In 2015, I studied abroad in Copenhagen during my junior year of college. Later that year I calculated my emissions and learned that my flight to Denmark and back had a bigger negative impact than everything else I had done that year combined. I haven’t flown since.
Individual action is not nearly as important as collective action, policy solutions, and systems change. But given the extremity of the situation we are now in -- we have just a handful of years to cut global emissions in half – everything matters, including individual action.
Most people have never flown. Flying is a privilege generally only available to those with means – and it is enormously polluting, causing serious harm to those on the front lines of climate collapse. From a policy perspective, we need to tax frequent flyers, as most flights are taken by a small number of wealthy individuals who fly very often. More importantly, we need major public investments in building a high-speed rail network connecting all major cities, with smaller rail lines or bus routes connecting smaller towns to those hubs.
Until we get those policy solutions in place, it’s imperative that as many of us as possible forgo this destructive activity. The money we would have spent on airline tickets can help support alternative systems, like rail travel. This behavior change can also help remind everyone around us that we are indeed in a climate emergency, and therefore we need to change how we are behaving in response to that emergency. Let it be a wakeup call that can make those around us think, discuss, and act.
With such little time to make major changes, we should be pushing on all of the fronts that we can. If we succeed in halving emissions in the next several years, maybe we can go back to flying then – ideally in electric planes. But for now, we need to refrain, and more importantly, to push for systemic changes.