Grounded

I remember being very young in the family backyard in California, looking skyward with my father at the passing airplanes. He helped me learn each shape, assigning names and purposes: transport, airliner, fighter. Before I was born, he had piloted a fighter jet, and he would tell stories of tearing up the heavens with his friends, of signing out a Grumman F9F-8 in the morning, flying more than 1,500 kilometres to have dinner with his parents, then climbing back into his cockpit the next morning and returning to base, six tonnes of kerosene fuel and a weekend well burned.

Air travel has lost most of its mystique in the half century since, but that does not make the fact of mechanical flight any less impressive. On a sunny day, at the end of runway 26R at Vancouver International Airport, you may find a half-dozen people enjoying the spectacle of a 363,000-kilogram jumbo jet surfing the air. I show up on a misty and brooding morning, and because the wind is blowing out to sea, the airliners come and go on the other side of the airport. They sound like receding thunder. The tall grass whips and shivers. I am alone. It’s easy to imagine a day, maybe not so far off, when the number of jets in the sky will have dwindled dramatically. A time when such huge birds might again seem exotic.

Could it happen? As the potential ravages of global warming come more solidly into view, jet travel has been fingered as a dangerous emitter of greenhouse gases. And now the price of oil is said by various experts to be headed toward $200 (US) a barrel within the year, maybe five, a sign for many that we’ve entered a new age of fossil fuel scarcity. What if we come to decide jet travel has become too polluting to risk our children’s future? Or just far too expensive to continue flying the kids to Disneyland?

And if a million such decisions were to cause the jet age to end, how would we come back to earth? Softly, one would hope. Pleasantly. But maybe, instead, it will be a white-knuckle crash.

George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author of the 2006 bestseller Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, wants a forced landing — immediately. Jet travel, he states, is “the greatest future cause of global warming.” And people who fly are “killers.”

At present, aviation accounts for only about 2 percent of total human carbon emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But because jets fly so high, their effect on global warming is near-tripled. Monbiot calculates that the industry is growing so fast that within decades jet travel will erase most potential climate-friendly gains in other sectors.

The European Union has responded by including aviation in its carbon emissions trading scheme as of 2012. Next year, the United Kingdom will charge a carbon tax on all flights within and out of the country. Here in North America, neither approach is close at hand. British Columbia’s “cutting-edge” carbon tax will apply to flights inside the province but not those with outside connections. And jet fuel itself can’t be taxed by any nation; international trade agreements prevent it.

Some airlines will let you choose to spend more to buy carbon offsets, but such volunteer programs aren’t likely to give the planet’s thermostat much of a shove. After a year of offering the option, Air Canada reports its passengers bought a mere $131,529 in carbon offsets, worth a puny 1,644 trees. People might step up to buy a lot more carbon offsets if the “messaging” were better and “fully integrated into the ticket purchasing experience,” says Joe Kelly, director of environmental services for InterVistas, a Canadian firm that consults for airline and tourism companies. His survey shows that “people need to feel confident their money is really going to make a difference.” He adds, “Of course, a lot of people say one thing and do another.”

He also points out that Boeing will soon roll out its carbon-fibre-bodied 787 Dreamliner, said to be 20 percent more fuel efficient than its predecessors. And an April press release from the International Air Transport Association trumpeted “a historic commitment to tackle climate change” and a vision for “a carbon emission free industry.”

Monbiot takes no solace from any of it. The window on defeating global warming is closing rapidly, and governments must ground the fleets now. Like an angry preacher who has glimpsed hellfire, he spreads his gospel. “When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida,” he writes, “they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes . . . The moral dissonance is deafening.” He’s not the only one championing the latest environmental commandment: thou shalt not fly. “Making selfish choices such as flying on holiday,” preaches the bishop of London, Richard Chartres, is “a symptom of sin.”