A neo-Jacobin

Modern jet-set lifestyle, represents freedom

Those professional miserabalists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change published a report late last year, which suggests that the government needs to put the brakes on air travel in the future if we are to combat climate change. The current environmentalist obsession with reducing CO2 emissions means that any growth in aviation would be catastrophic to their main aim of 'decarbonising' the planet and 'stabilising' the climate.

I've always thought it was quite funny and hypocritical how ecological journalists, activists and politician's jet around the planet in order to tell a worldwide audience that the aviation industry was eco-enemy number one. Indeed, some went further by arguing that flying in a jet plane was just as bad as being a child abuser. How jetting to the Mediterranean, or America, once a year can be equated with being a kiddie fiddler is not difficult to understand, if you're a hardcore environmentalist.

'Global warming means that flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse'. Well... I fly across the Atlantic (and elsewhere), on a regular basis, and I view my travel around the globe as a fundamental freedom that simply cannot be curtailed. But environmentalists like the columnist George Monbiot, thinks my jet-set lifestyle is akin to being a child abuser. Monboit and other eco-worriers are pointing their green fingers at those awful people like me who are quick to jump on jet planes because the price is so cheap - how could I unthinkingly jet to the Med, or the States, and pollute as I go?

In fact, air travel is not a problem. If there is a problem with air travel, is that it's still over priced for my liking - and should be cheaper still. In any case, cheap air travel has meant that millions of ordinary Britons can now explore the world, and seek out new horizons. Why anyone in Britain would want to go to Blackpool or Skegness for their summer holidays is beyond me (I'd rather not bother going on holiday at all). That seems to be the objective behind environmentalist concerns with cheap air travel, to get all those cultureless proles to abandon their jet-set lifestyle and settle for the cold waters of Hastings, or Brighton instead.

Any curbs on cheap air travel is a direct attack on my freedom to travel anywhere I want to go. I consider jumping on a jet plane as a liberating experience - what we need is a bit more 'skies the limit' thinking, not the middle-class miserable morality of reduced consumption and sustainability.

posted by Courtney Hamilton @ 12:40 PM