International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1 https://t.co/EfYxnFSf8n

As with much anti-EV propaganda, generated by a tiny minority of idiosyncratic drivers, international air travel is being used to obstruct action that would benefit many more people than those who can fly internationally. /2

About 2% of the world flies internationally in a given year. That 2% use tens of billions of litres of jet fuel to enable their country-hopping. Remembering that fossil fuel engines achieve not much more than 30% efficiency, that’s a colossal amount of energy wasted. /3

Yes jet planes can allow you to fly anywhere in the world inside a day. But you waste eye-watering amounts of energy to make that possible, staggering amounts of a high energy density fuel. What I think is rarely noticed is that this is already a broken business model. /4

Even without climate change, it would be impossible to extend this sort of travel to a significantly larger proportion of the world population. The energy required is simply not available. Let alone the massive infrastructure to shunt fuel and planes and passengers around. /5

So let’s not even pretend this was an industry that was catering for ordinary people, in global terms. It never was, nor was it ever able to be. The basic physics and engineering made that impossible. The attempts now to electrify international flight may be backwards. /6

It’s one of those activities that needed to be questioned fundamentally, rather than translated into a climate-friendly version. If you criticise international travel, immediately people will jump all over you talking about how their families would be separated without it. /7

But they’re only separated in the first place BECAUSE of it. Only this highly elite energy pig activity made it even fathomable that we could maintain ordinary family life spread across every corner of the globe, jumping on and off planes like they’re local buses. /8

It’s one of those cases of induced demand. There was no demand for running a family across multiple continents pre-jet planes, because it was impossible to do. It would be a much more obvious step to reframe our expectations and assumptions. /9

The problem of mobility is that it gives an appearance of greater freedom, while actually stripping away much of the agency people have. A world where every location is equally accessible to all people, is a world where all locations lose any special reason for being. /10

To be mobile means to sweep away the social rules built up over millennia around place. Place is an existential fundamental. Look at how many elections are won ‘protecting borders’. By the same people who expect to be able to travel unhindered across everybody else’s. /11

To be homeless, or State-less, to have no allocated place on the planet you can in some way call your own, is one of life’s greatest miseries. But the politics of the economy respects no place. Only mobilisation. Everything must be done to remove restrictions to movement. /12

Except, again, where that means movement into the places the Economy Gods call their own. The homes/places of the international travel crowd. They want full protection of place for those, just not anybody else’s. It’s classic remnant imperial behaviour. Our old empire DNA. /13 https://t.co/BLgYbrVy3j

We won’t find climate-friendly ways to do regular international air travel, because even with fossil fuels, the activity was already the exclusive playground of the international elite. The fact many ordinary people in rich countries don’t see themselves as that? /14

Just proof once again that privilege is mostly invisible to itself. A reframing of international travel is much more importantly a re-discovery of the importance and agency of place itself. The thing all empires disrespect most fundamentally. /15

Having to learn to negotiate with place again, respecting the homes of others as well as ourselves, rather than transforming them into easy-access tourist destinations. The rest of the world isn’t ‘sights’ to be seen. It’s peoples’ homes. /end