Despite rising oil prices, air fares are low. So low, in fact, that they hide the environmental impact of aircraft, reports Iva Pocock
As the aircraft surges down the runway and lifts off you grin at the prospect of a weekend in Copenhagen. Your last visit to the Danish capital was as an Inter Railing student, but now trekking across Europe isn't necessary. What a deal: just €36 each way. A two-hour flight costs less than catching the train from Dublin to Limerick.
And prices seem to be coming down all the time. Even with record increases in the price of oil - British Airways has slapped a £5 (€7.50) surcharge on its fares as a result - flying is arguably the best travel bargain in town: it's fast, cheap and popular.
Twenty million passengers travelled through Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports last year, a 5 per cent increase on 2002. "For 2015 we are forecasting 27 million passengers for Dublin Airport alone," says an Aer Rianta spokeswoman. "That's based on world trends." The International Air Transport Association's latest figures show global air travel is growing faster than forecast. For the first three months of 2004 air passenger and freight numbers were up 10 per cent compared with the same period in 2003.
Governments have adopted a "predict and provide" approach to air passengers, due, say critics, to consistent lobbying by the aviation industry. A former UK aviation minister, Chris Mullen, says that the sector's "demands are insatiable" and that "successive governments have always given way to them".
The ongoing row between the Government and Ryanair suggests it's no different here. Even though Bertie Ahern said this week that he won't be bullied by Michael O'Leary, the Department of Transport's policy is "to accommodate and facilitate growth in aviation to the maximum extent", says a Department spokeswoman. This approach is coming under increasing fire from international environmental agencies, which say the ever-upward growth in air travel is unsustainable.
Flying is the most environmentally expensive form of travel, releasing almost seven times more carbon dioxide per person than taking a train and some three times more than driving. The main problem associated with aviation's continuing expansion is therefore climate change, according to the UK's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which has expressed deep concern about the consequences of the growth in air transport.
Because aircraft emissions are released high in the atmosphere, their capacity for causing climate change by trapping infrared radiation within the atmosphere is up to three times greater than that of emissions from other human activities.
And although only a minority of the world's population enjoys the benefits of flying, the commission says that "the environmental costs of aviation can be global: climate change will affect every person, and its consequences may be most damaging for those in the developing world".
Pat Finnegan of Greenhouse Ireland Action Network, a lobby group, says: "As climate change is already happening, following an almost 40 per cent increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide over the last 200 years, the urgency of reducing aviation emissions is great." His views echo those of the commission: "A primary aim of policy must be to seek to limit aviation's contribution to global warming. This will require significant constraints on the growth of air travel."
The Department of Transport acknowledges that, "like other forms of transport, aviation does have some negative environmental consequences", such as emissions and noise, but it is opposed to capping air travel. It says it is participating in EU and other efforts to come up with policies that lessen, as much as possible, the environmental effects of aviation, including environmental charges on flights.
But the Kyoto Protocol to the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in 1997 agreed reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, did not encompass international aviation, which accounts for about 3 per cent of the emissions, on the grounds that agreement had not been reached on how to allocate emissions over international waters.
"To give an illustration of the problem, if an aircraft registered in Germany loads fuel in Montreal and flies to Frankfurt with passengers of many different nationalities, producing greenhouse gas emissions in the airspace of several countries en route, to which country's national inventory should these emissions be allocated?" asks Donal Buckley of IBEC. The industry is "considering the most suitable measures, including possible participation in international emissions trading, which begins in 2008".
But environmental organisations say the aviation industry fails to adhere to the polluter-pays principle, because the aviation fuel used for international flights is untaxed. This amounts to a significant subsidy in favour of fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, say Feasta, the Foundation for Sustainable Economics, and Friends of the Irish Environment. "If airlines had to pay the same amount of tax on their fuel as paid by British motorists, the cost of air tickets would go up by around 40 per cent."
Not surprisingly, the aviation industry is opposed to fuel taxation. "Ryanair has revolutionised air travel right across Europe for millions of consumers by consistently reducing air fares, and we would strongly oppose anything that could increase costs," says a company spokesman. Ryanair and Aer Lingus point to the newness of their fleets as evidence that they are reducing their environmental impact. "By using new aircraft with greater passenger capacity and efficient fuel use we are reducing the effect on the environment," adds the Ryanair spokesman.
But the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution points out that "despite the considerable opportunities for incremental improvements to the environmental performance of individual aircraft, these will not offset the effects of growth".
It continues: "Short-haul passenger flights, such as UK domestic and European journeys, make a disproportionately large contribution to the global environmental impacts of air transport. These impacts are very much larger than those from rail transport over the same point-to-point journey."
In Ireland, subsidies for regional air travel administered under the essential-air-services programme amount to between €200 and €560 per return journey, according to DKM Economic Consultants. The Department of Transport says this does not mean the programme is environmentally unsustainable.
Despite the availability of cheap flights, some travellers, such as the retired barrister and Feasta member John Jopling, are opting for overland travel on environmental grounds. He doesn't believe people can be expected to behave ecologically when all the signals encourage environmentally destructive behaviour. "Look at the comparison between train fares and air fares," he says. He takes advantage of the public-transport pass that comes with retirement to minimise his carbon emissions.
Others, such as Mike Haslam of Solearth, an ecological-architecture practice in Dublin, try to minimise the climate-change effects of their jet-setting by logging on to www.futureforests.com. The website allows airline passengers to calculate their "carbon debt" and mitigate it by sponsoring the planting of a tree to recapture carbon from the atmosphere. Supported by artists such as David Gray, Atomic Kitten and Massive Attack, Future Forests plants most of its trees in the UK.
Anyone keen to take up the recent challenge of the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Dermot Ahern, to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by a ton may like to note that a flight from Dublin to New York produces 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide per passenger.
Facing up to the real cost of air travel may be tough, but as organisations such as the Environmental Protection Agency now say, "global climate change remains the primary environmental challenge of this century". It is a reality that must be faced.
