Can you really give up flying and still have good holidays?
I’ve been invited to a stag do. In Budapest. A dozen lads off to Eastern Europe for a weekend of hard drinking and humiliation. Nothing that couldn’t be done in Bournemouth or Bognor, but Ryanair flies to the Hungarian capital for a tenner, so why not?
The UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) has a good reason why not. On Monday it warned that our attitude to C02-belching activities like flying would have to change if we want to keep global warming within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels.
The consequences of not doing so, it added, would be grave: more droughts, fewer crops and the death of ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef, which is already severely stressed due to rising temperatures.
The IPCC concluded that we had a dozen years to ring in the necessary changes, admitting that they would have to be “unprecedented in scale” in order to avert disaster.
This raises an uncomfortable question for environmentally-conscious travellers: is it time to give up flying? “The main environmental cost of holidays is always the flight,” said Greenpeace’s Graham Thompson. “If you’re not flying, you’ll have a much lower impact.”
According to the European Commission, aviation currently accounts for two per cent of global C02 emissions and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) reckons that figure could rise by as much as 700 per cent in the next three decades, which is a lot.
Quitting flying, then, would clearly reduce C02 levels, but it would also relieve travellers of much drudgery: no longer would we have to endure airport security, linger in terminals or walk that meandering, maddening path through duty free shops to get to our gate. Jet lag, turbulence and plane food would also be a thing of the past - and good riddance, too.
The myth that you have to hop on a plane to have a good holiday would also be exposed. Instead we could rediscover the joys of our own doorstep and even fall for train travel again, reminding ourselves that there is a life on the rails beyond the delayed Southeastern service to Sevenoaks.
I converted to train travel while travelling overland from London to Beijing in 2011. Watching the landscapes unfold before me, seeing the locals’ features change as I rattled across Eurasia, was the kind of experience air travel robs you of.
That journey took months, but many destinations are just a day away from the UK. Eurostar now delivers passengers to Amsterdam in around four hours, Marseilles in seven and the French Alps in a smidgen over nine. If you don’t mind changing, Barcelona and Berlin are all under ten hours away by train; the Orient Express, meanwhile, has made cheery work of whisking passengers to Venice since the 19th century.
Eschewing the plane could also help us rekindle our relationship with Britain’s faded seaside towns, which we dropped without much thought when low-cost carriers started flogging cheap flights to Spain. These forgotten resorts have the weather now, too, thanks to climate change, which just produced the hottest summer on record in England.
Though ditching the plane for a cruise might sound appealing it won’t necessarily boost your eco credentials. Ships are permitted to burn heavy fuel oil at sea, which means the cruise industry has a supersized carbon footprint of its own to contend with.
It’s also worth noting that quitting flying altogether could have unintended negative consequences for the environment. Travellers, after all, are a valuable source of revenue for many wildlife-rich, cash-poor destinations and if tourist dollars were to dry up there would be less imperative to protect those places from logging, poaching and development.
But while this argument could justify a safari in the Serengeti, I’ll have a hard time trotting it out for the Hungarian stag do. It’s a long way to Budapest: anyone know when the next train is?
