The Price of Crossing the Ocean

What is the price of crossing an ocean?

The price has varied over time. For the millions of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s, they could buy a ticket beginning around $10. For those unlucky enough to board the Titanic, a first class ticket cost them around £870. A third class ticket cost between £3 and £8.

I too recently crossed the Atlantic. Having been fortunate enough to win a Marshall Scholarship for two years of study in Oxford, I recently boarded a British Airways flight bound for London for absolutely no cost. There is no doubt that I'm gratefully for this opportunity; in the first few days it has already proven to be an exceptional experience.

But in traveling to the airport, and on the plane, I was reminded of a simple fact: The price of crossing the Atlantic still doesn't factor in the full environmental cost.

Consider the deals currently available on Ryan Air's website. As a part of a deal in which they are giving away millions of airplane tickets, the price of inter-European flights is listed as costing nothing. London to Milan? Zero. Birmingham to Oslo? Zilch. Glasgow to Paris? Rien.

It's true that Ryan Air works on the same kind of sliding scale as Megabus, in which the tickets bought first cost least, while those bought later cost more, on the assumption that the airplane will make the same amount of money from one flight even if the passengers pay vastly different amounts. Based on this you could argue that Ryan Air, as much as any other airline, factors in the environmental cost of flying.

Fair enough. But my concern is simply this: That the model of Ryan Air, in which flights cost next to nothing, promotes a misunderstanding that the environmental costs of flying are negligible.

The debate reminds me of those Irish immigrants. They thought they were buying a cheap ticket away from starvation and towards land of plenty. But they lived, on average, only six years once they landed in the states.

It's not that we won't pay the cost of flying. Indeed, as the skies become more and more crowded with planes, the environmental costs increases. It's simply that we have created an economic model at odds with the natural reality. The price will most likely be payed once the natural feedback loops catch up.

And it's not that I don't like flying. Indeed, now that I'm here, I plan to do plenty of traveling. But as I travel, I have to ask a few simple questions:

•  Why have we built large, expansive parking lots around our airports with no roofs? They leave our cars exposed to the sun, rain and snow. They take a long time to access, and they use space inefficiently.
• Why, when I drink a bottle of tonic water, does the bottle do into the trash on the plane?

 More directly, you can ask:

• Why don't we create multiple story parking lots and cover the roofs with solar panels to reduce the damage to our cars, reduce travel time and generate solar power on site?
• And why don't we require airlines to recycle bottles and cans?

The reasons are many. Market uncertainities. Habit driven action. Few incentives. But the point is this: Do we really believe it costs nothing to fly between London and Milan?