Status update, 16/06/2023

This blog is about what’s on my mind, and recently I’ve been thinking about aeroplane flights, and limiting how many I take every year.

I’m not trying to make anyone feel impressed or ashamed here, or create rules that I insist everyone needs to live by. And I am no expert in climate science, but we need to start talking about this stuff more – as you probably spotted, the climate is uncomfortably hot now, caused mainly by all the “greenhouse gases” that we keep producing in our industrious human civilization.

Commercial aviation accounts for 3.5% of global warming today, according to the 3rd result in a web search I just did. So planes aren’t the biggest issue – the biggest issue is a massive methane leak from an oil well in Turkmenistan, and I guess the best contribution I could make to avoid further heating would be to plug up that hole somehow. From here though, it seems more realistic for me to look at reducing how much money I give to airlines and oil companies.

Plane spotting

In 2020 I didn’t go anywhere due to the COVID pandemic. so lets start with 2021.

• 2021: 3 flights, 6 hours total. (Including work stuff, family visits for Christmas).
• 2022: 10 flights, 25 hours total (Including work stuff, family visits, Linux App Summit, OSSEU, the Audio Developer Conference, and an incredible climbing trip in Canarias)
• 2023: So far, 6 flights, 6 hours total (the usual, plus FOSDEM and an incredible bike holiday in Wales)

My current goal is that 2023 will have no more flights than 2022. I’ve started tracking them in a spreadsheet to make me think harder about avoiding them. It’s easy to get excited about a holiday, conference, concert etc. and forget about the broader goal of not taking flights all the time. It’s also very hard to avoid them all – I’m sure I will take a flight to GUADEC in Latvia next month, which is basically as far away from me as you can get without leaving Europe. (I am hoping I can take a boat to the UK afterwards though, let’s see).

Everybody’s circumstances are different of course. I chose to live 2000km from my family, which implies extra travel. Some folk live 20,000km from their family, which implies even more. There’s no point judging people for how their life turned out. (Although it is good to judge billionaires and politicians flying everywhere in private planes – fuck those guys!!!).

My last trip from the UK supposedly avoided 4% of emissions of one passenger by using “sustainable fuel”, so that’s about 0.03% of the total emissions, and they emailed me this nice certificate.

The aviation industry claim that flying is actually great anyway, soon aeroplanes will be powered solely by wildflowers and insect wings, etc. etc. This is exactly what a business that sells plane tickets would say, so I am skeptical, and there is plenty of evidence of “greenwashing” such as this recent “Science Based Target Initiative“. Ultimately its hard for airline managers to turn down a fat targets-related bonus just to try and help the future of civilization … a sort of “prisoners dilemma”.

Rambling about trains

Many people assume you can take a boat between the UK and Spain, and you can do but the boat takes over 25 hours and leaves you in either Santander or Portsmouth, neither of which are very well-connected.

High speed trains are a better option, and they already exist for most of the trip: Santiago – Barcelona is less than 8 hours (not bad to travel 1000km); and Paris -> Manchester is also only 6 hrs door to door (to go 800km). The missing piece for me is Barcelona to Paris.

There’s no sleeper train option between Spain to France, since the Spanish government decided to remove it in 2012. During the day there about 2 trains, which take 6 hours each, unfortunately 8 hrs + 6 hrs + 6 hrs makes 20 hrs means you can’t do this trip in a single day. You need an expensive hotel either in Barcelona or Paris to make the trip in addition to that expensive express train to Paris. So I’ve only taken this route once so far, and it involved a few days in the French Pyrenees. (As an aside, that would be an option for every trip if it wasn’t for the restrictions of my job! In fact most of these issues would be more tractable if I could work less days a week or just take days offline sometimes.)

The French government have seen sense already and run excellent night trains from the border up to Paris, but the Spanish government have not seen any sense at all, and the connections from Barcelona are hopeless. There is some hope though, from the European Sleeper cooperative who are working on a Barcelona -> Brussels night train, due some time in 2024/2025. That could make the Santiago -> Manchester trip feasible overland in around 24 hours – which would be incredible!! They are running a share offer at the moment, if you find that sort of thing interesting.

So that’s what’s on my mind as the hot summer weather picks up across Europe.

As I said above – I’m not posting this in order to feel superior to folk who travel more by aeroplane, nor to show off about being part of the lucky 20% of people who are able to travel by aeroplane at all.

But I would like to see more people talking openly about the future and the climate crisis. When you have a problem, usually the hardest thing is to talk about it. It requires you to admit that there is a real problem which is not much fun. A lot of oil companies would prefer that we stay in denial. (They are happy making record profits!). Stay safe out in the heat.