Zero Altitude

How I Learned to Fly Less and Travel More

Helen Coffey

• Publisher: Flint
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780750995726
• eBook ISBN:
  9781803990828
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

In recent decades, private jets have become status symbols for the world's wealthiest, while quick and easy flights have brought far-flung destinations within the reach of everyone. But at what cost to the environment? Around the world, flying emits around 860 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, and until the outbreak of Covid-19, the aviation industry was one of the planet's fastest-growing polluters.

Now is the perfect time to pause and take stock of our toxic relationship with flying. Part climate-change investigation, part travel memoir, Zero Altitude follows Helen Coffey as she journeys as far as she can in the course of her job as a top travel journalist – all without getting on a single flight. Between trips by train, car, boat and bike, she meets climate experts and activists at the forefront of the burgeoning flight-free movement. Over the course of her travels, she discovers that keeping both feet on the ground is not only possible but that it can be an exhilarating opportunity for adventure. Her book is brimming with tips and ideas for swapping the middle seat for the open road.

1

Is Flying All That Bad?

Stacking Up the Stats

I was the grand old age of 12 when I first set foot on a plane to go on holiday. I don’t remember feeling anything in particular about it – surprising as it may seem, considering my later career path. I suppose I must have had some degree of excitement but, if so, it got firmly squashed under my all-consuming tween desire to appear ‘cool’.

Back then, flying was emphatically not the norm for the people I knew. This was the late 1990s, a time before the proliferation of low-cost flights, before the stratospheric rise of Ryanair, before the birth of the £10 flash-mega-bargain-basement sales that made flying more cost-effective than catching a train to Scunthorpe. EasyJet’s Stelios was just an intrepid entrepreneur with a few planes and a big dream; UK airports handled a mere 100 million passengers a year,¹ less than a third of the number they dealt with before the pandemic hit.²

It wasn’t all about price, though. It was about mindset. Growing up in a middle-class family (Dad was a civil servant, Mum a translator), I was lucky enough to never feel like money was an issue. Presents may have been rationed, clothes purchased on a strictly need-to-wear basis and pocket money capped at £1 a week, but there were no discernible financial worries. I’m pretty sure we could’ve splurged on a once-yearly migration to somewhere hot and exotic – but I don’t think it ever even occurred to my parents. It just wasn’t what you did. Destinations were limited to coastal Devon, rural Wales or, to really up the ante, northern France, reached by car while listening to the same three tapes on a loop for five hours straight (Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Themes and Dreams, a compilation that included the Inspector Morse theme tune). Holidays meant grey skies and grey seas and scrambling across pebble-strewn beaches to discover rock pools teeming with life; this, too, being mostly grey-coloured. We were freezing but happy.

This was pretty much the experience of all of my peers at that time. Flying somewhere was an unusual enough occurrence that it bagged you a feature-length presentation at show and tell; I still think back, with something akin to envy, to Stephanie Hunt’s ‘My Two-Week Trip to Disney World’ talk, coolly delivered from behind a pair of new Minnie Mouse shades.

Cut to a quarter of a century later and the world of holidaying has changed beyond all recognition. Today, we Brits take more flights abroad than any other nationality, including Americans. Some 126.2 million passengers were British in 2018, roughly one in twelve of all international travellers.³ Far from it being a noteworthy event, kids are likely to be as well travelled as you or me; families with children under 5 take the most holidays abroad of any demographic, averaging 1.8 a year, according to data from the holiday association ABTA.⁴

The age of the low-cost airline, which properly got going in the early noughties, democratised flying in a way that no one could have anticipated. It transformed travel from the preserve of the elite to something anyone could do, provided you didn’t mind forgoing a complimentary meal and a comfortable seat. This seemed like a Very Good Thing – both for tourists and, in many cases, locals. More visitors equals more money equals more jobs; a whole new supercharged industry to revive flagging communities. But, like everything in life, change comes at a cost. There’s the human cost – residents displaced in Barcelona because soaring rents have forced them out; Amsterdammers feeling like strangers in their own city as badly behaved stag parties take over – and then there’s the environmental cost.

In 2019, just shy of 40 million flights took off worldwide.⁵ Passengers flew a total of 8.1 trillion kilometres, a number so staggeringly big as to be practically meaningless. This was an increase of 5 per cent from 2018 – and more than 300 per cent higher than in 1990.

For a while, the impact of all this exponential growth on the planet we inhabit was lost on most people, me included. The world was getting smaller, and that was fine by me – all those places you could previously only dream of going were now not only tantalisingly accessible, but practically on your doorstep. Five minutes on the internet could mean you’d soon be jetting off to Borneo, Barbados, Bolivia. It changed travel journalism, too: writers were no longer the gatekeepers, magnanimously (read smugly) sharing a glimpse of the exotic to help readers imagine far-flung places they’d never have a hope in hell of visiting. That age is over. Now, the aim is to inspire, to convince would-be travellers that this particular corner of the globe is the Next Big Thing: ‘Go now, NOW, before it’s ruined by all the tourists!’ we shriek into the void, with a somewhat endearing lack of irony.

Once upon a time, pointing out the negative effects of all this flying was something only offbeat outsiders did. The same people who went vegan ten years before it was ‘cool’, because farming livestock is responsible for 14.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions globally;⁶ the same killjoys who were banging on about recycling when no one wanted to know; those same Debbie Downers who, when you railed against the cruelty of child labour, would politely ask where you thought your mobile phone battery came from – and your £3 Primark dress. Overly earnest do-gooders whose greatest gift was bringing down the mood at a party, you understand – not normal people.

But they saw what the rest of us were far, far too slow to catch onto.

According to a report by The Guardian, taking one long-haul return flight produces more carbon emissions than the average citizen in more than fifty countries will account for in a year.⁷ Aviation industry emissions, which currently contribute 2 per cent of all global emissions, look set to double by 2050. (And even that’s an optimistic prediction, as it assumes that future aircraft could be more efficient based on technology that doesn’t actually exist yet.) The International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts passenger numbers will double – double – to 8.2 billion by 2037.⁸

I find these numbers just the tiniest bit frightening. The sky already feels damn near full. Pre-pandemic, if you went and stood at Myrtle Avenue, the famous plane spotter’s point near London Heathrow, you’d quickly realise just how full, as jet after jet after jet landed every ninety seconds, without pause, for eighteen hours a day. It was mesmerising in its relentlessness. Imagining double that makes my brain hurt. It makes me feel like this whole flying business is slipping out of our collective control.

But am I, along with everyone else, just getting hysterical about the latest cause célèbre? Is flying really so terrible when stacked up against the alternative ways of getting around? Let’s crunch the numbers.

Plane vs. the rest

While there’s a lot of talk about how bad flying is, it’s not always backed up by something tangible we can get our heads around. The calculations are tricky, for a start, because not all aircraft are alike. The newer they are, the more efficient they are, as a general rule – just as not all cars are alike and not all trains are alike. We’re therefore always talking in generalities when it comes to comparisons – taking the average emissions of a mode of transport, for instance.

In this book, we’ll often be looking at emissions on a per person basis – it’s how you calculate an individual’s carbon footprint, by looking at the total amount of CO2 produced during their journey and dividing it by the total number of people who are on that particular mode of transport. This way of calculating doesn’t take overall emissions into account – it’s purely a way to see what’s most efficient.

Obviously, there are some problems with using this method – the main one being that ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean ‘non-polluting’. Take Ryanair, for example. At the end of 2019, it released an ad campaign claiming to be the greenest airline. Technically, on the parameters it was using, this wasn’t inaccurate: the airline has one of the youngest fleets and highest load factors (aviation-speak for bums on seats) in the business, making individuals’ carbon footprints lower than if they flew on rival airlines. But this is the same Ryanair that, according to EU data, was one of the top-ten polluting companies in Europe in 2019 – and the other nine were all coal plants.⁹ Claiming to be a ‘green’ company in this context seems like a teensy bit of an oxymoron.

Bearing all that in mind, here’s a broad overview of the main modes of transport purely based on CO2 emissions (per passenger per km travelled):¹⁰

Diesel car:	171g
Domestic flight:	133g
Bus:	104g
Long-haul flight:	102g
Domestic rail:	41g
Coach:	27g
Eurostar:	6g

Now, if you’re surprised to see a bus beating a long-haul jet, you’re probably not alone. But hold your horses before you start booking long-haul flights like it’s going out of fashion – the story these numbers tell us isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Most importantly, this just shows CO2 emissions. If you add in secondary effects from non-CO2 emissions – water vapour, aerosols and nitrogen oxides, for example – which have been proven to significantly impact the climate, domestic flights contribute an extra 121g per km, while long-haul flights are responsible for 93g more, putting them both solidly ahead of motor vehicles. And it’s crucial that we do include these – back in 1999 a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that the total historic impact of aviation on the climate when factoring in non-CO2 emissions was two to four times higher than when looking at CO2 emissions alone.¹¹ Jo Dardenne, aviation manager at European sustainable travel NGO Transport & Environment, tells me the impact of flying ‘is much greater than carbon – a lot of warming impacts are being linked to contrails, which have twice as much impact as CO2 emissions’.

Including the warming impacts of non-CO2 emissions, then, our table looks more as we’d expect:

Domestic flight:	254g
Long-haul flight:	195g
Diesel car:	171g
Bus:	104g
Domestic rail:	41g
Coach:	27g
Eurostar:	6g

There are other factors to consider too – the ‘per passenger’ number is based on the plane having an average load factor, that is, most seats are filled. Sometimes this might be the case; sometimes it might not be. The car you have will also make a difference – the average hybrid, for example, will emit 113g per km, totalling around 28g per person if you have a full carload, making it technically more efficient than the train.

It’s also important to think about the bigger picture. On paper, travelling on a long-haul flight might not look that much worse than driving. But, realistically, are you going to be travelling to Sydney by car? By looking at just the km per passenger number, we can be in danger of overlooking the fact that a long-haul flight goes much further, and therefore produces a load more emissions, than a mode of transport that’s never going to travel that far. Likewise, although a long-haul flight is technically more efficient than a domestic one, the very fact you’re flying much further means more emissions overall. So, although the per passenger per km number is useful, it’s certainly worth also looking at our overall journeys, rather than just breaking them down into their component parts.

Looking at the bigger picture again, aviation accounts for about 12 per cent of transport emissions worldwide,¹² with all flights producing just shy of 1 billion (915 million) tonnes of CO2 in 2019.¹³ If it helps, you can picture 100,000 Eiffel Towers, 6.6 million blue whales, or just under three times the amount of CO2 the entirety of the UK emits annually.¹⁴ Mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Is Flying All That Bad? Stacking Up the Stats
• 2 This Green and Pleasant Land: Mastering the Art of the Staycation
• 3 Why Would Anyone Do This to Themselves? Tips and Tricks from the Flight-Free Experts
• 4 At a Rail’s Pace: All Aboard a Train Tour of Europe
• 5 Carbon Guilt: Does Offsetting Actually Work?
• 6 Drive Me Crazy: Learning to Hitchhike vs. Learning to Drive
• 7 But … What about Tourism? The Dark Side of Going Cold Turkey
• 8 I Love to Ride My Bicycle: From Commuter to Explorer in Amsterdam
• 9 Get on Your Soapbox: Infrastructure Changes to Save the World
• 10 Walk the Walk: A Real-Life Pilgrim’s Progress
• 11 Whatever Next? Introducing the Sustainable Travel Tech of the Future
• 12 The Big One: Just How Far Can I Get at Zero Altitude?
• Notes