The No-Jet Set: They’ve Given Up Flying to Save
the Planet
With airplanes producing a large amount of
climate-warming emissions, a growing number of travelers are signing pledges to
keep their journeys on the ground.
Debra Kamin
By Debra
Kamin
Feb. 6,
2023
. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/travel/travel-climate-no-fly-pledge.html
These days,
the skies don’t seem so inviting: Airfares are climbing. Passengers are
fighting. Computer systems, and entire airlines, are melting down.
Any of
those might be reason enough for some to stay off a plane. But for a small, yet
growing, number of travelers, the problem with air travel goes way further.
They are giving up flying because of its impact on the climate.
“I choose
to stay grounded because it aligns with what is true,” said Dan Castrigano, 36,
a former teacher who in 2020 signed a pledge not to travel by air. “The climate
is breaking down.”
The last
eight years on earth have been the hottest on record. Sea level rise is
accelerating, and extreme weather events are happening more often than ever.
Air travel
accounts for about 4 percent of human-induced global warming, and the United
Nations warns that airplane emissions are set to triple by 2050. Planes are
becoming more efficient, but our appetite for air travel is outpacing the
industry’s environmental gains.
One Boeing
747 carrying 416 passengers from Heathrow Airport in London to Edinburgh
produces the same carbon dioxide as 336 cars traveling the same distance,
according to BBC Science Focus, a peer-reviewed magazine, though such
comparisons depend on a wide range of factors like fuel efficiency and even the
time of day. That jumbo carbon footprint is leading many activists and
scientists to issue rallying cries to fly less, or not at all.
“This is a
climate emergency,” said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist with the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory who founded No Fly Climate Sci, an online forum on the
link between aviation and climate change. “When you get on a plane, not only
are you responsible for emissions, but you’re also casting a vote to continue
expanding that system.”
Trading wings for wheels
Mr.
Castrigano, who lives in Burlington, Vt., spent more than a decade as a middle
school teacher. He traveled extensively during that time, but has become
increasingly concerned about the pace of climate change over the past five
years.
Neither he
nor his wife, Laura, has taken a flight since 2019. And in 2021, Mr. Castrigano
left his classroom job to take on a new role as chief content officer at
SubjecttoClimate, a nonprofit organization that provides climate-related
teaching resources.
Staying on
the ground doesn’t mean he stays put. He takes frequent bicycle trips around
Vermont. When he travels shorter distances, he drives an all-electric Nissan
Leaf. Next month, when a good friend gets married in California, he and his
family will take several weeks to make their way across the country by train, a
choice that, according to the 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Data Book, is 34
percent more energy-efficient per passenger than traveling by air.
“I would
love to visit every place on earth,” he said. “But my mental health would be
poor if I were to fly.”
In 2020,
Mr. Castrigano signed a pledge at Flight Free USA to not travel on airplanes
that year, and he has renewed the pledge annually. His community of fellow
signatories is small — Ariella Granett, a co-founder of the site, says 365
people signed on in 2022, and in past years the number has climbed to nearly
450. Flight Free has a larger presence in Australia and Britain, and across
Europe, a number of similar organizations are rallying travelers to abandon air
travel.
Ms.
Granett, 46, works as an architect and an interior designer in Berkeley, Calif.
She has been a climate activist for decades, she said, but felt the need for
more critical action during California’s increasingly ferocious and destructive
recent wildfire seasons.
“Living
through that brought the climate urgency deep into my gut,” Ms. Granett said.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be on a plane again.”
Like most
travelers committed to reducing or eliminating their air travel, she shuns the
idea of carbon offsets, in which carbon credits can be purchased, often through
actions like planting trees, in exchange for greenhouse gases emitted.
As climate
change intensifies, critics say that rather than erasing carbon in the
atmosphere, the practice preys on travelers’ guilt and offers an excuse to
pollute without producing viable results. Many point to intensifying wildfires
in the American West, which have burned down forests planted with carbon offset
funds, as a metaphor for the inefficiency of offsets.
“I actually
think it would be better for people to fly without offsets but be aware of the
pollution they’re making, rather than just thinking, ‘Oh, I solved that
problem,’” Ms. Granett said.
Ms. Granett
was inspired to start Flight Free USA, she said, after reading a 2019 article
in Vox about a group in Sweden that was committed to breaking the air-travel
habit.
‘Flight shame’ goes global
There is
perhaps no country on earth with more anti-flight activists than Sweden, where
by 2020, 15,000 people had signed a nationwide pledge to travel without flying
for at least one year. The nonprofit behind that movement, We Stay on the
Ground, is currently raising funds and hopes to get 100,000 signatories in the
next few years.
Many
Americans are aware of Sweden’s young climate activist Greta Thunberg, who in
2019 chose to sail across the Atlantic on an emissions-free yacht to speak to
the United Nations. But Swedes — who have coined a word, flygskam, to describe
the shame associated with flying — point to earlier figures, including the
opera singer Malena Ernman, who is Ms. Thunberg’s mother, and the journalist
Jens Liljestrand, as those who started the trend.
“A lot of
people think that what you do as an individual doesn’t matter much. But the
thing is, what we do as individuals affects everyone around us, and changes
norms,” said Maja Rosén, 41, the president of We Stay on the Ground, who gave
up flying in 2008. Ms. Rosén, who lives in Sweden, now travels primarily by
train.
We Stay on
the Ground inspired the Flight Free movements in Britain and Australia, as well
as Flight Free USA. There are other grass-roots movements, too: Stay Grounded,
a global network of more than 150 organizations promoting alternatives to air
travel, was founded in 2016 and has its headquarters in Austria; Byway, a
British travel planning company founded during the Covid-19 lockdown, allows
customers to plan flight-free itineraries across Europe.
“There are
so many beautiful places all over the world. But do we want to visit them and
destroy them at the same time?” said Anne Kretzschmar, 31, who lives in
Cologne, Germany, and runs Stay Grounded’s Reframing Project, which focuses on
combating greenwashing, a practice in which organizations portray themselves as
more eco-friendly than they really are. She travels by train, bike and foot. On
a recent trip between Italy and Morocco, she took a ferry. She’d like to go to
more places, but says she doesn’t want to contribute to forces that are causing
environmental disaster. “We can see many absurd things like people flying to
see the coral reefs before they die,” she said, noting that climate change is a
main culprit in the reefs’ deaths.
Airlines
are making an effort to fly more sustainably, with pledges to achieve “net
zero” carbon emissions in the next three decades and move toward alternative
fuels and electric power. Airlines for America, a trade association that
lobbies on behalf of airlines, said in a statement that the industry was
working with the U.S. government to reduce its footprint even as, the group
said, “U.S. carriers transport over two million passengers and more than 65,000
tons of cargo per day while contributing just 2 percent of the nation’s
greenhouse gas emissions.”
Activists
say that progress isn’t coming fast enough and are pushing for frequent fliers
to at least consider small changes, which they say could add up to big
differences.
“We get a
lot of American customers who will fly into Europe, but then we’ll help them
travel around for two weeks through various European countries using sleeper
trains,” said Cat Jones, founder and chief executive at Byway. The shift, she
said, allows them to “travel slowly and soak up more experiences.” Many of her
clients still opt to fly across the Atlantic rather than travel by boat, she
said, citing research that shows cruise ships can actually emit more carbon per
passenger than jets do.
Mr.
Castrigano says that if the day comes when vessels like the one used by Ms.
Thunberg in her 2019 crossing are more available, he would jump aboard. “I
would love to visit every place on earth and, like Greta, get on a boat and
head somewhere else. But right now I’m sort of limited to this continent,” he
said.
Cutting back, but not to zero
Will and
Claire Stedden, both 34, who live in Madison, Wis., are taking a slightly more
flexible approach. The couple are excited for their next flight, even though it
won’t happen for several years. They point to guidance from Take the Jump, a
website devoted to simple changes we can all make to combat climate change,
citing scientific research that travelers can stay sustainable by limiting
long-haul flights to once every eight years, or domestic trips to once every
three.
The two
have been flight-free for three years and plan to wait five more before taking
a trip to Europe. For now, they chronicle their bike and train trips on
Instagram, and Mr. Stedden, a data scientist, believes that he appreciates his
travels more.
Mr.
Castrigano, the former teacher who has vowed to forgo air travel, said, “People
think of just flying anywhere we want, at the drop of a hat, as being something
normal,” adding, “but if you stop thinking of it as normal, all of a sudden you
start thinking in terms of places you truly want to go.”
Ms. Rosén,
of We Stay on the Ground, said the shift to ground transportation had also
helped her redefine travel.
“We need to
think about what we really want from our vacations, and why we need to go so
far away to get that,” she said. “A lot of people who take the flight-free
pledge say they wouldn’t change it even if they could, because when you travel
by train, the trip itself becomes part of the adventure.”
Debra Kamin
covers real estate for The Times. More about Debra Kamin
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