THE WEATHER CHANNEL IS ASKING QUESTIONS THAT NOBODY IS ASKING: Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make.
Most of us can’t imagine not flying. But as airline emissions continue to adversely affect the climate, our writer deliberates why making the ethical choice is so hard—and why those who have done so are actually happier.
Four years ago, during a Zoom work meeting, a colleague who lives in London told me she’d decided to quit flying on airplanes. She simply couldn’t stomach the cost to the climate. Due to her decision, she said calmly, she would probably never visit the U.S. again. My heart skipped a beat.
Her choice seemed so extreme. She shared it with me casually in the context of conversation, without a trace of judgment or moralizing. Still, I felt shocked and inexplicably a little defensive—but also intrigued. At the time, I traveled by air as often as ten times a year for my work as a journalist and to see family members strewn about the country. I couldn’t imagine my life without flying.
But my colleague’s comment lodged in my mind as a beautiful and challenging seed. Over the next few years, it cracked through the concrete of what had been, until then, a completely unexamined belief in my inviolable entitlement to flying. When the pandemic arrived, grounding travelers and shrinking international air travel by 60 percent in 2020, I began to see that significantly reducing air travel—or even giving it up altogether—was absolutely possible.
Rare individuals have chosen not to fly for ethical reasons for decades, but in the years leading up to the pandemic, the smattering of outliers coalesced into a movement. It took root most quickly and deeply in Sweden, which in 2017 became the first country in the world to establish a legally binding carbon-neutrality target—a year before Greta Thunberg began protesting in front of its parliament*. In Swedish, the movement became known as flygskam, which translates to “flight shame,” a term commonly attributed to Swedish singer Staffan Lingberg, who gave up flying in 2017.
But the people who preach global warming as a religion the strongest aren’t even pledging to fly commercial, let alone switching to meetings via Zoom:
● Private Jets Flock To Dubai For COP 28: Event Set To Have Biggest Carbon Footprint In History.
● Sunak, Cameron and King Charles each take own private jets to travel to Cop28.
● “In 2022, U.S. government employees spent $2.8 billion on official travel, taking more than 2.8 million flights, 2.3 million vehicle rentals and 33,000 rail trips.”
To coin an Insta-paraphrase, maybe think about quitting flying when the people who tell you that global warming is a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves?
* Thunberg has recently switched religions. So why take take flying advice from someone who’s now pro-Hamas?