Date published: 2007/08/30
The BBC says:
Britons are "addicted" to cheap flights and confused about the climate impact of flying, according to research.
In a government-funded study, even people living generally "green" lives said they were reluctant to fly less.
The Exeter University team that carried out the research says cheap flights have become a lifestyle choice.
Aviation accounts for about 7% of the UK's emissions, and research suggests Britain will not meet its climate targets without curbing the industry.
The government raised air passenger duty in February, and the European Union is set to include aviation in its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which could increase costs further.
But the Exeter research suggests price hikes would have a minimal impact.
"We found that flying is quite embedded in peoples' lifestyle choices," said Stewart Barr from the university's Department of Geography.
"And it's not people on lower incomes taking these flights, it's middle class people taking more flights to go on city breaks, and they can afford to pay higher prices."
The findings come from a series of focus groups run in Devon in 2005, and from a prior questionnaire.
...
Expansion plans are lodged for many airports including Heathrow, Stansted, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Liverpool and East Midlands."I certainly wouldn't advise expanding them," said Brenda Boardman from Oxford University, "because the more you build them, the more people will use them.
...
Dr Boardman's Environmental Change Institute (ECI) published research last year showing the government could not achieve its long-term goal of a 60% cut in national greenhouse gas emissions without curbing the aviation sector.She also believes the increase in flying may be hurting the national economy, with Britons choosing to spend money holidaying overseas rather than in the UK.
Away from Britain, aviation is growing at spectacular rates, with India recently seeing a 45% increase in passenger numbers within a single year. It is the fastest-rising source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course you can't believe the results of any questionnaires or focus groups, because they can easily be biased in various ways. And anyone who uses the word "addicted" in this context obviously has an agenda, so anything they say cannot be taken at face value. But it does not take a genius to figure out that people like to fly. And it's the academic middle class, who have taken this capability for granted for decades, who want to make flying so expensive that the working class will no longer be able to afford it. Claiming that "it's middle class people taking more flights" is completely missing the point. When you go from 2 to 4 flights a year it's no big thing. When you go from 0 to 1 it is. What these academic middle class people are suggesting will hit the poor much more than it will hit the rich, and they should stop pretending otherwise. And for both the Exeter researchers and Boardman to show that they are not just anti-working class, they should immediately encourage Exeter and Oxford universities to ban all their academic employees from flying anywhere, ever (on university business or not). And of course they should volunteer first. Let the academic middle class take their own medicine.
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