"I'm trying hard to be eco-friendly. But please don't ask me to give up flying to visit my family"

24.4.2008  (Guardian - Comment)

by Tahmina Anam, a Pakistani living in the UK

I have decided to try to do everything George Monbiot says.  Perhaps it is because Bangladesh is going to be one of the first countries to be affected by climate change, or because I find myself pumping my fist and saying "Yes!" every time I read one of his articles.

The other day he advised us all to eat less meat, and I found myself writing "tilapia" on my shopping list.  I have changed all of my lightbulbs and I now recycle religiously; my friends have threatened to teach me to ride a bicycle.  My eating life revolves around a veg box that appears by magic on the doorstep every Tuesday with notes on how best to prepare purple-sprouting broccoli.

But there is one thing I cannot do, and this makes me incredibly sad, because I understand - and fully endorse - all the reasons for its importance.  Yet it is something I don't believe I can ever change:  flying.

My parents first left Bangladesh for Paris in 1977, when my father accepted a job with the UN.  A year later, our suitcases crammed with gifts (blenders, aspirin, hairdryers, chocolate), we flew home on an Aeroflot flight via Moscow.  Twenty-seven hours later, waiting at Dhaka airport was our entire extended family, crowding the arrivals lounge and pressing their faces against the glass partition.

Monbiot says that "love miles" represent the distance between us and the people we love.  In his book he talks about people who have friends across the seas, perhaps a sister or an aunt who has decided to leave Britain for warmer climes, and the moral dilemma of boarding a plane to visit them.

But there are those of us whose entire list of loved ones lives somewhere else. What are we to do?

The gifts have changed - you can get aspirin anywhere now - and the flights are shorter, but I still look forward to my trips to Bangladesh with childish excitement: the thrill of the wheels hitting the tarmac, my father waving hello from the arrivals gate, the humid, banana-tinged smell of Dhaka that makes its way on to the plane even before the doors have opened.

There is no other way to live apart, no other way to make it OK that our lives happen in each other's absence, than to allow ourselves the promise of regular visits.

And it is not only the wealthy who travel now.  Salman Rushdie has called ours the "age of migration", and this is true for the poorest countries as well as the richest. 

There are more Bangladeshis living outside of Bangladesh than ever before; they work as labourers in Dubai and Malaysia; they are domestic servants in Spain, fruit vendors in New York, trinket-sellers in Rome.  These men - they are mostly men - send an enormous portion of their income to their relatives in Bangladesh; at the moment, the Bangladesh economy receives $2bn a year from this so-called "manpower industry", eclipsing all other sources of revenue.  But these people who leave the country are longing for their loved ones, and usually, as soon as they are able, they will fly home.  Going home is the whole point of leaving in the first place.

The economic and environmental crises that grip Bangladesh today are driving people to seek their fortunes on distant shores; what a cruel irony it is, then, that their flying back will mean the destruction of this very home, and the worsening of the problems that led them to leave in the first place.

Oil is $117 /barrel. Nearly doubled in one year. Major airlines are losing money hand over fist. They cannot keep rising fares fast enough, and they are progressively cutting routes and merging or going broke. Of course oil is not going to stay at $117, it is going to get MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE.

Russia has now admitted its oil production has peaked. Nigerian production is expected to fall by 30% in 7 years. Mexican and North Sea production is in free fall. Saudi Arabia has announced it is canceling new developments and has quietly started reducing production recently. The global supply of oil has peaked. We are in a permanent and ever deepening energy crisis.

Mass aviation is history. In five years, only a fraction of the current level of flights will be in the air.

It was fun whilst it lasted.

My parents live in Canada - they emigrated there when I was a teenager; I moved back here as soon as I could. Of course I don't see them as much as I would like but there are other ways to keep in touch, rather than flying across the world. We talk on the phone every week, we email .. if we were inclined we could even video conference. Moving away from your family is a choice not, for most, a necessity. To deal with a problem as enormous as climate change we'll all have to make sacrifices (even those of you who don't care now will soon be made to care like it or not) and maybe you will have to sacrifice either seeing your family frequently or your lifestyle lived away from them.

Oh my lord, this strikes me as an incredibly angry bunch of comments!

I think the author was raising a pretty good point. There's a list of 'things one should do to be environmentally friendly' (and yes, a substantial number of people who comment here have no interest in any of them. Well done you). Of that list, one of the hardest is the issue of flying, and it's also one with a substantial impact. Environmentalism, like everything else, is not a saints v sinners scenario. A driver can scrupulously avoid drink-driving, but still occasionally go over the speed limit. Similarly, someone can recycle but still fly. Call it hypocrisy if you like, but it's part of being human.

It'll be incredibly complex, but at some stage we'll need to come up with an eco-calculator: X is amount of resources I wish to use, Y is amount of resources I consume by eating meat, flying home, cycling to work, etc. There'll be an awful lot of fudge factors, but we need it to make informed decisions. If I take a flight to Switzerland, but give up meat for 6 months, does that cancel it out? It'll be the equivalent of calorie-counting, or balancing your chequebook.

The changes you have made in your behaviour and your anguish over the true cost of your flights to Bangladesh show that, unlike so many others, you have a conscience and are willing to take responsibility for the effects of your actions.

Unfortunately however, the pain you are causing by flying is more acute and immediate than the long-term destruction of Bangladesh due to climate change.

You see, when you drive or fly, you are not just burning fuel, you are burning food. As oil supplies plateau there is increased competition for the oil that remains, driving up prices. One of the effects of this is to increase the price of food directly, since a lot of oil is used in food production. Another effect is to encourage the use of agricultural land for growing biofuel crops instead of food. Yet another effect is to increase the number of droughts, further reducing agricultural production.

Which is why the price of food has risen dramatically in the last year, leading to hunger and ensuing food riots around the world.

Ironically for you, Bangladesh is one of thoe countries experincing sharp increases in hunger and consequent food riots. Analysts warn of a "silent famine" in the country, where 40 percent of the 144 million population live on a dollar a day - most of which is spent on food.

The World Bank has calculated that each 100L car tankfull of petrol has the approximate effect of removing from the market enough food to feed a person for a year. Your trips to Bangladesh would conservatively use 500L of (untaxed) aviation fuel each way, meaning that each trip removes enough food to feed 10 people for a year.

In other words, in a world of exploding hunger due to rising food costs, your visit home removes enough food from the market to feed 10 people for a year - or one person for 10 years.

Some people are paying a very high cost for your choices - and you'll meet them next time you go back for a holiday.

Unlike most, you have (heroicly) chosen to accept responsibility for the effects of your actions. One way or the other you are also going to have to accept responsibility for the effects of your flights.

Polluter pays is a sound principle!

So either you clean up your pollution yourself or pay someone else to do it. For petrol we in europe pay around 10p per kg CO2 equivalents emitted from the tailpipe in taxes, ergo we pay the government to clean up after us for that pollution.

Unfortunately the tax on jet fuel i zero, that doesn't mean that the responsibility to clean up after oneself goes away though, just that you have to tax yourself. Personally I give money to an agroforestry project in africa for pollution that is tax free. If all who pollute and don't pay for it start giving money to projects that help those that will bear the brunt of the damage maybe most of them can be helped.

Suggest you calculate the amount of CO2 equivalents you have emitted and not payed taxes for since 1992, the year it became generally known that CO2 was a huge problem, and pay 10p per kg emitted to charities in Bangladesh. Pollution before that is a common responsibility as the problem was generally unknown, but after 1992 an informed global citizen knew and had an responsibility for his/her actions as to personal CO2 emissions.

It is worth quite a bit to be able to look yourself in the mirror each morning knowing that you have taken responsibility for your personal actions. Kicking the poor in the face and not even paying them so they can get help is not nice.

(27th April 2008)

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