muggins

... is short of time and money, but spends a day and a half investigating train routes and prices to Budapest; books and rebooks, reinvestigates, unbooks, then spends half a day pleading with telephone operators and another half shouting at them to make the same booking again; spends £360 instead of £210, and 2 days and a night instead of the 6 hours it would have taken to go by plane. She thinks she is saving the planet. But the plane was taking off anyway.

So - should the mugs and mugginses, who continue to believe it may not be too late to save the planet, fly while the aeroplanes continue to do so, and thereby save their personal resources - time and money - to fight the bigger battles?

Here is how I see it. Speaking as a mug.

1. Critically... Climate change is critical (bla bla bla1), and one carbon cut that can be made, and should be made, is that fewer aeroplanes need to take off. Which means people only using air travel when it is absolutely necessary2. The air industry won't cut back on flights while it is still profitable to keep their aeroplanes in the air, and the government won't force them to cut back while it is still profitable - so we-the-people need to do whatever we can to make it unprofitable. One small thing we can do is not to buy the tickets.

2. Ethically... If an industry is already partially responsible for destroying the lifestyle and lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and if the continuation of that industry makes it more and not less likely that humanity as a whole may not survive - then we too become complicit if we support that industry (when we do not need to). We are complicit in the (genocidal) crime of destroying the lifestyle and lives of hundreds of thousands if we fly unnecessarily. How else could it be?

3. Pragmatically... In order to make the change required to stop the planet tipping, enough people need to be persuaded that they should make the change. Enough of them might even, possibly, make the leaders of the world (and of the airline industry) realise that change is possible, desirable, politically acceptable - as well as absolutely necessary (the last of these alone is obviously not enough for them to sacrifice their ministerial posts and profits). But no-one can hope to persuade anyone else - and get that process started - if they are not seen to be making the change themselves. So if we need others not to fly, and if we hope to persuade a very few of them (who may in turn persuade some others) then we certainly cannot do so while we are up in the air ourselves.

Change happens slowly, but if no-one starts the process, things stay where they are. Every movement of change - from votes for women, through universal health care, the end of apartheid, abolishing the poll tax, banning landmines, cluster bombs and CFCs - every one of these movements was started by a few 'mugginses' who thought that they could get the world to move in their direction. Or even if they didn't think that, they knew they had to try because the consequence of change not happening at all was worse than being thought a muggins3 Many - most? - of them didn't succeed, and even for the those whose movements did go on to snowball into change, the world quite likely didn't move while they were 'gesturing'. But if they hadn't done so, could anything have ever moved?

It surely cannot be a matter of personal choice, of personal freedom or entitlement, whether we continue to drive, fly and burn up the earth's carbon resources, spitting them out into the sky and into the faces of those who suffer as a consequence. When it comes to stopping the world's wars, we do not use the fact that our individual refraining from joining the military will not stop others from doing so; so where is the difference? My refraining from flying will not, now, instantly and single-handedly stop the earth from burning or the southern regions from famining and flooding. It may have an impact on others - and I would rather take that chance, slim though it may be. Above all, though, I would rather not know that I have knowingly contributed to the destruction of a system on which billions of others depend. It may be some consolation in my grave - lying there along with the rest of humanity - that I put (or paid for someone else to put) less CO2 up in the air than others did.

"On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once a 90% cut in emissions has been made"4

— George Monbiot, Heat

• 1. see here for more on that
• 2. If you are important enough or rare enough and travelling is difficult enough, and if your journey is an attempt to fight the bigger battle (and not just to have a nice holiday or earn a bit of extra cash) then I can imagine flights that might be 'necessary'. But it should be a very high threshold.
• 3. That is certainly not to say that any muggins who thinks they are saving the world is in fact starting a snowballing process - or even a process that is necessary. There are a lot of mugs who fancy they are more important than they are. I may be one.
• 4. 'And remember: that's just the CO2: the total warming effect of CO2 + H2O + NOx is about 3 times greater.' From http://www.Chooseclimate.org See also flying from london to new york