Author Archives: Vincent Gragnani

airplane with contrail

Green Responses to Flight Shaming

With a rising global middle class and decline in inflation-adjusted airfares, the number of air passengers is forecasted to double in the next 20 years, which also means an increase in greenhouse gases emitted by airplanes — taking up as much as 27 percent of our carbon budget.

Flying also has a significant impact on one’s individual carbon footprint compared to other measure individuals can take, such as carpooling or giving up meat. Flight Free USA offers a calculator, where one can enter a flight route and see the climate impacts of flying — or avoiding — that flight.

Awareness of the impact of these emissions has given birth to “flight shaming” –  or “flygskam” in Sweden, where it originated – a movement that seeks to discourage flying for environmental reasons. Climate activist Greta Thunberg gave the movement a significant boost in 2019 when she made a high-profile crossing of the Atlantic on a carbon-neutral boat, consistent with her own pledge to avoid air travel. 

While dozens of media stories have reported on flight shaming, it is not (yet) a mainstream movement. Even committed environmentalists continue to fly, and many individuals have offered their own “green” responses to the movement, which include: 

  • Continue to fly because of the many benefits of travel, including building global empathy, supporting local economies and keeping poachers at bay. 
  • Cut down on flying without totally eliminating it. The problem may lie less with those who fly once or twice a year and more with the 12% of Americans who fly six or more times per year who are responsible for about two-thirds of all flights. For those who do fly, the following practices are recommended:
    • travel with less baggage (lighter planes require less fuel)
    • avoid business class (larger seats make this option two to four times as carbon intensive as economy class)
    • choose nonstop flights (takeoff is the most carbon-intensive portion of the flight, making one flight significantly more efficient than two) 
  • Purchase carbon offsets when you fly. This involves investing a small amount of money into a project that is said to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make up for a traveler’s share of carbon emitted from a flight — including planting trees, maintaining forests, building a wind farm. Many environmentalists criticize this practice, saying there is no scientific basis that these projects actually counter the carbon emissions of flying and that the purchase of carbon offsets perpetuates the myth that it is possible to fly without increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 
  • Fight for systemic change in the form of a carbon tax that will discourage air travel on a large scale. 

Recent air travel numbers show the movement may be having an effect in Sweden and Germany, where pre-pandemic domestic air travel showed slight declines from previous years, while more-sustainable rail travel posted record numbers.  

While the skipped-trips of flight-shamers themselves may not have a significant impact on greenhouse gases, the voices of the movement are being heard and influencing policy proposals: 

Airlines, too, are taking note, with many promoting their own sustainability credentials. Below are two examples. The first, from Ryanair, has been heavily criticized as “greenwashing.” The carrier advertises itself as Europe’s lowest emissions airline, based on carbon emissions per seat-kilometer flown, because it has a younger, more fuel-efficient fleet and fills 96 percent of its seats. The ads do not mention that Ryanair is the tenth-largest carbon emitter in Europe (the first nine are coal-fired power plants). KLM, on the other hand, recommends exploring other travel options besides flying. 

Unfortunately, Americans have few green options for inter-city travel. Rail is by far more sustainable than air or car travel. And while extensive high-speed rail networks link hundreds of cities across Europe and Asia, the United States’ only “high-speed” rail corridor, connecting Boston and Washington, D.C., moves at an average of 66 mph. Rail travel in the rest of the country is worse: A train trip from New York City to Chicago takes 19 hours (for comparison, Beijing and Shanghai, an equivalent distance, can be covered in 4 hours and 20 minutes by train). 

If implemented, the Green New Deal could make massive investments in our rail network, though the infrastructure would likely take years to build, years we do not have to wait if we are going to limit warming of the planet.

While flight shaming remains a radical notion in the United States, environmentalists are clear that radical change is needed to avoid a climate catastrophe. Is flight shaming is the radicalism we need?

Resources/further reading:

Laudato Si: On the Care for Our Common Home

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home

Core text

Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home. The Holy See: Vatican Press, 2015. The Holy See.

Summary

The urgent need to preserve our planet has emerged as an issue of science, politics, economics, justice — and morality, as evidenced by Pope Francis’ 2015 publication of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. The title of the encyclical comes from the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. “Laudato Si’” means “Praise be to you Lord,” from the beginning of a prayer of St. Francis that continues, “through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”

While Francis joins leaders of many other faiths — including his own predecessors — in defining environmental concerns as moral concerns, publishing an encyclical addressed to the world elevates and develops these concerns in an unprecedented way. In doing so, he defines environmental degradation and social degradation are inextricable.

Laudato Si‘ is more than a call to lower carbon emissions. In fact, Francis calls the buying and selling of carbon credits “a quick and easy solution” (if only it were quick and easy in the United States) that does not allow for the radical change these circumstances require. Instead, Laudato Si’ is a call to change the way we live: to decrease consumption, to be in solidarity with future generations, and to value every creature. The current pace of consumption and waste, of extreme consumerism, is not sustainable.

So, too, is unrestrained capitalism. As if writing directly to the United States, Pope Francis says that our current economic model is too rooted in individual success and self-reliance. He links the mindset of those who lack concern for the most vulnerable of society with the mindset of those who have no concern for the environment. He devotes an entire section to global inequality, reminding us that the environmental deterioration will affect the world’s most vulnerable people.

The message of Laudato Si’ will be familiar to those on the frontlines of the environmental movement: Extreme consumerism has led to a grave environmental crisis, and human beings need to change their lives radically to solve this crisis.

Teaching resources

  • Klein, Naomi. “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker, 10 July 2015.

    This essay in The New Yorker — also a chapter in Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal — tells the story of her trip to the Vatican to participate in the announcement of the publication of Laudato Si’. A self-described “secular Jewish feminist” Klein describes the juxtaposition of her presence against the male hierarchy, though she describes many of the Catholics present as either from the Global South — with a different perspective from that which has dominated Christianity for centuries — or those who have felt like exiles under previous popes. When asked in a press conference to address the juxtaposition, Klein responds that she is not present to negotiate a peace deal, but that if she and Pope Francis are correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental change to our economic model, then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes. Klein questions how Francis can on one hand understand the gravity of our current crisis and, on the other hand, be hopeful for the future — then realizing that if the Vatican itself, one of the most tradition-bound institutions in the world, could change as rapidly as it has under Francis, then perhaps that gives hope to the world.
  • McDermott, Jim. “At the Front Lines: An Interview with California Governor Jerry Brown on ‘Laudato Si”.” America Magazine, 8 July 2015.

    Former California Governor Jerry Brown has spent more than four decades in public service and has accomplished the feat of serving as California’s youngest governor (1975 to 1983) and oldest governor (2010 to 2018). A former Jesuit seminarian, he was interviewed in 2015 by the Jesuit weekly America regarding the intersection of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ and public policy. He speaks from the front lines of the fight against climate change — both with dealing with the effects of climate change (longer fire seasons) and combatting it (with policies that have succeeded in reducing carbon output despite an increase in population). The now-former governor acknowledges the tension between our reliance on amassing consumer goods and the pope’s words on the need to consume less.

  • Okpodu, Camellia Moses. “What It Will Take to Do the Work of Laudato Si’: Stewardship for All, by All.” National Catholic Reporter, 26 June 2020.

    Part of a series in the National Catholic Reporter on the fifth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’, this piece reflects on Laudato Si’ from three unique perspectives: The author, Camellia Moses Okpodu, is an environmental scientist, she is African Methodist Episcopal, and she serves as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University of Louisiana, one of the nation’s 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Okpodu explores the need to ensure that environmental programs in academia reach students of color, noting that environmental programs are lacking at HBCUs across the country. She has proposed a Centers for the Environment at colleges and universities serving minority students that would include students trained in the humanities and social and/or behavioral sciences, as well as the sciences. If people of color are to share the stewardship of caring for creation, Okpodu writes, we must make available the training it takes to do that work.
  • Weber, Kerry. “Why ‘Laudato Si” Is the Perfect Encyclical for Millennials.” America Magazine, 18 June 2015.

    This article — by a millennial who bought her copy of 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth at age 8 — notes that Laudato Si’ addresses all of the primary concerns of the millennial generation, as reported by a Deloitte survey: unemployment, resource scarcity, climate change/protecting the environment and inequality. The encyclical recognizes the power of human connection, values ethnic and cultural diversity, appreciates innovation, offers a call to humility and urges greater efforts for equality and solidarity — all accessible to the generation that grew up with the 50 Simple Things series, Weber writes. Laudato Si’ was a needed reminder to this young writer that “our use of technology, love of the poor, and care for our environment are integrally connected, and that cultivating love and respect for all God’s creation is, in fact, a timely and timeless concern.”

Discussion Questions

  1. Quoting his predecessors, Pope Francis writes, “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.” How has American individualism and the sacredness of private property rights contributed to environmental degradation? Is it even possible in this country to view private property rights as anything less than inviolable?
  2. Pope Francis also writes “Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack.” Could spirituality — of any faith or background — be a tool toward turning away from consumerism?
  3. More often than not in this country, many faith communities have been publically allied with politicians who do not support greater environmental protections. Is that changing? Is there a unique role that faith communities can play in combating environmental degradation?
Greta Thunberg urges MEP's to show climate leadership.

Social media reaction to flight shaming and Greta Thunberg’s trip across the Atlantic

If you’re a regular flyer, odds are that your biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions each year is air travel. It likely dwarfs the footprint of all the lights in your home, your commute to work, your hobbies, and maybe even your diet.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-thunberg-climate-change-flying-airline

Last summer, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg set sail from the UK on a zero-carbon racing boat (NOT a luxury yacht) to attend the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York. Thunberg has vowed not to fly — and has persuaded her parents to do the same — because of the greenhouse gases emitted by airplanes (cruise ships are even worse). In making her trip to the United States by boat, she gave a significant boost to the “flight shaming” movement, known in Sweden as “flygskam.” She also provoked wide ranging responses on social media, many of them distorting her message.

Perhaps the most egregious social media response was a photo of Thunberg eating breakfast on a train, with a scene out the window that was manipulated to depict hungry children of color looking inside. The photo was shared by the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

Presumably this was to discredit Thunberg by portraying her as a clueless child of privilege, unaware of real needs around her. Discrediting Thunberg because of her youth is a common response on social media.

In a March 2020 article in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism titled “Hero or villain? Responses to Greta Thunberg’s activism and the implications for travel and tourism,” Mucha Mknono took a closer look at reactions such as this, analyzing hundreds of Facebook responses to Thunberg’s trip across the Atlantic. The authors read and categorized responses across three Facebook pages: Sky News, BBC and CNN, coding responses into five categories, four that scapegoated Thunberg and one that heroized her.

The following are the broad categories, with examples of comments from each:

  1. Insults of Thunberg’s personal characteristics, including being dismissed for being young, mentally sick, ignorant, irrational, or idealistic.

Amazing! If my parents had not loved me and I suffered from a lack of attention I’d do the same! (y)’; and ‘I’m not that special’??? Oh please- you’re not special at all. Nothing but a silly little attention seeking brat.

Comment on BBC Facebook page

2. Conspiracy theories

Who’s puppet is she? Its clear as day that she isn’t doing this on her own, you can see it when she speaks, like shes being forced to read from a script that somebody else has written for her

Comment on Sky News Facebook page


3. “Hypocrite villain” to create an “us-and-them dichotomy; a sort of class struggle representation of the climate change debate.”

Emissions free until I fly one crew home and fly another crew in for the return trip. Practice real ecology not Eco theatre your more fake than cool whip. I’m tired of people falling for these stunts that are not green and accomplish nothing other than making a carbon spewing fake Eco warior famous for fifteen minutes. Your a discrace to the very cause your besmirching.

Comment on CNN Facebook page

4. Dismissing personal responsibility and portraying Thunberg’s anti-flying message as without a sound scientific basis

I DO listen to the science. HUNDREDS of predictions of our doom, we should have been flooded and burned to death long ago, and none, not a single one, has come true yet. We were even told that by the 1990s we would see a new ice age kill us off. Didn’t happen either. When your predictions don’t match actual observations, the theory is wrong and you throw it away. Why this theory proven so wrong hasn’t been is very telling. It’s not about the environment, it’s about something else.’

Comment on CNN Facebook page

5. And finally, “hero ecology,” wherein she was viewed as inspirational, and her anti-flying message as worth heeding.

This young woman is doing an amazing job in highlighting the climate crisis and bringing young people into the demand for change.
Well done Greta!

Comment on CNN Facebook page

The analysis found that 70 percent of the comments fell into the first four categories, which the authors refer to as “scapegoat ecology,” where Thunberg becomes the target of vitriol toward climate change activism and the anti-flying movement.

It is depressing to consider that absent from these comments is a sincere, productive discussion about the role of air travel — or any travel — in contributing to greenhouse gases.

Also absent from the comments ridiculing her age is Thunberg’s own words acknowledging that she would rather scientists be the ones speaking out: “We know that most politicians don’t want to talk to us. Good, we don’t want to talk to them either. We want them to talk to the scientists instead. Listen to them” (Brussels, 21 Feb 2019).

I am reminded that Susanne Moser’s, “Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science‐Action Gap” was written in 2011, when social media was still in its early years. The author has since written much on climate change communication. With so much of our communication happening via social media, perhaps it is time for a study of best practices for activists to most effectively communicate the realities of climate change — and solutions — amid this vitriolic online environment.

Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home

Radical conversion and our throwaway culture: the intersection of Pope Francis and Naomi Klein

In 2015, Pope Francis published a groundbreaking document, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” an encyclical defining the environmental movement as a moral issue for the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and calling all of humanity to a radical conversion. 

From the pope’s opening words quoting his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, in praise of “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us,” the pope rejects the anthropocentrism of Judeo-Christian culture in recent centuries. He also acknowledges something that many in this country do not: that unrestrained capitalism and consumerism have led to a grave environmental crisis, and human beings need to change their lives radically to solve this crisis. 

This is not an academic document nor a call for Catholics to recycle, compost, turn down their air conditioners or buy energy-efficient cars, but rather a 246-paragraph statement that our relationship with creation and our relationship with each other are inextricably tied: “We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

The pope writes in his introduction:

“I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle.”

While the pope’s language frequently references Catholic tradition, the encyclical is explicitly addressed to all of humanity. And as such, many of the pope’s words will resonate with environmental acivitsts of all backgrounds: He writes about the “sufferings of the excluded,” the “globalization of indifference,” the earth as a “shared inheritance,” the rejection of the absolute “right to private property,” “sustainable development,” “intergenerational solidarity,” “rampant individualism,” “excessive consumption,” “compulsive consumerism,” and “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded and at the same time protecting nature.”

For those in the United States fighting for a Green New Deal, these words should sound familiar, albeit from a source surprising to some.  Just as the Green New Deal takes a wide view, addressing climate change side by side with systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices, Pope Francis calls humanity to a more radical conversion that addresses these injustices together. 

The encyclical even led Anglican priest and journalist Giles Fraser to write a piece in The Guardian titled “Pope Francis is a bit like Naomi Klein in a cassock.”

The two certainly have their similarities, at least when they write about the need to reject consumerism. Consider these two passages:

“The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”

“Policy makers are still dancing around the question of whether we are talking about slapping solar panels on the roof of Walmart and calling it green, or whether we are ready to have a more probing conversation about the limits of lifestyles that treat shopping as the main way to form identity, community and culture.”

Can you tell who wrote what? The first is from Laudato Si, the second is from Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal. 

Pope Francis frequently uses the term “throwaway culture.” In On Fire, Klein makes similar references: “It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s certainly how we’ve been trained to treat our stuff — use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more,” or, more bluntly, “it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.”

Indeed there is a direct connection between the two: Pope Francis asked Klein to co-chair a Vatican conference on the environment upon the publication of Laudato Si, an encounter Klein writes about in On Fire. And Klein urged world leaders attending the Paris climate change conference to read Laudato Si. Not just summaries, she said. The whole thing.

The burning question now is which path this country will take, if any. Should climate activists in this country go big, and seek the radical change that Pope Francis and Klein advocate, and which the Green New Deal calls for? Or focus narrowly on decreasing carbon output? Pope Francis and Klein certainly make convincing cases for the former. 

    Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

    ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and the American ‘right’ to cheap oil

    “Drill, Baby, Drill.” These words call to mind former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the 2008 presidential election, when many Americans were outraged over $4/gallon gasoline prices, and many Republicans sought to solve this “problem” with increased drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

    Palin popularized a phrase written by Michael Steele, then the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, who went on to Chair the Republican Party.  As he recounted in an interview, he was writing the speech at 2 am the morning before he was due to give it, and felt he needed something catchy. He came up with “drill, baby, drill” — which brought to mind a phrase associated with the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, “Burn, baby, burn!” — but fretted that it might not be appropriate for a nationally televised speech.

    There was no need to fret. When Steele said the words, delegates at the convention immediately broke out in a “drill, baby, drill” chant, which continued into the fall presidential campaign (even though their nominee opposed drilling in ANWR and supported cap-and-trade legislation to limit carbon emissions). The chant conveyed an argument that increased drilling would lead to the cheap gasoline prices Americans need and deserve. 

    Though it would be difficult to measure cause-and-effect impact, the chant correlated with a significant shift in party platform: In 2008, the Republican platform acknowledged human contribution to carbon levels and called for “technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.” Four years later, even after a spill discharged 4.9 billion gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the party all but adopted “Drill, baby, drill,” with a platform that opposed “any and all cap and trade legislation” and demanded that Congress “take quick action to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations.” 

    In her piece, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Cara Daggett addresses this Palin-Republican belief that Americans have a right to cheap fossil fuels:

    “No wonder that access to cheap and plentiful gas and energy became the sine qua non for American well-being, and a right demanded both of the state and for the state. Even as Americans in the 21st century disagree about whether health care or food should be considered a right, there is a widespread, bipartisan assumption that Americans deserve cheap energy, and that the state has a duty to ensure it. In turn, any threat to energy supply appears simultaneously as a threat to the American dream and, in turn, the dominant position of the US in the world.”

    And though her argument focuses on masculinity, Daggett acknowledges that more than half of white women voters were drawn to a different slogan, “Make America Great Again.”  These women (presumably Palin included), Daggett argues, find “security in the status quo, and therefore resent threats to fossil fuel systems and/or hegemonic white masculinities.”

    Daggett also makes direct reference to Palin: “Fossil fuel systems provide a domain for explosive letting go, and all the pleasures that come with it – drilling, digging, fracking, mountaintop removal, diesel trucks. In the words of Sarah Palin, ‘drill, baby, drill!’”

    Of course, the obsession with cheap oil and fossil fuel reliance flies in the face of environmental experts. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018 that carbon pollution would have to be cut by 20 percent by 2030 to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or by 45 percent by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. And in the largest public statement of economists in history, more than 3,500 economists from both sides of the political aisle signed a statement calling for a tax on carbon — not a reduction in prices, as Palin and others have called for — as key to limiting greenhouse gases. 

    Cheap oil is not a right, as it passes enormous costs onto future generations.

    For Palin, “Drill, baby, drill” wasn’t just a slogan or proposed policy, it was tantamount to a divine mandate. In the years since the 2008 campaign, she coupled “drill, baby, drill” with a reference to our oil reserves as “God-given resources,” suggesting that our Creator intended for Americans to drill and extract oil. 

    In 2015, while suggesting she would accept a position as US Secretary of Energy in a future Trump administration, Palin said, “Oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations … No, we’re not going to chill. In fact, it’s time to drill, baby, drill down.”

    If Palin is looking to God for energy policy, she should drill down instead on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home and the words of other Christian leaders who believe combatting climate change is a moral issue.