment and am concerned about its future, I don't think eliminating the only feasible way to travel long distances is the way to do it. I think there are plenty of other things we can do, such as cutting down on industrialization, encouraging individuals to live a self-sustainable lifestyle such that they're less dependent on industrial goods, and expanding and incentivizing public transportation. More effort should also be put into solar energy, including solar-powered vehicles and the development of solar air transport. As far as air travel goes, I think everyone should have the ability to get anywhere they need/want to be within a close vicinity of their desired travel time, though I also do think that if there are multiple flights going the same path within a reasonable amount of time (at least every other day), it could be a good idea to cut down on the number of flights offered if the planes on that path are consistently not full.

 

On another note, if flights are limited compared to demand, costs are going to skyrocket. My mom was in China when COVID hit, and she found herself stuck there, potentially illegally as she'd skimped on the paperwork upon landing since no one had ever bothered to check in the past. It took a huge toll on her physical and mental health, especially with authorities going door to door looking for people just like her. It took her months of effort, networking, logging on constantly to check for new flights, and something like $5-10K out of pocket, just to be able to go home. Could you imagine what it must be like for someone in a much more urgent situation and who cannot afford that ticket? Some people might suggest screening for the necessity of travel to alleviate this problem, but that's not quite realistic either. It would take a lot of effort, a lot of money, a lot of time (that emergency travelers cannot afford), and a lot of moral gray area. After all, where do you draw the line? Once upon a time, when my mom first moved abroad to work, it wasn't considered a necessity for her family to see her.

[Monke Jimmy]

My family needs to fly long-distance because half of my family live 7 time zones away. I don't know why people need to travel so much for business or pleasure in the first place, let alone environment and economic concerns. There are mountains, plains, forests, lakes, deserts, cities, sunsets/sunrises, and wild animals on almost every continent. Especially with the existence of zoos and the internet, I don't have any reason to travel overseas other than for the people you love. 

[Muffin123]

1 hour ago, Iam9man said:

I honestly cannot square any scenarios with what I perceive to be the urgent environmental need to not fly long distance.

Immigration. Not all immigrants live close to the country they plan to move in.

 

Every immigrant moves to another country in order to get a better opportunity in life and, very likely, for their family. How necessary is this step depends on their point of view but, to give an example, people who live in countries deeply affected by climate change, which would make their reason an emergency from an environmental standpoint, would be the most affected by banning long distance flying 

[everywhere and nowhere]

I absolutely think that long-distance flying should be reduced, flying shouldn't be de facto subsidised in a way which makes, for example, intra-Europe flights cheaper than travelling by train on the same route. "Enjoying it while we still can" would be the worst solution: the time to act is now and the longer we procrastinate, the harder it will be to alleviate the problems.

However, the problem doesn't exist for me personally. I can't afford travelling and, first of all - I'm really scared of commercial flying. (I could hypothetically take a short panorama flight, at least when it comes to mental concerns only, I'm much less afraid of that.) The very thought reminds me of the Smolensk disaster, or the Kabaty Forest disaster - the plane crashed less that ten kilometers away from my home. I really don't care that flying is supposedly "statistically the safest mode of travel" - I intuitively perceive it as something which, in an admittedly rare case when something already does go wrong, gives the lowest chance of survival.

[JimmyJazz]

I have no issues with your standard commercial flights but private jets should be outlawed in my opinion. 

[RoseGoesToYale]

I think it's unethical to stop people from traveling long distance and quickly, because there are times when people need to (to see a loved one, to escape a dictatorship, to get an abortion or other life-saving healthcare, etc.) What we should be doing is finding ways to cut down or eliminate emissions from long-distance travel without sacrificing efficiency, or instead possibly improving it with more advanced technology. Unfortunately, thanks to capitalism, we choose technological stagnation.

 

I agree with JimmyJazz, private jets should be outlawed, though actually not on account of long-distance travel... they produce unholy amounts of pollution by going short distances frequently and with very few passengers.

 

We should also strive to eliminate emissions on pleasure travel, especially cruises (they emit 4x the CO2 per passenger than flying). If you're hellbent on spending hundreds of dollars to either get drunk or dysentery on the high seas, you should have to board one of these.

[Epitaph]

Long distance flying wouldn't be a problem if our technology development wasn't stifled into forced dependancy on things with harmful emissions to begin with. But I've got to give it some slack since that's all hypothetical territory.

 

As a country bumpkin, the time's that I've traveled on foot or with slower means of travel have changed my opinions about travel itself. I can't deny what air travel has given the world in terms of speed, although I have my doubts about speed itself. I think in some ways, our world's focus on speed is in part blinding us to what needs to change, while subtracting quality of life in certain areas. 

 

Airplanes, to me are an example of this to a certain degree. You get on one, point A to B, that's it. There's not much room to be human in that, the same as being stuck in a traffic jam all day. The times of my life where I've walked or taken trains, the interaction with people and the sights I saw are core to the human experience, I think. But of course I know that some people "need" to travel, and that some things like food "need" to travel quickly. That's okay. What does this have to do with the ethics of dumping particles into the atmosphere?

 

I wouldn't miss planes if they all suddenly dissappeared because of my perspective and thoughts on them. But I think society's views at large about aircraft differ from mine, and I think if you're ever going to sell the idea to the public that flying is doing harm, you need to present a motiff other than "it pollutes." The cargo tankers we ship across the ocean run on crude oil, and they alone pollute at the rate of a city's monthly to yearly output in a matter of hours. I'm sure those tankers contend and beat out airplanes as well.

 

I think, honestly, in this race, ethics can never be the selling point, because the average person doesn't care about ethics when they're surrounded by a world that readily lacks ethics but tries to pretend it has them. Case and point. I'm aware of what airplanes do the atmosphere. I don't use them because I prefer a personal journey at my own pace rather than a point A to B trip with nothing in between.

 

What has my impact caused? Has it stopped any planes? No. That's because you'd need a million more people like me to all stop taking planes for personal travel purposes. And even if that were to happen, the oil tankers would still run, we'd still use the internet(which the bulk of it runs off coal power), we'd still hack and slash burn fields, nutritionally delete crop fields, and rely on all the other systemic problems produced but not controlled by the common folk.

 

Ethically I don't think it matters because ethically no matter what we do it amounts to a grain of sand while the mountain sits in the distance. Our world is too addicted to the benefits of speed that technology creates to give it up. Greed and ease of use will then beat ethics, every time. I think the only hope when we discuss environmental issues is not to use ethics as a point to address issues, but technology and a push forward.

 

We won't solve the problem by deleting airplanes or x polluter and trying to win people over morally. There'll be too many complaints for the luxury that was had and lost, which will generate pushback against "green" movements. However, making airplanes cleaner or nearly pollution free would solve the problem, while maintaining the status quo everybody was addicted to and adamantly refusing to give up.

 

 

[Muffin123]

1 hour ago, Monke Ilahi said:

I don't know why people need to travel so much for business or pleasure in the first place, let alone environment and economic concerns. There are mountains, plains, forests, lakes, deserts, cities, sunsets/sunrises, and wild animals on almost every continent.

Are you familiar with the concept of The Third World and/or the continent of Africa? 

[Monke Jimmy]

11 minutes ago, Muffin123 said:

Are you familiar with the concept of The Third World and/or the continent of Africa? 

I have been there. That's where my family lives 😂

Everything I described exists in both my home country and the country I visit, except the animals, the most exciting of which also exist in my local zoo (which, to be fair, is a very large zoo). 

And because of Westernization, the difference in culture is similar to what I'd get if I visited certain stores or restaurants in my city. 

[Muffin123]

 

13 minutes ago, Monke Ilahi said:

I have been there. That's where my family lives 😂

Everything I described exists in both my home country and the country I visit, except the animals, the most exciting of which also exist in my local zoo (which, to be fair, is a very large zoo). 

And because of Westernization, the difference in culture is similar to what I'd get if I visited certain stores or restaurants in my city. 

You mean living there, right? 

[Lilibulero]

I've got three flights I need to take,for visiting people I promised I'd see, all because there's no easy way to go over land, but that'll be it for me, I'll be able to do any other personal travel by train.

 

Unfortunately, my freelance job requires me to take flights, so I'll soon be retiring from it.

[Muffin123]

6 minutes ago, Lilibulero said:

Unfortunately, my freelance job requires me to take flights, so I'll soon be retiring from it.

Spoiler

Out of topic but, what's your freelance job? 

 

[ElloryJaye]

There are some people who literally have no choice.  Canada has small communities that can only be reached by air or (for a couple of months in the winter) ice road—someone in a location like that who needs urgent medical care often must fly if they want to live.

 

That being said, more than half of all airline travel is being done for "business reasons", and a lot of that could be done by telepresence or less-polluting transport, so I would class those flights as unethical.  Even factory inspections and such could be done via drones that get mailed from location to location.  We need to work on both the culture and the tech to reduce business travel as much as possible.

 

Electric aircraft may also help to some extent if we can ever build one that can take a commercial-sized payload.

 

[Muffin123]

Well, any way, I'm still waiting to know if they mean actually living in the country and not just visit it

[Monke Jimmy]

24 minutes ago, Muffin123 said:

You mean living there, right? 

We visit for a month at a time. I've been out to the reef and the beach, seen the countryside and animals, and been through all the sights of the city. 

[Muffin123]

4 minutes ago, ElloryJaye said:

That being said, more than half of all airline travel is being done for "business reasons"

Hey, I agree with you on those flights being unethical but I would love to confirm this. Do you have any links I could read? 

[Muffin123]

Just now, Monke Ilahi said:

We visit for a month at a time. I've been out to the reef and the beach, seen the countryside and animals, and been through all the sights of the city. 

You can't judge a country based on what you get as a tourist 

[Monke Jimmy]

32 minutes ago, Muffin123 said:

You can't judge a country based on what you get as a tourist 

1. We have family there and are there for a month at a time, so we have experience with what living there might be like. 

2. The tourist experience is the topic at hand. 

[ElloryJaye]

1 hour ago, Muffin123 said:

Hey, I agree with you on those flights being unethical but I would love to confirm this. Do you have any links I could read? 

The article I was remembering was apparently this one from the BBC, but a quick skim suggests my recollection was not entirely accurate:  it says that 90% of business travel emissions are due to flying and says nothing about the proportion of flying that is business travel.  I may have been conflating it with something from a comment section on another site entirely.

 

[Muffin123]

16 minutes ago, Monke Ilahi said:

1. We have family there and are there for a month at a time, so we have experience with what living there might be like. 

2. The tourist experience is the topic at hand. 

a) Let me ask you this: Do you seriously believe any of your family members actually wanted you to see what it's like to be there? 

 

b) If you genuinely believe that the First World and the Third World are barely different from each other, then why do you think that immigrants are willing to take low-income jobs in your country even when they have enough education to be working as a doctor in their own? Why do you think a lot of them are willing to risk their lives just to get into the First World?  

 

c) Also, the topic in question is the effects of long distance traveling and one of my arguments I mentioned is that we need to take into account immigration, specially immigration thanks to the effects of climate change in other countries and your response was to pretend that these effects do not exist and economical labels such as Third World country barely have any meaning all based on the fact that you visit your family from another country from time to time. Telling you that you being a tourist is not enough to properly judge it, specially when your instinct is to mention "everything that exists in my home country exists there" is not telling that you are not on topic

[Monke Jimmy]

@Muffin123

I wonder what your experience with third world countries is. 

The fundamental difference between first, second, and third world countries is not economic, it's political. Poverty and wealth exist in both types of places. I have seen the slums, they are hard to hide.

Your thing about education is weird because I know people who have good educations and come here and get good jobs. In fact, people get visas specifically because of the importation of skilled workers. There is a big difference between refugees and other types of immigrants. 

The fact remains that many of the things you'd want to see as a tourist, you can see something similar in my country anyways, making long distance travel not worth it. 

[Muffin123]

1 hour ago, Monke Ilahi said:

@Muffin123

I wonder what your experience with third world countries is. 

The fundamental difference between first, second, and third world countries is not economic, it's political. Poverty and wealth exist in both types of places. I have seen the slums, they are hard to hide.

Your thing about education is weird because I know people who have good educations and come here and get good jobs. In fact, people get visas specifically because of the importation of skilled workers. There is a big difference between refugees and other types of immigrants. 

The fact remains that many of the things you'd want to see as a tourist, you can see something similar in my country anyways, making long distance travel not worth it. 

Economics and Politics are not disconnected with each other specially in this type of conversation. For example, one of the things that determines a Third World country is their Human Development Index (HDI). According the W.H.O, HDI is defined as: 

 

The HDI is a summary composite measure of a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge and standard of living. It is a measure of a country's average achievements in three dimensions of human development:

• a long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth;
• knowledge, as measured by mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling; and
• a decent standard of living, as measured by GNI per capita in PPP terms in US$. 

 

GNI is an economical concept. Furthermore, money in general affects not only the salary but every important pillar that affects its development. You can't have a good health care center without the budget for it, you can't have a good educational sector without the budget for it, etc. 

 

Also, having poverty is not what differentiates us between each other, is the level of it. And, once again, this is going to affect the political climate.

 

Just because you know cases of people who got the exact same kind of job as they would have in their home country, doesn't mean that you should dismiss the multiple stories that immigrants tend to have. The whole "middle class in their home country, low class in their new one" is the biggest stereotype here and visas, like the ones you described, are basically a lottery ticket in practice. And you don't have to fall into the refugee category in order to be desperate enough to get out of your home country even if you with the risk of your own life. 

 

Just look at my country, no one here is in the type of situation when they can argue refugee status but the whole "traveling in yawl to Puerto Rico" is basically the national joke at this point. 

 

And again, I'm not disagreeing with long distance travel being selfish from a tourist standpoint, I'm saying that long distance travel and the access to it affects immigration, and trying to talk about whether or not this should be allowed internationally based purely on tourism and business transactions, it's just trying to simplify a subject that, almost like every political decision, is complex at its very nature

[Monke Jimmy]

@Muffin123

1. You have insulted me by calling me a tourist in my mother's home. 

2. You have continued to talk about me judging a country that my family is from, whose citizens I've had hundreds of conversations with, from wealthy business owners in the cities to homeless men on the beach, that I have been in for months year after year, a country that you know absolutely nothing about. 

3. You have continued to misuse the outdated term "Third World Country" (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/04/372684438/if-you-shouldnt-call-it-the-third-world-what-should-you-call-it#:~:text=The First World consisted of,assigned to the Third World.) and while doing so have made a straw man argument by giving me the definition of HDI instead of connecting it back to the idea of first/second/third world countries, which is ABSOLUTELY a political thing https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world_countries.htm

 

I really hope that you are a troll. I am not going to be responding anymore lest you continue to go down the list of logical fallacies. 

[Iam9man]

Please stay on topic and avoid personal insults.

 

Iam9man

Reports Co-Administrator

[Iam9man]

Thanks all for your thoughts.

 

Several of you have indicated, to paraphrase, that you feel it would be wrong to stop long-distance flying in all circumstances. 

 

My (shallow) understanding of the science is that the sort of environmental issues scientists were expecting in the 2050s have actually started happening in the 2020s.

 

So my (hopefully) hypothetical follow-up question would be, if long-distance flying were to be scheduled to be essentially banned (except for emergencies) in say 5 years, would this change your view on long-distance flying today?

[Muffin123]

@Monke Ilahi

 

1. Alright, VFR traveler. 

 

2. I don't know about that country but I know about what it's like to live in the "developing" world as you guys want to call it, and needlessly to say I have experience with VFR travelers because my American cousin falls into that category. If my American cousin thought she can speak for any of us because of her experiences here the same way as any of us, it would be ridiculous even if she gets to talk to the people here. Your reasons for traveling are more understandable than a tourist, but just because you went to one of your family members' home instead to an hotel, doesn't mean you have the authority to down right trying to explain to a person from a "developing" country that economic concerns are not important enough to immigrate. 

 

3. I read your article.

 

a) It says that the term originated from the Cold War and it said because many countries in the Third World were impoverished, it came used to refer to the poor world. Just a clarification, just because a word was used to define one thing in particular doesn't mean that the new meaning is invalid. Words have meaning depending on its use. There are words in my dictionary that have definitions completely unrelated to what they used to mean, that doesn't mean we are using the word in "the wrong way", it means that its definition changed with the times.

 

b) The logic behind it is that is confusing because if a country has anything that could be better than another country then, "why are we calling it third world?" Isn't this the same logic that people from middle class and higher use to dismiss the problems of anyone from a lower class than them? The whole "how can you be poor if you [insert one particular thing that would require money to have while ignoring every other issue they have]"? 

 

c) The other part of the argument is that is offensive. To who? I would be classified as a Third World country citizen and, as you can see, I don't care about using that term, and every time I have seen other citizens talk about these issues, they don't care either. The only group of people who are obsessed with using it, are politicians. Funny enough, it's more likely to see people mocking the term because most of the time, it feels as a way to try to sugarcoat our situation. And the only people who I have seen wanting to explain to the rest of humanity that we shouldn't use it because it's "out-of-date, insulting and confusing" are from the First World. 

 

Also, I used HDI because as the term is currently used, HDI is a good way to classify it. Words, again, evolve through time, and the article that you yourself send me (The NHS one), explained how this particular use came to be. 

 

But even if you were right that the term itself is bad, the reality is still the same. People from "developing countries" have drastically different lives than the people from the "developed" world and most of them would be categorized in the "economical" immigration because their situation doesn't apply for refugee status. The nature of visas, like working visas specially, are more based on luck than anything else, this characteristic would get worse depending on the laws of the country in question. Most of the immigrants from "developing" countries would go there, knowing full well that they might have to work in a low-income job even if in their native country they would be middle class citizens because they know than it still is in comparison a better life standard than what they would get back home. 

 

You want to argue that I used logical fallacies but your entire argument is based on anecdotal evidence as a VFR traveler to argue against someone that actually lives in one of these "developing" countries to dismiss the idea of economical immigration and that you don't know why people would need to move for environmental concerns because "There are mountains, plains, forests, lakes, deserts, cities, sunsets/sunrises, and wild animals on almost every continent" despite Africa being the perfect example of a continent that is deeply affected by climate change:

Quote

9 hours ago, Muffin123 said:

I don't know why people need to travel so much for business or pleasure in the first place, let alone environment and economic concerns. 

9 hours ago, Muffin123 said:

There are mountains, plains, forests, lakes, deserts, cities, sunsets/sunrises, and wild animals on almost every continent.

 

 

(I had in error in the post, I'm not old enough here to know how to fix it) 

 

(An example of studies talking about Africa and climate change: https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/climate-change-triggers-mounting-food-insecurity-poverty-and-displacement-africa) 

 

And then, you made a big deal of trying to argue based on semantics, one of them is unironically based on the idea that a term I use to talk about "developing" countries is offensive towards them even if I belong to a "developing" country myself and then victimize yourself for me using hypervole when you have no problem dismissing the "developing" world as "pretty similar to the west". 

 

Before accusing someone of using logical fallacies, take a look at yourself

[Muffin123]

25 minutes ago, Iam9man said:

 

Please stay on topic and avoid personal insults.

 

Iam9man

Reports Co-Administrator

Honestly, if calling them a tourist is an insult then sorry, I viewed it as using hyperbole