Air Travel I: Warning Sign

by Ben Carmichael  |  April 11, 2008  |  More By Ben Carmichael

Last week U.S. and European officials signed the OpenSkies pact. U.S. officials, ever eager for market rule, saw it as an opportunity to reduce international fares through increased competition, even while fuel prices hit 4 clams a bucket. But as has historically been the case whenever this former colony of ours signs a pact with its former colonizer, confusion followed. It was time for a debate sold as news.

Some newspapers sold the story of low prices. Still others told another story -- of airlines using this as an opportunity to attract more high paying customers, precisely what they need at such times. Whatever the pact means for international prices, it does mean one thing for sure: more airplanes flying more often.

Americans don't tend to think of airlines as a growth industry. Just this week pictures of stranded American Airline passengers have graced the cover of the NY Times online. And last week, my family lost close to a thousand dollars when Skybus filed for bankruptcy.

And yet, the industry is poised for major growth overseas. The industrialization of China and India, often discussed in terms of vehicles added to the road, will afford millions of people the opportunity to travel -- people who have, so far, been trapped as a class of laborers, not travelers.

Today, the airline industry is currently only responsible for around 2% of the world's daily greenhouse emissions. Yet the industry is growing at more than 5% a year. By 2050, there could be twice as many flights as there are now, making the industry responsible for 10% of anthropogenic climate change.

Together the EU and US account for more than half of all global air traffic. It's estimated that the OpenSkies pact alone would add another 26 million air passengers over five years. This at a time when the UK is attempting to green it's aviation industry.

The European Federation for Transport and the Environment pressure group said, "This will lead to some 3.5 million tonnes of extra CO2 emissions annually. This is about as much as the expected reduction of aviation emissions resulting from the inclusion of aviation into the European emissions trading system."

I feel particularly caught between the desire and the guilt of travel. This fall, I head to graduate school in the UK, where all of Europe is at my fingertips for low fares. Ryan Air advertises fares beginning at £5. Stockholm? Madrid? Milan? For as much as a pint, you're there.

But this is the problem with these fares: they lure you into thinking that air travel has few, if any, associated costs. It's a classic example of market externalities, and the need to include the full cost of adverse environmental impacts into the price.

It's also a classic example of the industrialized world partying at the expense of the poor. People expect to travel; affluence has made travel seem to people less like a privilege, and more like a right. They expect to travel. This despite the fact that the luxury of increased air travel comes at the cost of degrading our air and our water, the land and its people -- the very things we often travel to see. It's a price we simply can't afford.

What to do? I'm not sure yet. But stay tuned. I'm going to return to this topic as I look into who's doing what with biofuels, etc.