target cars
by asi
There’s quite a lot of climate change noise going around flights and aviation recently, mainly due to the climate change protesters at heathrow airport. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m totally aware to the fact that aviation is one of the greatest evils. Figures show that while the UK’s overall carbon emission have more or less stabilised, emissions from international aviation are spiralling out of control – they grew by a staggering 12% in 2004. It now accounts for 6%-7% of CO2 emissions, but is increasing at a rate of +7% per annum.
Campaigning against aviation is extremely important and necessary BUT I honestly don’t think that the general public is ready for that. People are (way too) slowly shifting to a more sustainable and climate friendly lifestyle and as far as I can tell (there’s a lot of different research data coming weekly) the last thing that people are willing to give up on is flying. This might change in the future. For now, imho, cars should be the main targets. Cars should be made the current evil, mainly because there are greener, cleaner alternatives . Depends on which report you read, UK households’ vehicles accounted for 9%-12% of the emissions (thanks John). That’s almost the same as aviation. While people are not yet open to give up on holidays or business trips, i believe that it’s much easier, practical and pragmatic to get them change their commuting habits.
While every website/organisation, as part of their “5 easy steps to save the planet” is saying something about private car usage, it’s usually a call to use more public transport, walk/cycle short journeys etc. all good but not enough.
Cruising on my scooter in London, mostly to-from work I’m always shocked to see how many cars (i’d say at least 80%!) have a single passenger in them. Thats obscene! It’s bad in any aspect you look at it – traffic, emissions, pollution, parking – you name it.
Putting the effort on cars should, of course, come as both top-down and bottom-up activity. The government should start taxing people on a pay-as-you-drive basis. It doesn’t make any sense that people who use their cars 10 times more/less will pay the same for road tax [this, needless to say, should come hand-in-hand with massive improvements to public transport].
And if Ken is serious, he should aim for a ban on single passenger cars entering London. People are sometimes lazy and stupid and they need a little push to help them change their ways. At the same time green organisations should focus much more on educating the public and facilitating services that will help people use their cars less and share their car more.
There must be a way to facilitate car-sharing. When I wrote few months back that I’m waiting to see something more meaningful happens on facebook thats exactly what I had in mind. We got google maps, we got facebook, we got mobile phones, we got gps – there must be a simple, practical way to help people share a ride. It’s a win-win situation – if people will share rides, there will be less traffic, less pollution, more parking – for now, it’s far easier to communicate the benefits of changing your commuting habits, than changing your flying habits.
[update] This facebook app looks like a good start.
totally agree that the public is not ready now to campaign on aviation, but (and im being controversial here) will they ever be?. people now tend to live far away from family and home (like me and all the other immigrants in the world) and I cant imagine them not flying. also, once people opened their appetite for travelling, its going to be nearlly impossible to get them ro close it. so there is also a need to be realistic.
I think the energy for aviation campagining should be chanelled to other directions: bigger planes that can carry more passangers, greener fuel, heavy taxing etc.
nice post and i agree with most things, especially that people need to use their cars a lot less (especially when alone!).
what i think is missing is the fact that the extreme rise in aviation emissions reflects an ongoing change in people’s travel habits. people go on more and longer flights than ever before and what needs to be done at this point is not really to change people’s behaviour but to try stop this change from continuing to happen.
the challenge as regards aviation is thus to make people not make more and/or longer flights despite constantly falling flight prices, i.e. to avoid a change in behaviour. i believe this is worth targeting before flights become even more common than they are today, i.e. before everyone has developed the habit of flying abroad (however, I’m a bit afraid that it already is an addictive habit among many people and it will be tough to struggle with that force of habit… taxing flights more is perhaps be the most logical thing to do?)