School of Arts heads to Barcelona

I understand that the School of Art organizes an annual field trip around Easter, and this year they are going to Barcelona. I asked them how they are travelling there, and the reply that I got was by plane.

Air travel is enormously destructive to the environment, and has significant implications for climate change. An average calculation of the carbon footprint for air travel from Liverpool to Barcelona from Climate Care was 0.31 tonnes of CO2; a calculation from the CarbonNeutral Company was 0.4 tonnes for CO2 for a journey of 2778km.

I asked the School of Art whether they had considered going by other means of travel; I know the Biology department travels to Spain for a summer field trip by ferry and there are also trains and coach networks across Europe. Going to Barcelona, these modes of travel obviously take longer, but have a far smaller carbon footprint. The answer that I got back was that they had asked the Art students and all of them preferred going by plane. Thus, 'it is the students I need to convert'. It's all too easy to pass the buck - 'oh, we tried, but they just didn't want to do it' and just like that, climate change falls through the gap.

There is a valid point that was made to me - not everyone is aware of the impacts of aviation on climate change and campaigners face the constant task of getting the word out - as we come to understand climate linkages better we have to communicate those effectively. But climate change requires an assertive stance, and the School of Art should have not made air travel an option.

Marketing people call this choice editing - the choices we make are from a range that have been selected by others. Insisting that air travel was a no-no would have been a powerful sign of how seriously we are taking climate change and make it easier and encourage students to be green.

It is short-haul air travel that we can do plenty about. The most popular flights out of the UK are to Paris and Amsterdam - easily accessible by Eurostar. There are plenty of other options for further beyond on rail, ferry or coach. Short-haul flights are the most inefficient (on a per km, not an absolute basis) because the aircraft is in the air for only a short period of time and the extra fuel needed for take-off and landing isn't exploited. And short-haul flights are the ones that we can do without.

George Monbiot made a striking point in one of his columns a month or so ago that the real threat to our ability to face up to the climate change challenge are not the 'climate deniers' - ExxonMobil et al. The real theat comes from those of us who are aware of what climate change is and what its impacts are, but who do nothing about it and do not change their lifestyles accordingly. We can all say the fuzzy words of concern - but rhetoric means nothing without action.

For more information on aviation and climate change, visit Spurt - the website of those who favor more runways, expanding air travel and building bigger airports...