The Planet in Flames – and Planes
Inconvenient Truths for Campaigners and Business

By: Peter Kinder

I found George Monbiot’s fine new book, Heat:  How to Stop the Planet Burning¹ in a small bookstore just off St. Kilda’s Beach in Melbourne.  It was my companion on flights to Sydney and back to the Barcelona of the Antipodes.  Six days later, I finished it as the 747 landed in San Francisco on my way back to Boston.

In Heat, Monbiot shows how ‘a modern economy [Britain’s] can be de-carbonized while remaining a modern economy.’²  He prescribes for every major form of carbon emissions – except one – more or less painful but plausible and practical remedies that could reduce them in aggregate by 90 percent by 2030.

The one major area of carbon emissions for which Monbiot could find no remedy or even palliative:  jet travel.  Over short distances, carbon dioxide emissions per person by an airplane can run 12 times higher for planes than trains and something less than twice as much for cars.³  And there are no technological fixes even in contemplation.

‘...[L]ong-distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of climate change are not compatible.  If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.’⁴

***

The only journalist to whom I can compare George Monbiot is George Orwell.⁵  They share a realism about the crucial issues of their day that includes an acknowledgment of their own compromises.  Consider this from Heat:

...[T]he people who are most concerned about inhabitants of other countries are often those who have travelled widely.  Much of the global justice movement consists of people – like me – whose politics were forged by their experiences abroad.  While it is easy for us to pour scorn on the drivers of sports utility vehicles, whose politics generally differ from ours, it is rather harder to contemplate a world in which our freedoms are curtailed, especially the freedoms that shaped us.⁵

As I said, I picked up Heat in Australia.  I was on a 17-day business trip, which required eight flights to cover over 21,000 miles.  Long-distance travel is essential to KLD’s business.

It is also, ironically, essential to the campaign to save the planet.

***

An expert, it’s been remarked, is someone who can find his way from the airport to his first appointment.  As an expert on Sydney and Melbourne, I can report that they were abuzz with talk of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

From cabbies to consultants, the talk was climate.  Gore’s visit, which preceded mine by a couple of weeks, was still being referenced in the major papers and on talk radio.  On my marketing calls, more than once I heard, ‘I wouldn’t have been interested in talking to you, but I saw “An Inconvenient Truth.”  During the first week in October, Gore spoke at the Global Reporting Initiative’s conference in Amsterdam.

Now, another inconvenient truth, which I’m sure Al Gore knows, is that if the campaign on global warming is to be won, it will be by mobilizing broad-based constituencies behind the hard choices he has done so much to publicize.

There is no effective substitute for personally reaching out to these potential – and critical – constituents.  Not movies.  Not television.  Not radio.  Not the Internet.  Not even excellent books such as Heat.  It’s presence by leaders that makes the difference in politics.  And the campaign is global.

So, what do we – whether global campaigners or business people – do?  What’s the solution?

***

I admit that I sometimes avoid reading books and articles like Heat because I find them depressing.  The remedies for environmental ills are, so often, obvious and implementable.  That we are not taking steps oppresses me.  So, I don’t tend to read ‘here’s how to fix’ pitches.

Monbiot highlights the hopelessness of the air transport dilemma by contrasting business / political travel with what he calls ‘love miles’, the flights we take to maintain friendships and family ties.  The choices confronting those who care about global warming are agonizing and probably irreconcilable.

It is a ‘cop-out’ to conclude, as I must, that since we can’t resolve the air transport issue, we’d better get busy on the remedies Monbiot and others have identified to de-carbonize in other areas.  And, we’d better exceed the aggressive goals Monbiot has set for them.

But what other conclusion is there?  Globalization, economic integration and the climate feedback loops will not slow.  Nor must the global campaign on climate change.  We face a profoundly inconvenient dilemma.

Endnotes