Saturday, January 28, 2006
Cheap flights and the environment
In today's Independent two pages and a third of the comment section is devoted to explaining how cheap flights could potentially prevent the United kingdom meeting its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A number of surveys have indicated that overseas travel is growing between five and six percent per year. At present trends, the Commons Environmental Audit Committee believes that aviation will be producing 43 million tonnes of carbon in carbon dioxide in 2050. The article and comment then discusses the implications of the expansion in overseas travel, fuelled by cheap flights. It concentrates on climate change and carbon dioxide emissions but strangely doesn't mention that air travel will be unable to grow at present trends until 2050.
We will reach a point at which oil production will peak and then fall off long before that. Of course oil will be with us for a good number of years yet, but not in ever increasing supply like it has up to now. Once demand for oil exceeds its supply, there can only be one result in a market economy. Plain and simple it will be a rapid escalation in the price of oil, unlike anything we have seen up to now. Of course oil crises have come and gone but they occurred due to wars, and disasters like Hurricane Katrina. These were transient, but still caused the price of crude oil to quadruple in some of the cases. Just imagine what will happen when the under supply is due to exhaustion of reserves and not a temporary blip. Even the proposed application of tax to aviation fuel will be slight in comparison to the price escalation due to dwindling oil reserves.
At this stage even Ryanair will have to factor in the price of oil into its fares. Air travel from that point on, will return to the pattern around before the advent of the budget airlines. It will be costly. The only cheap flights will be on high capacity charter flights the Airbus A380 fitted with 800 seats may well come into its own on the long haul routes and the high speed train network will become more popular on shorter European routes. The stag party in Prague will be too costly to contemplate for the majority of the United Kingdom, unless of course Eurostar and Germany's ICE train run an special offer.
Climate change is a serious problem facing our planet but the depletion of oil reserves will affect us well before we the predicted temperature changes start to be felt. In any event action to prevent damage is the same. Consume less energy from unsustainable sources. The Independent article has 10 tips to lessen the impact of travel. They include not travelling First or Business Class, meaning travel on aircraft with high load factors. Pay to offset your carbon emissions with organisations such as www.climatecare.org. Using the train for shorter trips as it is up to 8 times less polluting than air travel per passenger. More...
My advice for what it is worth, is to think carefully before flying off to a destination just because it is cheaper than the taxi home from a night on the town. The faster the oil is used up, the sooner the oil price will spiral upwards.
We will reach a point at which oil production will peak and then fall off long before that. Of course oil will be with us for a good number of years yet, but not in ever increasing supply like it has up to now. Once demand for oil exceeds its supply, there can only be one result in a market economy. Plain and simple it will be a rapid escalation in the price of oil, unlike anything we have seen up to now. Of course oil crises have come and gone but they occurred due to wars, and disasters like Hurricane Katrina. These were transient, but still caused the price of crude oil to quadruple in some of the cases. Just imagine what will happen when the under supply is due to exhaustion of reserves and not a temporary blip. Even the proposed application of tax to aviation fuel will be slight in comparison to the price escalation due to dwindling oil reserves.
At this stage even Ryanair will have to factor in the price of oil into its fares. Air travel from that point on, will return to the pattern around before the advent of the budget airlines. It will be costly. The only cheap flights will be on high capacity charter flights the Airbus A380 fitted with 800 seats may well come into its own on the long haul routes and the high speed train network will become more popular on shorter European routes. The stag party in Prague will be too costly to contemplate for the majority of the United Kingdom, unless of course Eurostar and Germany's ICE train run an special offer.
Climate change is a serious problem facing our planet but the depletion of oil reserves will affect us well before we the predicted temperature changes start to be felt. In any event action to prevent damage is the same. Consume less energy from unsustainable sources. The Independent article has 10 tips to lessen the impact of travel. They include not travelling First or Business Class, meaning travel on aircraft with high load factors. Pay to offset your carbon emissions with organisations such as www.climatecare.org. Using the train for shorter trips as it is up to 8 times less polluting than air travel per passenger. More...
My advice for what it is worth, is to think carefully before flying off to a destination just because it is cheaper than the taxi home from a night on the town. The faster the oil is used up, the sooner the oil price will spiral upwards.
