Tag Archives: flight shaming

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:

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.