The "shame" of flying

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In Sweden they call it "flygskam", something like "shame on flying". Greta Thunberg joined the trend in 2015, and that same year convinced her mother - the mezzo-soprano Malena Enrman - to give up traveling by plane on her international tours. Although the real precursor of the movement is called Maja Rosén, who stopped flying in 2008 "for environmental reasons."

Maja Rosén has now launched Flight Free 2020 , with the goal of reaching 100,000 practitioners of the "repair" to fly and with the numbers in their favor: Sweden airports lost passengers in 2018, at the same time that train travel reached A record

"At the beginning it was a personal decision, but I took a step forward because my friends kept talking about vacations to remote places without making the link with the collapse of the weather," Rosén warns. "So I decided to ask a few awkward questions around me, and I realized that people are not aware of the enormous impact of air travel ."

Aviation contributes a total of 2.4% of CO2 emissions and 14% of the global transport pie, compared to 74% of road trips. With the current trend, the number of annual passengers will double in 2037 (8,200 million) and the increase in emissions will rise unstoppable to reach 14% in 2050.

On a personal scale, however, a commercial flight is probably one of the actions with the greatest environmental impact. The contribution of a passenger on a 5,800-kilometer trip between New York and Madrid amounts to about 935 kilos of CO2. Although many companies already offer to "offset" emissions by making donations for environmental projects, tree planting or carbon capture systems, Greta Thunberg believes that this option serves to "give us a moral license to move forward with our unsustainable lifestyles ."

A single transatlantic flight from London to New York, for example, is equivalent to 11% of the annual emissions of a Briton. Traveling by plane from London to Paris means CO2 emissions of 63.6 kilos per passenger, compared to just 4.1 kilos if traveling by train, the greenest option in front of the combustion car and the bus (the impact of traveling by boat it varies greatly depending on efficiency and distances).

The impact of the private plane

Another important factor is the contribution of the richest to the aeronautical cake. The British are probably among the most travelers on the planet. However, 75% of trips are made by 15% of the population. To this we must add the boom of private planes, whose impact per passenger is up to 40 times greater than that of a commercial flight.

It is estimated that in the next decade there will be 8,000 new private planes in circulation, almost double those that exist today. In 2017, Bill Gates became the great "super transmitter", traveling 320,000 kilometers by plane, enough to go around Earth eight times. Its emissions were estimated at 1,600 tons of CO2, compared to less than five tons of global average per person .

"If the use of the plane increases as planned, it will soon become one of the biggest causes of global warming," warns George Monbiot, author of Heat and columnist for The Guardian , who decided to apply the story and subscribe to the Flight Free movement years. "And the impact goes beyond CO2 emissions. Nitrogen oxide emissions, as well as steam, also contribute to the formation of condensation trails that can even double the heat effect. And unlike the car, there is no alternative in sight: the use of biofuel or the arrival of the electric airplane may never come to fruition. "

Boom in Britain

Leading British activists, such as the founder of the Transition Cities Movement Rob Hopkins or the co-leader of the Sian Berry Green Party, have not taken a plane for environmental reasons for more than a decade. The Extiction Rebellion movement, which has had a great impact in the last year, has taken very concrete actions against Heathrow and the City Airport to try to visualize the impact of the airline industry.

Another British, Anna Hughes, has collected the witness of the movement born in Sweden and created Flight Free UK, with the goal of also reaching the 100,000 British subscribed to the promise not to fly in 2020. "A plane flight is the action with the greatest impact on the carbon footprint of any person, "says Hughes. "Even if you take other steps such as recycling, using green energy or stop eating meat and becoming vegan, a single flight can take all your environmental savings by land."

Pianist Sarah Nicols has been one of the last to sign the "commitment" to become "fligth free" over the next year: "Stop flying is a very concrete step that most people can do. I have had to adapt all my calendar next year and think about how to get by train to the last tip of Norway ... But not everyone can afford slow travel and personal steps are sometimes not enough. It is also necessary to take political measures , like the tax on the fuel of the airplanes or the complete stop to the extension of the airports ".

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