I was asked to submit something to the New Statesman, who were having a redesign and might like some new columnists. I submitted this piece, but was told that if they wanted funny they had famous funny people to do it and they wanted something else, although exactly what I never ascertained.
In the last few years flying has somehow become something to be ashamed of. Whereas a few years ago you’d have been proud to point to all the visas in your passport or reel off the cheap flights you’d snared over the internet, suddenly by jetting anywhere you are single-handedly sucking out the lifeblood of the planet and for fun! Environmentalists rail against aviation, pointing out that for each passenger on a plane uses 500 times more petrol to cover the distance than they would in a car and pollutes in precisely the worst part of the atmosphere. Which kind of makes you feel that it must be alright to drive your car to the shops after all. Yeah, the school run is polluting, but I’m hardly driving to Milan 500 times this week am I?
Moreover, the net effect of all this publicity is to encourage those responsible, cultured and informed people not to fly whilst the ignorant, selfish, small-minded types get everywhere. This, for example, appears to have been happening with Australia. This can’t be a good thing, especially for a country which such low self-esteem as the UK.
Of course, for a country as small as the UK, airplane pollution not our main problem, mainly because most of it is done over other countries. Being an island, we do perhaps have more to worry about from rising sea levels than other countries. Whole swathes of East Anglia could be wiped out. And there would also be negative effects.
Another complaint about aviation is the noise. Airplanes are unfeasibly noisy. I often feel sorry for people who live along the North Circular Road, or any other ancient pathway now home to six lanes of twenty-four hour traffic. But to be living near an airport is truly like having 500 cars screaming over your head every few minutes. And every increase in aircraft traffic results in more airports, more terminals and more planes. What is needed is an airport in the middle of nowhere. But even that is a problem.
Firstly there is no nowhere in England and very little in Scotland or Wales. And secondly if there was, by the very fact of it being nowhere it would be spoken of fondly and endowed with protection by all the same environmentalists. Maybe there’s a couple of small islands in the Channel with ugly birds and dull rock formations that we could stick a few runways on. Although, of course, you’d have to fly there to get your plane.
Perhaps there’s an environmental way round this. For instance, if you were to stick a few wind farms along the busiest flight paths, you could recoup some of the energy ordinarily lost. Or attach a wind farm to the back of all jets, recycling some of that power blasted out of the back of the plane and saving yourself a bit of fuel. Then with the fuel you’ve saved, you could carry less fuel and with carrying less fuel you would be lighter and hence you would use even less fuel in total, which would mean you could carry even less fuel and so on until you could fly anywhere with just a wind farm. A sort of Achilles and the Hare approach to climate change.
Nay-sayers may deride that plan as impractical, but what’s the alternative? We have to stop going abroad for our holidays? Seems unlikely to happen. Much as I would like to abandon foreign countries to people who live there, the public pressure to be seen to enjoy the company of swindlers and rip-off merchants simply because they can’t speak English is apparently overwhelming. We could at least stop demanding out of season fruit and vegetables, which are both an environmental and taste catastrophe, but I’m still not convinced that most English people buy that many vegetables anyway, unless its to show how healthy they are.
I, hamstrung by a dubious faith in life’s homeostatic qualities, think it will be alright. Because once global warming kicks in there won’t be any need to get on Easy Jet in search of sun. We’ll be able to swan off down the Thamesmead Riviera anytime we should choose. If we loosen up on immigration as well, we won’t even need to go abroad for cultural reasons. And then everything will be fine, won’t it.