Flying: Guilty Pleasure or a Lost Opportunity to Combat Climate Change?

Evidence-Based Policy is Bigger than You or Your Feelings — Part I

Join me on a journey in imagination. In the last couple of weeks, has someone beseeched you to fly less, to buy more local food or to save energy? Remember the feeling of guilt they brought upon you. Or maybe you yourself are climate-conscious and keep haranguing your acquaintances and friends about these topics. And for sure, doing one (or even all) of these things will make you feel good, warm you with an inner glow and assure you that you did your part. Because in the end, don’t we all share responsibility for the future of our descendants and our planet? In the coming weeks we’ll have a close look at the activities suggested above to find out what we’re getting wrong about them and why. And for most of them, we get it horribly wrong. We’ll start with perhaps the most obvious and yet insidious suggestion: flying less.

Clip Your Wings for a Warm Feeling or Soar the Skies and Save the Planet?

But first, let me be very clear about some ground truths before we get muddled up in misconceptions: climate change is real; at least the majority of it is man-made; left unchecked, its consequences for everyone and everything will be dire and we should do everything in our power to slow it down, stop it and ideally reverse it. My point is not that we should throw up our hands in the air like we just don’t care. Rather, I want to stress — really stress — that it profoundly matters what we do to combat climate change. There is a whole philosophy behind this which I’m drawing upon, called effective altruism, which you should definitely check out. Either take a peak or fully delve into it, it’s worth it.

Having put that out of the way, we can now turn our attention to airplanes. I’ll assume that it’s common knowledge that airplanes, among other things, release tons of CO2 and thereby directly mess up the climate. Objectively, that’s bad. So reducing it by flying less has to be good. Right? Not necessarily. First, let’s get our facts straight. All aircraft emissions together (CO2 + everything else that comes out of the rear end of an airplane) are responsible for just 3.5% of anthropogenic climate change according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This might be less than you initially thought to be the case. Additionally, you might be accustomed to annoyingly full planes (you can thank the Inspection Paradox for that one) though actually more than half of Americans don’t take a single flight in any given year. An additional quarter of the population reports 1–2 flights per year, not exactly qualifying as frequent flyers by any measure.

Now let’s say you’re one of the few people which actually do fly frequently and you’re very motivated to save the planet and cut your air travels in half. In some jobs, such as consulting or sales, this could very well kill your career while it would make life at least a lot harder for many other jobs. A transatlantic airplane exhales about 0.09 tons of CO2 per hour per passenger, so let’s just say one transatlantic flight amounts to one ton of additional CO2 per passenger for the sake of simplicity. For the UK, this amounts to around 1.8 tons of CO2 equivalent per resident per year for aviation. If that sounds like much to you, better don’t think about the ~36 gigatons of CO2 we release every year into the atmosphere overall. So is foregoing flights really the best thing you can do? Is it even a worthwhile thing to do?

Charities are heavily power law-distributed, meaning that a few charities do most of the work with an incredible efficiency while the majority effectively just wastes money (especially if you consider opportunity costs). Luckily, there are some organizations which thoroughly investigate charities and their effectiveness. For our case we’ll of course look at charities promising to reduce CO2 emissions and price them per ton of prevented CO2 emission. According to an investigation, the most effective charities require between $0.01 and $12 per ton of CO2. So even with conservative estimates, just over one dollar to a charity such as for instance Cool Earth could offset your entire transatlantic flight. Would you really rather skip an important meeting that could advance your career or a well-deserved vacation than pay $1? Hell, you could even use your flight-induced guilt to donate $5 and do so much for the environment than if you wouldn’t have taken the flight in the first place!

If we want to reach the reduction recommended by the IPCC we need to do far more than just foregoing flights! Source: Statista

Some clever people might think now: wouldn’t it be better to do both? Flying less and donating to effective charities? Absolutely! The thing is however, you probably won’t do that. Research shows that we only have a certain do-good-budget and even mentally negate bad deeds with our good actions in a process referred to as moral compensation. Halving your yearly flights might give you such a moral boost that you simply don’t see the necessity to donate anymore. Which is incredibly inefficient considering that for just $10 you could offset 10 transatlantic flights which is probably more than you will take on average! The really cool thing is that even if the calculations / estimates here are off by a lot, it wouldn’t change anything for the suggested actions. Oftentimes the ideal thing to do and the practically most useful thing to do aren’t congruent at all, because the ideal might not be practical.

Other people might complain that this is just throwing money at problems or buying indulgences without the necessary changes in behavior which are needed to triumph over climate change. To them, I say: thank you! Because this misconception is actually the main point of this article. Two main reasons why we engage in most of these conspicuously good acts are warm glow and guilt. Doing something good in an unemotional, businesslike manner just doesn’t feel good to us. Empathy is powerful in that it allows us to connect with individuals but it also leads us to narrowly focus our attention on an emotionally-laden individual spotlight, losing sight of the big picture in the process (the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an entire book about the pitfalls of empathy in the context of charity etc.). We want this warm glow gained by helping individuals, not the diffuse knowledge of doing the most good with a given amount of money. But while the African child you write letters to and support with money may be eternally grateful to you, the many more lives you could have saved with an effective charity weigh more heavily than your satisfaction with yourself. We have a duty, especially with regard to professed altruism and donations, to think about effectiveness and evidence-based behavior.

Speaking of duties, let’s get to the second point mentioned above: guilt. Year after year we are being told that climate change is a responsibility of us all and that we all have to consume less material and energy. In itself that is of course true. But let’s not forget that responsibility is not shared equally. About two-thirds of all anthropogenic climate change-related emissions are caused by just 90 companies (mostly energy companies relying on coal and oil), more than 900 gigatons of CO2 since the industrial revolution! Shifting the blame to consumers may be a nifty PR strategy but is not exactly rooted in reality. In a society where a sharing economy is taking off and we’re constantly decreasing the amount of material needed to produce our goods in a more and more energy-efficient manner it’s hard not to blame the main culprits. So don’t let them get away with this.

In summary, this is what you should do according to evidence-based policy / effective altruism:

- Donate to highly effective charities.

- Lobby your government representative for evidence-based policy, especially in the energy sector!

- Spread the word on the real climate culprits and evidence-based behavior in general.

- And of course if you really want to cancel your flight to Hawaii: go ahead but remember that this alone won’t make much of a dent in the war for our planet.

Let me know what you think of it and whether you know of any interesting avenues to contribute meaningfully to progress against climate change!