It was good to see a high-profile publication such as the International Herald Tribune highlighting the environmental impact by the massive growth of low-cost flying in Europe. The European Low Fares Airline Association says the number of passengers on European low-cost carriers more than doubled from 2004 to 2007, to 120 million a year. Britons are the biggest users of ‘no-frills’ air travelling as they are are now the world’s biggest owners of foreign second homes as a percentage of population. Cheap housing developments pop up everywhere in southern countries with warmer climates, such as Spain, Portugal as well as Eastern Europe, further increasing the demand for traveling – one feeds the other and meanwhile exorbitant amounts of carbon are tossed into the atmosphere as result of the decadent behavior of the rich in the north.
The article points out that from 1990 to 2005, the last full year for which data were available, total CO2 emissions from European Union aviation grew by 73 percent. The European Low Fares Airline Association argues that low-cost carriers are a “green” alternative compared with conventional airlines, since they tend to have newer, more efficient fleets and run at high occupancy, thus creating lower emissions per passenger. However, its calculations do not take into account the huge growth in flying they have created.
In fact, no one has studied or quantified their cumulative emissions, as if no one – travel agents, tourists, policymakers – can bear the uncomfortable answer. Even the UN World Tourism Organization, which is based in Madrid and last year publicly adopted sustainable tourism as one of its fundamental principals, has not looked the issue.
These findings once again highlight that Europe is not as green as it likes to portray itself and it will ignore the truth when it is convenient. But how long can the planet wait for the world’s rich to realize that their hedonistic lifestyle is not sustainable and actually do something about it?
