It seems impossible, but what if we stopped flying?
A highly recommended BBC article, “What would a flying-free world look like?”, is an exercise in economics-fiction to try to imagine what a world would look like in which airlines and air travel as a whole simply disappeared.
To begin with, contrary to what many might think, flying is not such a widespread activity: only 11% of the global population flew at some point during 2018, and only 4% flew in international transit. More than half of Britons do not fly even once in an average year, and the vast majority of flights are taken by a tiny minority of users.
Yet air traffic is one of the most difficult activities in the world to decarbonize, and its emissions grew by 30% between 2013 and 2019, against a backdrop where global emissions over the same period grew by 4%. Despite the 60% standstill brought about by the pandemic, airlines, which were in many cases bailed out with taxpayers’ money for the use of the small but highly active minority, will contribute between 6% and 17% to the amount of carbon dioxide we will emit if we try to not exceed the 1.5% to 2% global warming target.
What would happen if we stopped flying? For starters, unemployment would increase by some 11.3 million people working directly in the activity, and up to a total of 87.7 million jobs worldwide — according to the industry…
