Come fly with me
From the Bonkers Institute comes an analysis, concluding that A small minority of frequent flyers dominate air travel
. No shit! I guess that must be why they're called frequent flyers
then. Well, at least that little mystery's been cleared up. (rolleyes)
In the UK, apparently, 70% of flights are made by a wealthy 15% of the population
. This has lead to claims from Greenpeace that air miles…reward frequent fliers for flying more frequently
, and from Possible that a small minority of frequent flyers take an unfair share of the flights
, as well as calls for a levy on frequent flyers and an end to rewards programmes.
I have no idea where the statistics that underlie these claims came from. I also don't know whether John Sauven of Greenpeace and Alethea Warrington of Possible have ever enrolled in frequent flyer programmes. I have, and I'd like to get a couple of points straight.
Firstly, in my personal experience, the majority of frequent flyers are not particularly wealthy, swanning around drinking champagne on ice. They're business travellers. Their flights are paid for by their employers, not for the sake of racking up airmiles, but for the sole purpose of conducting business. Most of the business travel that I undertook wasn't even in business class, but economy.
Secondly, again in my personal experience, frequent flyer programmes don't promote further travel, they simply make the travel that has to be done more bearable. In the days when I travelled on business, frequent flyer programmes afforded me lounge access, for example. But would I have travelled solely for that? Nope! I've spent far too much of my life in airport departures, especially Brussels. Away from family, longing for home. I'll never get that time back, and I certainly don't pine for the return of business travel, especially since the war on terror
has made security checks even more arduous than before.
It's true that frequent flyers earn airmiles
, which ostensibly promotes more travel. But I can think of only one case in which they were actually useful. Mostly, they expired before I used them, or other costs were actually more significant than that of the flight.
I have been a frequent flyer in the past, and I'm still a member of a couple of programmes, but I think that their advantages are overestimated by people who have no experience, while at the same time having some particular axe to grind. Having said that, if they were abolished it wouldn't bother me. For business travellers, any levies would be paid for by the employer; and presumably passed on or absorbed like any other cost of doing business. So these proposals are unlikely to have any profound effect, other than to give government more money to piss down the drain. Perhaps they could use it to alleviate the cost of dealing with the Chongvirus, since Winnie the Pooh isn't going to man-up and accept his pestilential nation's responsibility.
Although frequent flyers might dominate air travel
, to say that they take an unfair share of the flights
is utter nonsense, because it presupposes that airlines are at capacity and their travel is prioritised over others in an otherwise free-market economy. Absolutely no one, let alone frequent flyers, is preventing anyone else from flying, should they have the means and the desire to do so. It's not as if the airlines are over capacity; after all, they're taking desperate measures to stay afloat. So there's no unfair share
at all, even at the best of times for travel, which these are not; just the confused whining of a naïve, agitprop dunderhead:
I work on Possible's campaigns for carbon-cutting solutions which help tackle climate change, including Blown Away, our campaign to remove the blocks preventing onshore wind from playing a bigger role in generating the UK's electricity. Before starting at Possible, I worked as a researcher in Parliament and for an NGO campaigning against gender-based violence, and did an MSc in Climate Change. I'm also involved in grassroots climate activism. Outside work, I love reading, finding creative ways to obstruct the fossil fuels industry, and a bit of vegan baking.
Alethea Warrington, Campaigns Manager, Possible
Right on! A really balanced, objective opinion to be expected there, then. (rolleyes)
While Alethea Warrington's salary is undisclosed, Greenpeace UK is more forthcoming. John Sauven's current annual salary as executive director is £79,000. This puts him within the top 3% of UK earners, and I'm sure that he's worth every penny. But one important point must be made here. While the general public recognises the vested interests of those individuals or organisations that the NGO such as Greenpeace and Possible go up against, what is less well-appreciated is that the NGO themselves have vested interests. They don't pull in those donations, with which they make those salary payments, by declaring that there's nothing to worry about. They need to find problems, even if they're imaginary or overstated, in order to stay in business. So, when the likes of Sauven and Warrington claim that the sky's falling in and that they have the solution, their ability to put food on the table and a roof over their heads depends upon donors buying into it.
If the impact of air travel on climate change is to be tackled, then I can't help but think that there are more effective approaches than nibbling at the edges like this. Let alone whether that goal is even meaningful in the wider context of environmental degradation. And that leads me to wonder just how much critical analysis the author of the article—the BBC's environment analyst
, Roger Harrabin—actually undertook. Most of the article seems to be a regurgitation of press releases and soundbites from Greenpeace and Possible, with a little counterbalance from UK government soundbites. Perhaps BBC analysts aren't expected to be critical thinkers; but, if that's the case, what does analyst
really mean to the mainstream media?
I had assumed, just from reading his article, that Roger Harrabin was some wet-behind-the-ears, just-out-of-journalism-school, twenty-something hipster, holding a mochalatte in one hand and chowing down on a Greenpeace bullshit sandwich in the other. Surprisingly, he's 66 years-old. He also has his own entry on Wackypeedeeya, according to which he's a Visiting Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford; an Associate Press Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge; and has received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Cranfield University. Which just goes to show that you should never judge a cover by its book.