CPT737: Sustainability in PracticeSession 4

Flights of fancy? Air travel, carbon off-setting and personal responsibility

Richard Cowell, cowellrj@cf.ac.uk,Room 2.74, ext. 76684

Today’s session:

• Introduction to air travel, mobility and carbon offsetting from me

• Split into focus groups

 

Effects of growing air travel:

• Tripling of CO2 emissions (from FoE)

• So what explains this growth and how are we implicated?

Growth of low-cost airlines and multiplication of routes

• flights homedestinationsflights searchflight mapsflight newsFlightmapping > Flight Maps > Europe

• (C)2008 Flightmapping.com

• De facto subsidy (no taxes on aviation fuel, not paying full social costs)

Are we simply exercising rational choice?

• But where does this desire for mobility come from?

Elizabeth Shove and the pursuit of convenience

• In modern life, time has become more fragmented

• This requires us to ‘juggle’/ coordinate activities

• Technologies that help this juggling are very attractive

• But they facilitate further fragmentation, and more need for juggling

• Also see pursuit of ‘quality time’• See next slide (Shove p.183)

Elizabeth Shove and the pursuit of convenience

• In modern life, time has become more fragmented

• This requires us to ‘juggle’/ coordinate activities

• Technologies that help this juggling are very attractive

• But they facilitate further fragmentation, and more need for juggling

• Also see pursuit of ‘quality time’

Issues of identity, too:

• As ‘modern’ people, as students• As academics

Are we getting ‘locked in’ (after Tim Jackson) to spirals of ever-increasing mobility?

Carbon Off-setting:

• Commercial companies - CarbonNeutral Flights Airline flights are among the fastest growing sources of global warming gases. But you can make your travel a little greener. © The CarbonNeutral Company Limited, all rights reserved 1998-2008

• Many airlines are interested, e.g. Easyjet Home

Raises interesting questions:

• Extension of personal responsibility and reflexivity

• Increasingly used by producers of things we purchase (Rolling Stones’ carbon neutral tour, Atomic Kitten’s carbon neutral album)

• Big element of economic rationality and rational choice theory

Offsetting raises a number of issues:

• Effectiveness of schemes and effects on communities living with the projects

• Exploits global inequality• Moral question – sanctioning something

intrinsically wrong?• Cheatneutral “Helping you because you

can't help yourself”

• Or do we reject idea of off-setting, and beliefs about climate change and individual responsibility on which it rests?