In Scandinavia they have a term for it: flygskam – flight shame. This expresses the guilt feelings and shame that many are beginning to have over the use of jet travel to indulge one’s wanderlust. Another expression, tågskryt - train brag, is the corresponding positive feeling that one has when utilizing a more ecofriendly transportation option. The Germanic languages have such a lovely way of encapsulating complex concepts in a single word.
Now I could argue that it is easy enough and a bit disingenuous for Europeans to indulge in such fine-tuning of conscience given the compact nature of their countries, the travel distances and their delightful train network. But how the world travels and what impact it has on hydrocarbon emissions and global warming is a reasonable thing to ponder.
I won’t go into the details, but a little simple math yields the fact that an airplane is about 4 times as efficient as a car in taking people from A to B. The average miles per gallon of an airplane is about 100, whereas it is closer to 25 for a car in round numbers. Sounds good, right?
The problem is that air travel racks up the miles much, much faster than car travel. If the average American puts 10-12,000 miles a year on his car, then a trip to Europe more than doubles that mileage. Even a trip to California and back from the east coast increases it by half.
Between business travel and pleasure travel jet engines contribute about 2.5% of global emissions of CO2. This seems like a small number, but when normalized to a per capita statistic it takes on a different meaning. A small percentage of the world’s inhabitants use air travel. In 2018, 11% of the global population took a flight, 4% flew abroad and 1% was responsible for half of global aviation emissions.
And private jets are the worst offenders – with a typical private jet owner emitting on average 540 times the hydrocarbons the average person will emit. So it is not so much the total impact I and others are having through our privilege of our travel, but the unfairly disproportionate share we so blithely take as our own.
Yes, of course we all worked hard for our success. And business and tourism travel are major engines for the world economy. A world without jet travel would be a very different world. Nothing is simple.
Unfortunately, airplanes are unlikely to go electric in the near future – the battery and motor technologies are a long way from being capable of powering a large plane over any distance. There are efforts to optimize fuel economy and there have been significant improvements, but air travel will never get close to zero emissions.
As a relatively recent retiree and avid traveler, I struggle somewhat with the pangs of conscience. But those air travel specific pangs are just part of a package of guilt that anyone who is honest and logical has for having won the lottery of birth and opportunity. I could stop traveling, just as I could give all my money away or live in a 'tiny house' or stop taking showers or never eat meat again or spend all of my time working in homeless shelters. But I won’t.
I rationalize that I will only be doing this type of extravagant travel for a few years and will eventually ramp down to domestic road trips in an electric car. But in the meantime, I will just have to wrestle with flygskam along with all the other contradictions and paradoxes in life that confront me.
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