After a period of decline in some countries, business travel is on the rise. Total spending is expected to have grown by 7.4% in the UK, 3.1% in the US and 15% in China, according to the Global Business Travel Association, with $1.25tn predicted to have been spent globally on business flights this year.

If you want to know who most of these business travellers are, four of the top 10 biggest spenders are the giant accountancy firms PwC, EY, Deloitte and Accenture, which are busy crossing continents still cleaning up from the financial crises they were woven into. Two others are aviation business themselves, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, kept company by ExxonMobil and a few others.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. New, seamless video conferencing technology and businesses keen to save staff time and company money were supposed to be reading the last rites to business travel, especially flights. Other factors appeared to work against the industry, such as growing security concerns, lasting impacts from the financial crises creating a new, more austere corporate culture and, of course, climate change.

But it seems the environmentally weightless economy has become long, if not permanently delayed at its departure gate. Why is this? From its earliest association with a glamorous, wealthy elite – which gave us the term jet set – flying has remained tenaciously aspirational.

A working paper for the Global Sustainability Institute highlights the growth of perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of business travel: private jet ownership and hire. NetJets, a company owned by the billionaire Warren Buffet, is one of the major providers of such a service. Its has a fleet of more than 700 planes, 200 more than the German airline Lufthansa, and it flies to 1,900 airports in 100 countries.

But, apart from the continuing appeal and status of flying around the world, aviation could well be experiencing a pattern very familiar to observers of historical technology development and energy use. The emergence of new technologies to perform a task already achieved by other means – in this case the technology to connect people without the need for travel – rarely, if ever, fully substitutes for the old methods but rather leads to a net increase in overall activity.

For example, rather than substituting for fossil fuels, renewable energy technologies are currently just adding power generating capacity alongside the continued global consumption of coal, oil and gas. Similarly, the ease of establishing global relationships through social media, Skype and low-cost telecoms is likely to increase travel so that people meet face-to-face. What this demonstrates is that technological development alone cannot deliver sustainability, but needs to run alongside policy and regulatory changes too.



Heathrow third runway decision put off until at least summer 2016 Read more

Concern about global warming appears to apply no meaningful brake on aviation expansion. A frequent and startling failure to connect those issues may explain why the Confederation of British Industry felt able to lobby aggressively in favour of a new runway at Heathrow in London. This happened just as parts of the UK were reeling from record-breaking floods due to extreme weather events and the Cop 21 UN climate change conference was happening in Paris. When the runway decision was delayed, ostensibly for environmental decisions, though many suggest it was to do with political considerations around the upcoming mayoral election, there were cries from big business groups.

International aviation has avoided inclusion in the scope of international climate agreements, receiving a free ride on efforts to reduce emissions elsewhere. In spite of expectations that, this time, an agreement in Paris would include some reference to a mechanism for the industry it appears to have escaped attention again.

The aviation industry body IATA promises carbon neutral growth of aviation by 2020 and a 50% emissions cut by 2050, much less than what scientists says is needed. Professor Alice Bows-Larkin, partner representative at the Manchester Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says that IATA’s figures rely on a controversial and unproven mix of carbon trading, offsetting, efficiency and biofuels: “They think they’re special and wriggle out of sectoral targets, their numbers don’t add up. They are saying: ‘We are doing something, so leave us alone.’”

One novel way to begin squaring all these issues is suggested by Prof Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre. He says that if demand for business travel continues to grow it means the industry is, in effect, expecting other sectors to compensate for its apathy, or for those poor communities living in climatically vulnerable parts of globe to suffer the impacts of ever-higher temperatures.

There could be a quick win to reduce emissions, says Anderson, that might change the culture of business travel for good. Take business flyers and airlines expressing climate concern at their word, or call their bluff. “If they don’t want demand reduced, but think that climate is important, they should remove business and first class seats from planes and make everyone travel economy, that would significantly reduce the carbon emissions from their planes.”