How to Fly Less (Without Giving Up Travel)

 

00:00 Kim: Flying is one of the few sectors that isn't technically possible or ready to decarbonise.

 

00:07 Ed: I can't see particularly how I can live without flying.

 

00:11 Kim: The first people to reduce flying shouldn't be, you know, one family holiday a year, or someone traveling to see family, but a frequent flyer or a private jet flyer.

 

00:20 Ed: I mean, I was guilty of falling for that myself, of trying to, you know, accrue as many miles as I could. I can't believe they don't do that for other things like rail, for example.

 

00:26 Kim: So I also was a frequent flyer and I retired my frequent flyer card in 2012. And it's now in a museum called Carbon Ruins.

 

Have you shared your concerns and feelings, like realizing the seriousness of the climate crisis and why you care about it and what it means to you? Is that something they know?

 

00:46 Ed: They dressed me up as Greta Thunberg on my stag do. It's well known how I think and feel.

 

00:52 Kim: So I hear you're interested in talking about flying and potentially flying less. So I'm curious to start with why flying is on your radar. When did you start thinking about flying in the context of climate and start caring about it?

 

01:06 Ed: Well, I've lived abroad. I'm originally from the UK, but I've lived abroad for about fifteen or sixteen years now. I think an awful lot about the ways in which I can reduce my own carbon footprint and be kind of influential. But when living abroad means I have family in different countries, then flying is very much a part of my life, whether they're flying to visit us or us flying to visit them. 2017 or 2018, I started a new job, and I remember that being a bit of a catalyst moment of, oh, wow, climate change is way more serious than I realized before. I've always worked in transport planning and infrastructure projects, and a big part of that is obviously sustainability and trying to move transport beyond the private car. It was probably not until sort of 2017, 2018 that I really understood how bad of a spot we are, and the impact that flying has.

 

But my relationship with flying is quite messy because I have family in Cyprus. I have family in the UK. I've lived in the Middle East, I've lived in Australia. And so I have flown quite a lot. And that probably won't change for the foreseeable. I can't see particularly how I can live without flying for quite a while, but I can certainly try to reduce it, and I have tried to cut down quite a lot.

 

02:46 Kim: Yeah, I hear you. We're in really the same boat. I've been living abroad far from family for sixteen years as well, and in quite a dilemma with trying to reduce flying but also still see loved ones. It can be tricky. Those are the hardest miles to cut. Love miles, George Monbiot calls them. And at the moment, how often do you fly and where are you flying for, for what purposes?

 

03:12 Ed: Once or twice a year, maximum, to see loved ones. That's it. We don't particularly, or haven't particularly, flown for a while for a holiday. I did previously travel for work, but I haven't had to travel for work for a while. And I was fortunate enough to be able to, or felt in a position where I could push back on when I was asked to fly for work. I said, actually, I feel like I can do this online. It was for a conference. So I have also done that. Not everyone's able to probably feel like they can push back and worry about their jobs and things. We've also got a two year old son and two more boys on the way. My wife's pregnant with twins.

 

04:04 Kim: Wow. Congrats.

 

04:06 Ed: So it's not just my flying when you live abroad, it's also people coming to visit. They're also forced to fly because of our decision to live abroad.

 

04:15 Kim: Yeah. People want to meet those grandbabies, I certainly understand. And you mentioned having kind of a catalyst moment, was that about flying specifically or about climate more generally?

 

04:25 Ed: It was a COP event, and just getting more involved in watching the output, but there was just a lot more information being shared. I think at that point it became probably more mainstream than it had, than I remember it being.

 

04:45 Kim: And when did you become aware of the climate impact of flying, or how do you think about the climate impact of flying? Why flying in particular is a problem for climate.

 

04:59 Ed: I work in transport decarbonisation, and my job is getting people out of cars, or planning a transport system that moves us beyond the private car. So I can sort of see a pathway to most other things decarbonising, and that's happening quite a lot around the world. It's difficult to change people's behaviours, but there are a lot of encouraging signs. I think, flying is still a long way behind. But flying, it's very difficult to see any way of reducing the impact of flying, certainly in the short term. It's hard to see how that can be decarbonised in the immediate future. There was lots of talk of hydrogen at one point. There's talk of sustainable aviation fuel, which my understanding is, it's not really scalable. And electric aviation is, I think, an option for short haul flights, but is a long way off, if possible, to tackle long haul flights. So it's one of those, if we maintain the current system, it's hard to see how that can be decarbonised.

 

And at one point I was flying and thinking I could just pay my offsets. So the airlines would tell you this is how much carbon emissions you were making on this flight. And I could pay a small amount of money and then feel like I was flying kind of guilt free, which I realise now was a bit of a con. So I can't remember a specific moment when I realised, I think maybe I kind of always knew, but I just didn't know how bad things were with climate change.

 

06:59 Kim: Yeah, you're absolutely right on all counts, that flying is one of the few sectors that isn't technically possible or ready to decarbonise. For most sectors we do. We do, as you mentioned, with ground transport, which is great. So flying is one of those industries that actually needs to reduce in order to reduce emissions, that we don't have substitutes and we actually need demand reduction. And that makes flying so powerful as a climate action, or flying less, for people who fly, because it does emit so much per distance travelled. It's really carbon intensive and we don't have good substitutes at the ready and emissions have to go down.

 

07:40 Ed: Yeah. And it's problematic because most airlines, and seemingly most countries who are pursuing economic growth, seem to think that expanding aviation, and even the size of the airport itself, is a good way of pursuing economic growth. And that is compatible with net zero. So in the UK, for example, they've decided to expand Heathrow. The airport is saying that if you expand Heathrow with a new runway, we can have a lot more flights, we can deliver the growth that you want, and we can still do that in a net zero way because we're going to have sustainable aviation fuel, supposedly. So, like you just said, I don't see how you decarbonise aviation without demand reduction. And that is difficult to do.

 

08:31 Kim: With sustainable aviation fuel right now in the European Union and in the UK, the requirements are to have a certain percentage be these sustainable aviation fuels, which ideally should be lower emission. But as you say, they're not on track to meet climate goals. In the UK right now it's one point two percent and it's supposed to be ten percent by twenty thirty, so it's not scaling fast enough. And a big problem is that airline use is growing. People are flying more. As long as that curve is going up, even if a larger fraction is lower emission fuel, the total volume of flying is outpacing any benefits there. So yeah, you're absolutely right, demand reduction is necessary.

 

09:10 Ed: You could talk about pricing mechanisms. So if you made flying more expensive, then the demand would go down, and the advent of cheaper flights and these low cost airlines has, I'm sure, contributed to more people flying, being able to afford to fly. But that also doesn't sit well with me because I can't imagine that would be politically achievable either, because it feels unfair in a way if you price people out of travelling, and there's quite a big tension. I would rather see, personally, a ban on private jets as a way of trying to reduce demand. I don't know the maths on that, and whether that alone would help bring aviation into, as a sector, make it compatible with net zero. But I would have thought that would be a pretty good starting point.

 

10:10 Kim: Yeah. There actually is a campaign to do that. So the charity Possible in the UK has a campaign to ban private jets as part of their strategy to reduce flying. And exactly, as you say, to focus on those who can least afford to reduce flying. And polling shows that that's also supported, that people, the first people to reduce flying shouldn't be, you know, one family holiday a year, or someone travelling to see family, but a frequent flyer or a private jet flyer who's taking their fifth or tenth or twentieth trip. That's certainly a good place to start.

 

10:42 Ed: Yeah, the whole concept of frequent flyer miles is utterly absurd, I think, as well. I mean, I was guilty of falling for that myself, of trying to accrue as many miles as I could, for points. But you know, you get a credit card, if you spend on your credit card, it means I'm going to be able to have a cheaper holiday, but I can't believe they don't do that for other things. Like, for example, aviation seems to be way ahead of the game in their pricing and their sort of incentives for return customers than other modes.

 

11:17 Kim: Yeah, absolutely. So I also was a frequent flyer and I retired my frequent flyer card in twenty twelve, and it's now in a museum called Carbon Ruins, which is a museum from the future, looking back on the crazy things that we did in this fossil fuel era, which by then has ended. So there's this gold card from a climate scientist who stopped being a frequent flyer when I sort of did the maths and put everything together.

 

We struggle with reducing flying, and what makes it difficult? Because there's a lot to take in. So how do you think about your own flying in the climate crisis?

 

11:54 Ed: I mean, even if you ignore the climate crisis, I actually don't like it. It's quite a stressful experience, particularly when travelling with a child. I find it maddening as hell when people say, oh, it only took me an hour to fly here, or I can fly there in two hours. It doesn't, because it's the whole experience of getting to the airport, the hours you spend, and the stress going through security, is my weight allowance okay, and taking stuff out of your bag and blah, blah, blah, and then the other side, and then, you know, it just doesn't take the short duration that people seem to think it takes.

 

One example was, we were in the UK and we went to Amsterdam with my son on the Eurostar, which was just a way more pleasant experience for us to do, because we could get a table seat with my mum and dad, we could play games with him, we could interact, he could walk up and down, he could stare at other people. It was just, as opposed to flying, when they're young, they're strapped to you, they're crying, all there is to do really is to look at the screen. It's just a really unpleasant experience.

 

But when we got to Amsterdam, we met another couple, and we said, I think it was a four hour train ride, I can't remember the total length of time it took, including the security side, which was much shorter. But they said to us, it only took us forty five minutes to get to Amsterdam. But it didn't only take you forty five minutes. So I find that really annoying. And when you think about it sort of holistically, as an experience, flying, for me anyway, is quite stressful.

 

13:43 Kim: Yeah, absolutely. I, on my fourth date with my now husband, we took a fifteen hour train trip to Paris. That was quite a good relationship test, and also a lot of fun. And I totally agree that it's a great way to travel, and making the journey a part of the trip is just a different mindset. So yeah, it would be great to emphasise those benefits more, and the fun aspects of it.

 

14:07 Ed: My friend Pete Dyson wrote a book on behaviour change, it's called Transport for Humans. And he talks a lot about the experience that people have, and simple things like having a seat with a fold down table, so you can do a little bit of work at the same time, or watch something more comfortably, which you often don't get on a train. Those kind of, the human side of the experience, would go some way in making rail travel more competitive with aviation, I think, as an alternative.

 

I also like the idea, I was listening to Outrage and Optimism with Christiana Figueres a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about electric aviation. But I like the idea that you would maybe do, instead of one long haul flight, you might do two or three short haul flights on an electric plane. It can't do the long distance in one go, but it would allow you to see more places along the way. Or even, you could do electric plane and a train, as opposed to one plane journey.

 

15:52 Kim: Yeah, absolutely, that sounds really appealing. So with the flying that you are still doing, what does it give you that you value? Is there a recent trip that you got a lot of meaning from?

 

16:04 Ed: It's just seeing friends and family. We did have some family in Australia, which was one of the reasons why we lived there. And my wife grew up in the Middle East and has family here, and also family in Cyprus. So there's basically nowhere where we can live where we won't have to fly a little bit. Maybe the UK to Cyprus might be one of those that could be done by electric plane, or perhaps a couple of trains and a ferry or something, if we have more time to go to Cyprus in a kind of slower way.

 

We've recently, in recent years, tried to do more holidaying from the UK via the Eurostar, which we've really enjoyed. So that kind of holiday side of things, we've done more by rail trips.

 

[NO TIMECODE — see note below] I went, we went to Cyprus this year to see my mother in law. I don't think there's a way of doing that by any other means, even if we had several weeks. I'm not aware of any other way of doing that other than flying. I could be wrong, and perhaps I should research it, but we also don't own a car, so I don't think we could drive through Saudi Arabia with a hire car, particularly either. So that's one that's difficult to do. But yeah, perhaps one day, when we, if we move somewhere else, we might be able to change our behaviour a little bit.

 

16:51 Kim: So what would your ideal look like? What is it that you want to get from flying, or I guess, not just flying, let me take that back, but what you actually want in terms of how you live and travel? What would the ideal life look like for you in that sense?

 

17:06 Ed: Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of value in travelling. I'm speaking a little bit from a position of privilege, having been to places like Australia and New Zealand and Thailand, and I'm sure there are, well, I know there are lots of people who haven't been to those places that would really like to fly to those.

 

So it's from a position of privilege that I can probably say that I feel like I have done a lot of travelling and don't feel necessarily like I need to go back to those places as much as I had an absolutely amazing time.

 

One thing that I would like to try to do is, instead of going to these sort of far flung places all the time, explore places a lot more locally.

 

One real tension I'm having at the moment is that my friends in the UK, who I went to university with twenty years ago, we've been putting some money aside for our fortieth birthdays, which is next year, and we do a lot of kind of outdoor adventure stuff, climbing and canyoning and things like that. And everybody wants to go to Canada.

 

I'm the only one that's pushing for a European trip, because I think we can have the exact same experience in Europe. It's got some of the best canyons in the world. And I guess I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine it doesn't feel probably as exotic to everybody else, because Canada's, you know, maybe further away and perhaps there's been a lot of marketing more about Canada, and they, you know, maybe they've been to Europe lots of times, and so this is a big trip, we should go somewhere a bit more exotic, I'm assuming that's kind of what's going on. But they've all said Canada. And so I'm now in this quandary of, do I go and feel really guilty about flying the whole time, or do I not go and feel really sad about missing out on a trip with my friends?

 

But, yeah, it's, I feel like I've tried on that one, and I'm not sure I'm going to win. So I'm in a difficult spot with that.

 

19:43 Kim: Yeah.

 

19:43 Ed: And I'd be lying if I said I also don't want to go to Canada. So I am really struggling with that one. Yeah, we'll see, I'm not sure how that's going to play out.

 

19:55 Kim: Yeah, I hear you. I mean, maybe we should dive into that case a little bit. So is there one person who's in charge, or it's their main birthday, or they're going to decide, or it's the group of you together that decides?

 

20:07 Ed: Yeah, it's the group. We're running it as a democracy. There's no leader as such. One person's in charge of the money, so maybe he's done a bit more of the organisation. He actually is probably one person that thinks a little bit along the same lines as I do, and so I have, I suppose, quietly suggested it on the side to him as well, just to get his thoughts.

 

But the other side of it as well is that I've flown a lot more than those guys over the years, and it makes me a giant hypocrite, because they've lived in the UK and haven't probably flown every year like I have. And so for me to turn around and say we should go to Europe because I feel guilty about flying, well, they can say, well, we don't, because we haven't flown as much as you have.

 

So it's, but yeah, there's no real one person that's a leader. And so I thought maybe I could, you know, a true politician style, try to sort of lobby for more votes one on one, take people to the side and try and do it that way. But that's also, the critical mass is not with me at the moment.

 

21:22 Kim: Yeah. I hear you. And I'm married to a Canadian, so I have lots of good feelings about Canada, but I agree that trying to reduce the amount of flying, and especially the distance of flying, because the climate pollution is proportional to the distance you fly, so for everyone to fly, you know, long haul from the UK to Canada, will be a lot of emissions. I think it can be quite tricky.

 

Something that really I was stuck with for a long time was, okay, I can't, I'm not ready, and I can't imagine giving up all flying. So I wasn't able, because I couldn't imagine, I wanted to keep flying, to see my family in North America, living in Sweden basically. So I couldn't start thinking about the flights that I could reduce, or ways of having those experiences without flying.

 

So I hear you on the worry about being a hypocrite, or being perceived that way, but I think every flight you can skip really is a very powerful climate action, and especially influencing others is very powerful. So it's worth trying to figure out what people want to get out of that trip, and if there are ways of satisfying those needs of adventure and time with your friends, and in a beautiful place, enjoying nature, and having it feel special and epic, without flying, or with less flying.

 

22:47 Ed: Yeah, I'll have a think. I've tried a few ways. I also googled world's top canyons, and there were none in Canada. I'm sure there's some great canyons in Canada, but in this list I found, none of the world's top canyons in this list were from Canada. Several were in Europe. So I tried it that way, here's this list, here's some of the great ones. And, yeah, that got shot down.

 

23:19 Kim: That sounds really frustrating. I think it's a good strategy, your idea to approach a friend one on one and maybe have more of a conversation and ask questions on where they're at. And, have you shared your concerns and feelings, like realising the seriousness of the climate crisis and why you care about it, and what it means to you? Is that something they know?

 

23:43 Ed: They dressed me up as Greta Thunberg on my stag do. It's well known how I think and feel. And some of them also do think along those kind of lines as well, and have probably taken their own steps. I'm maybe talking them down a touch and doing them a disservice. Others in that group also don't own a car, vegetarian meals in the week, and things. So I'm being probably a bit unkind by painting them in a bad light.

 

24:16 Kim: No, I get it, I get it. Well, let's talk a bit more about what you're already doing and what you might want to do in the future. I mean, you're already doing a lot. So you live car free, you're trying to help others live car free, and plan decarbonised land transit, which is a huge climate action, so thank you for that.

 

You've already cut down your flying, it sounds like, quite a bit. Most flying, something like seventy to eighty per cent for most people, is flying for leisure, not for work, and it sounds like you fit into that category. But you've eliminated, for the most part, we can come back to this, you know, potential trip with your buddies for your fortieth birthdays, but you've eliminated a lot of the holidays for flying. So you've already done a lot.

 

But if you wanted to fly less, where do you see room to do it? Or what's the tension for you of wanting to fly less, and what makes it feel difficult to do?

 

25:20 Ed: When I first moved to the Middle East, I would fly back to the UK for long weekends, for a wedding, or just for a few days to see friends and family. So I might end up flying back to the UK four times a year or something. But I wouldn't dream of doing that now. I'm also slightly fortunate that I'm past the stage where all of my friends are getting married, so I'm not getting the constant wedding invites, as I should, full disclaimer, I also got married abroad, which I felt terrible about.

 

Now we try to fly so that one or two times a year we fly, I'll go for a lot longer, and we try to sort of fit in a trip. Like I said, on the Eurostar, or on the UK rail network, or something. So it feels like we've also had a holiday. I think not one hundred per cent sure where I could actually cut down. I don't want to see my family less, but what I could do is fly to somewhere closer and then get the train from there. So would it be possible to fly into Amsterdam or Paris, or I don't know, wherever, and so that's a shorter flight, and then get the train from there, because I do have the luxury of more time. I can probably do those things. And then it would feel like we've also had a holiday, and a bit of an adventure, seeing some different places. We'd all be keen on that. That could be something we should look at in the future. I think that would probably be a good idea.

 

27:11 Kim: I was looking, you know, the website, the Man in Seat Sixty One.

 

27:17 Ed: I haven't heard of that one.

 

27:18 Kim: Oh, so it's a former rail director from the UK who is just like an incredible train guru, and the first stop for planning any trip from anywhere to anywhere. So he has an incredible website, that's basically how to get from London to anywhere on earth by train. And it's just like so plucky and can-do and well written, and he's someone who clearly loves trains and has this really devoted following. Anyway, I really recommend it.

 

But when I looked up, the Middle East is not there, so it doesn't seem to be possible to take trains from where you are back to the UK, for example. But the closest I could get was Istanbul. So one option could be to fly to Istanbul and take a train from there to London, which would be a pretty epic adventure, and, you know, that would be a journey in and of itself, but that would cut the flying almost in half, of the time or the distance. So that could be something to consider.

 

28:17 Ed: Yeah, good to know, I went there once on a rugby tour, and we had a brilliant time. I'd love to go again, I'll for sure look up, because it would tick the box of, feel like you've had a bit of a holiday, plus seeing family and friends, which we try to combine in one trip to cut down on the flying. So I will definitely look at that.

 

28:39 Kim: Well, is there anything specific you want to commit to, or you want help with, taking an action from here? Anything that kind of sticks with you that you feel like could be your next step?

 

28:54 Ed: Yeah, I think you've just probably caught me at a moment of, you know, if I hadn't, if I wasn't just about to have twins, because my life's kind of about to blow up, in a great way, so I just don't have anything particularly planned, other than going back to the UK in the next year myself. And so with my wife and kids, I think if we were having this conversation before, I would, before my wife was pregnant with twins, I would have one hundred per cent committed right now to trying that, or at least researching the Istanbul option. So I'm still fully committed to reducing flying. Having twins certainly isn't going to make me fly more to see family.

 

I mean, another difficult one, I suppose, is my mother in law is a saint, and she's going to fly over and help us with the twins, which would be virtually impossible without family support but because of that, you're not allowed to stay here for thirty days, and you have to fly.

 

For her to stay for more than thirty days, she has to fly in and out. So it's expensive for her, number one. I was trying to think if there was any way of reducing the impact of that in some way. She's probably going to have to make two completely unnecessary flights, on top of the flight in and out of the Middle East to see us, and I don't think you can do it with a hire car, because I will definitely research that to see if I can do that via hire car, to make it cheaper for her and avoid unnecessary flying. But I don't think you can, because I don't think you can cross borders in a hire car, I can't, you have to actually go into kind of no man's land, and on the other side, to get the exit stamp and then an entry stamp.

 

So I don't think you can do it. So the only way I could avoid those flights is if I bit the bullet and bought a car, which we've been trying really hard not to do. It's not easy in a harsh climate where we live, but we don't have a car, so I don't know, I'll certainly research, I'll do some digging and see if I can find a bus company, I don't think there is, but I will also check and see if we can do it with a hire car. And I will double check that, that may be a way around it.

 

30:53 Kim: Oh, it's so tough when all this infrastructure and policies and norms sort of push you in the direction you're trying not to go. I know that it is more common for families to get cars after they have kids, and given your work and philosophy and what you're trying to do, I think I really respect and support and encourage you to try to stay car free if you can, because that is a really high impact climate action in and of itself. Though I understand the trade offs you're facing here.

 

So it seems like you have a good plan, of operate within the law, I mean, you have to, of course, meet those requirements, see if there are any ways to do that without flying. And if not, try to help her and encourage her to fly as little as possible, meaning as close and as nearby and as short flights as possible, to meet the requirements, and hopefully see other friends or meet other needs, that don't make it a total waste.

 

But this kind of highlights some of the shortcomings of individual action, even though flying less is really the most powerful and most high impact personal climate action on the consumer side, in terms of, if you fly, it causes a lot of climate pollution, and reducing a flight really helps a lot.

 

But also we need collective action, supporting campaigns and initiatives and policy change, so policy and industry action to actually effectively address these. And there, I think there is a lot of good work happening. There's the Flight Free campaign that's active in the UK, I know, and started here in Sweden. I think I mentioned Possible is a charity that has this frequent flyer levy, which is an idea that I think is gaining a lot of traction, to try and make it more expensive for the most frequent flyers to fly, and start changing the incentives so that we're not subsidising and making it cheaper and easier to fly more, because the data show that it's the top one per cent of flyers who cause half of climate pollution from flying. So targeting that group is really effective.

 

33:07 Ed: Yeah, it makes it difficult, doesn't it? Because when you think about, let's say I don't fly to Canada on this trip, that decision will have probably made almost no impact yet, and there are all these kind of people flying around in their private jets all the time, totally carefree. It does make that, make it very difficult. I think if you thought we were all in it together, it kind of makes it more palatable to do something. But we're not. So, yeah, I do struggle with that.

 

Sometimes I hear, my family flew over to Australia to see us, which was great, they then wanted to fly to another place in Australia for a holiday, and I said we didn't want to do that for climate reasons, and they came back and said, well, the flight went anyway. And you hear that quite a lot, don't you, when you sort of make the decision not to fly, or to fly less, well the planes are going anyway, but that's also not true, because if lots of people chose not to fly, and there are lots of people that are choosing not to fly, or flying less, then the demand is not there, and they won't grow.

 

So I also just wanted to say that a lot, I feel like a lot of my framing has been like giving up stuff, talks about being without a car or flying less, but actually what I found in doing that is that giving up a car has meant that I get the bus to my son's nursery, and then I travel on the metro to work, it takes me an extra fifteen minutes each way, but I have got none of the hassle of owning a car, filling it up with petrol, insurance, crashes, all of that kind of stuff. But I get real quality time with my son on the way to the nursery, and it's amazing to see him on a bus interacting with different people, trying to wave at strangers, smiling, and we play games, we've been doing it for so long now, it started off just singing nursery rhymes so he wouldn't cry, but now we have proper conversations and I've seen all of that, in that time his vocabulary has really developed.

 

And also the decision to fly less, I don't see it personally as a sacrifice, because I've really enjoyed that approach of going to being in a location for a longer period of time. We spent three or four weeks with my parents the last time we were there, and we also got the train and went to the Amsterdam trip that I've mentioned, and we really enjoyed all of that. And if we were doing these sort of, you know, going back for a few days, it's stressful, it's tiring, and doing it with a child is knackering. So I just felt, I think that it's not a sacrifice, it's actually made me really enjoy those things, and giving me more of an opportunity to spend quality time with my family as well, not just my son, but my parents who I don't see all that often. So a way of framing kind of cutting down on flying, you're not giving up something, you get all this other stuff by doing that.

 

36:34 Kim: Yeah, I think that's so important. That's also been my experience. And I think it's often people are loss averse, like if you have something, you don't want to give it up, and it's easy to think of the downsides. But often, when you do make a change, there are a lot of positives associated with that change that you might not have thought about beforehand. So that really holds true for your experience.

 

I wanted to come back to the plane flying anyway. I hear that argument a lot too, and what the research shows is that flying is very demand sensitive. So airlines add and drop routes all the time based on demand, and a lot of the routes that we have now are supported by subsidies, they might not even be that economically viable on their own. So they're also often flying with older planes, which are more polluting, and not that full, globally planes are less than 85% full. So there's a lot of room for improvement there. And basically what that means is that marginal demand really makes a big difference with flying, that you deciding to fly or not fly, like the number of passengers on a trip can be the difference between a flight being profitable or not, or a route being cancelled or not.

 

37:45 Ed: Oh, that's great. I wasn't aware of those statistics, or how sensitive it was to demand changes. That's good to know.

 

37:52 Kim: And you said a second thing I was going to come back to, what was the other thing you mentioned there? Oh, it was about people being all in it together. This is like one of the biggest, I think, challenges to overcome in unlocking climate action, because consistently so much research shows, all these international studies across so many countries, consistently, a large majority of people care about climate change, are worried about climate change, want to take climate action, are willing to take climate action. But they underestimate how willing other people are. So everybody thinks that they're alone, or they're more alone, that, oh, other people don't care, other people aren't taking action, other people, they don't see the action around them, which is another reason that it's so powerful to lead by example with things like flying less, like you're doing.

 

But we really have to talk more about it, take these actions, talk about it, make it conversations with our friends in our everyday circles, and make it visible, to reinforce this norm that, yeah, climate action is good and normal and positive and fun and quality time and meaningful, and it's not the weird thing, because we really have to break that silence, because that gap is really killing us, it's really preventing a lot of people from taking action. When we look around and don't feel that others are behind us, it's hard to lead, but it makes leading all the more important. So thank you for the leading that you're doing, you're really doing a lot.

 

39:21 Ed: Yeah, so you're right. I think the other thing is, just to add to that, this idea that, what I didn't mean to come across as, others aren't doing it, therefore, in that case, I won't bother then, and that doesn't make any sense to me at all. If, the idea that, just because lots of other people are still kind of flying, therefore I won't make any changes to my behaviour, is a bit ridiculous, I suppose, on that example, I just meant more around the kind of billionaires that are flying around on private jets, that are really, that top one per cent that you mentioned, that seem to be kind of trashing it. I know there are loads of people that don't fly, or flying less, for similar reasons. That was, it's always good to reinforce that message as well, and hear it that there are lots of people that are working really hard to make a difference and try and be influential.

 

40:28 Kim: Yeah. Well, maybe that's a good note to end on. I can ask if you have anything you want to sum up, or key takeaway you'll take with you.

 

40:32 Ed: Well, you've given me some resources to go and look at, Possible, I think you mentioned the Man in Seat Sixty One. Yeah, I'll definitely look those up. You've kind of motivated me to look more at options to address that kind of border thirty day issue that I have in this, where I live, and also trying to fly somewhere where I can then get an onward, more locally, and get an onward train journey. So I will have another look, and just to be honest, just the thought of coming on this podcast and thinking about it a little bit more, I kind of, you know, one of those things where I thought about it a bit, I just haven't thought about it for a while, because I've kind of, I don't feel like I've crystallised my thinking on it already. But you've given me another good thought to go away with as well.

 

41:26 Kim: That's great, I'm really happy to hear it. Well, I really appreciate the conversation. It's been fun to talk about this, the takeoff of staying on the ground and ways to fly less for the climate, and also make room for more of what really matters. And it's great to hear your stories about the meaning and fun that you've had from the flying less you've already done, and I feel confident you're going to have some productive and good conversations with your friends about this upcoming trip. I feel like that's a real opportunity for bringing others along with us and finding out where you have shared values. And I wish you all the best of luck with your twins on the way. And thank you so much for all that you're doing, and thanks for joining us.

 

42:09 Ed: Yeah, thanks, lovely to meet you, Kim, and same to you, thanks very much.

 

Kim: Likewise.

 

42:14 Ed: And yeah, definitely travelling by train with kids is way better than travelling by plane with kids, 100 per cent.

 

42:45 Announcer: Next time on Climate Actually.

 

42:27 Caroline: We want our farms to be resilient to all the changes that we’ve experienced that’s gotten more intense over even the last 10 years. Kind of watching these heat domes and drought and fire impact our operations.

 

42:41 Kim: What would you say your main challenges are to reducing emissions?

 

42:46 Caroline: We have a few. You know, it’s never just one thing that’s making this challenging. So in 2021, we had a plan to kind of replace our tractor fleet with electric tractors. And we very quickly realized that those tractors were not yet ready.