Should flights be banned?

Taxing aviation fuel was at the centre of the talk on climate change yesterday in Edinburgh.

The Flight Free UK movement organised an event on that topic at the Eric Liddell Centre in Morningside, where around 30 people came to understand the impact of aviation on climate and how individuals can make a difference.

The director, Anna Hughes said the whole movement is asking 100,000 people to pledge not to fly in 2020.

She said: “The aim is that we try to inspire people to make behaviour change but as part of a collective whole so you don’t feel like you are one person not making a difference, you can feel part of a social movement.”

The movement, which has now a bit less than 4,000 signatories, wants the government to take action by taxing aviation fuel, banning airlines’ advertisement and banning airports’ expansions.

Ben Parker, a parliamentary Green candidate, insisted on the fact that taxing aviation would reflect the true value of travel.

He said: “We know that unabated growth in aviation is not compatible with meeting climate targets but other parties fail to grasp this, supporting policies like Heathrow expansion.

“Greens call for measures like the introduction of a frequent flyer levy and the replacement of the present no-tax regime surrounding aviation to tackle the problem.”

Hughes mentioned that “currently aviation fuel is not taxed which seems insane given that we tax petrol and diesel, and kerosene is far more polluting, so why don’t we tax it?”

A leaked study on aviation taxation funded by the European Commission, completed in 2018, showed that if kerosene was taxed for flights within and departing from Europe, the number of passengers would decrease by 11% and so would CO2 emissions.

This study demonstrated that taxing the minimum rate of €0.33/litre (£0.28/ litre) would have no effect on jobs or GDP.

With regard to a possible impact on the industry, Hughes said: “It’s an industry that creates employment but we must remember that aviation is not the only industry that creates employment and that a campaign like this is not going to resort in the collapse of the industry overnight.”

UK-wise, introducing an aviation fuel tax would cut down CO2 emissions by 12%, knowing that civil aviation accounts for 6% of the UK’s total emissions per year, according to the Civil Aviation Authority.

The aviation industry is responsible for between 2% and 5% of global CO2 emissions and for 3% of the EU’s emissions according to that study.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends an individual carbon output of 2.3 tonnes per year, however, “the European average is 7 to 8 tonnes, so it’s way too high, and on an individual level, you could emit 2.5 tonnes in a single flight.

If you’re flying transatlantic, you could emit up to 3 tonnes and even short-haul flights emit about 1.5 tonne,” Hughes said.

She continued: “We’re talking about per passenger on the plane, not the plane as a whole. So when you start to look at it in those terms, you can see that flying has a huge climate impact for us in the West and it doesn’t really have any place in a sustainable future.”

This British movement takes after the Flygfritt movement which started running in 2019 in Sweden and which obtained 14,500 people pledging not to fly.

Hughes insisted on the fact that it was not a flight-shaming movement.

She said: “I get asked a lot about flight-shaming and that is pointing the finger and telling people they are bad for getting on a plane whereas flight shame is an internal thing that you feel, it’s a climate conscience that you have when you take a flight because you know that flights are not great.

“If people naturally feel that, because we educate them about the climate impact of flights, then that’s fine and if that motivates them to flight less, then that’s good but we definitely don’t do flight-shaming.” she added.

Cleaner alternatives to planes such as electric or solar aeroplanes are currently being studied and are considered.

For Anna Hughes, “it’s an interesting idea but the short answer is that the technology for electric planes and solar planes to be viable will take longer to develop than the time we have.

“We’ve been given less than 12 years by the IPCC to significantly turn things around, and it will take longer than that to develop this.”