CPT737: Sustainability in PracticeSession 4
Flights of fancy? Air travel, carbon off-setting and personal responsibility
Richard Cowell, [email protected],Room 2.74, ext. 76684
Today’s session:
• Introduction to air travel, mobility and carbon offsetting from me
• Split into focus groups
Effects of growing air travel:
• Tripling of CO2 emissions (from FoE)
• So what explains this growth and how are we implicated?
Growth of low-cost airlines and multiplication of routes
• flights homedestinationsflights searchflight mapsflight newsFlightmapping > Flight Maps > Europe
• (C)2008 Flightmapping.com
• De facto subsidy (no taxes on aviation fuel, not paying full social costs)
Are we simply exercising rational choice?
• But where does this desire for mobility come from?
Elizabeth Shove and the pursuit of convenience
• In modern life, time has become more fragmented
• This requires us to ‘juggle’/ coordinate activities
• Technologies that help this juggling are very attractive
• But they facilitate further fragmentation, and more need for juggling
• Also see pursuit of ‘quality time’• See next slide (Shove p.183)
Elizabeth Shove and the pursuit of convenience
• In modern life, time has become more fragmented
• This requires us to ‘juggle’/ coordinate activities
• Technologies that help this juggling are very attractive
• But they facilitate further fragmentation, and more need for juggling
• Also see pursuit of ‘quality time’
Issues of identity, too:
• As ‘modern’ people, as students• As academics
Are we getting ‘locked in’ (after Tim Jackson) to spirals of ever-increasing mobility?
Carbon Off-setting:
• Commercial companies - CarbonNeutral Flights Airline flights are among the fastest growing sources of global warming gases. But you can make your travel a little greener. © The CarbonNeutral Company Limited, all rights reserved 1998-2008
• Many airlines are interested, e.g. Easyjet Home
Raises interesting questions:
• Extension of personal responsibility and reflexivity
• Increasingly used by producers of things we purchase (Rolling Stones’ carbon neutral tour, Atomic Kitten’s carbon neutral album)
• Big element of economic rationality and rational choice theory
Offsetting raises a number of issues:
• Effectiveness of schemes and effects on communities living with the projects
• Exploits global inequality• Moral question – sanctioning something
intrinsically wrong?• Cheatneutral “Helping you because you
can't help yourself”
• Or do we reject idea of off-setting, and beliefs about climate change and individual responsibility on which it rests?