Are Cheap Airline Flights a Blessing or a Horror? Or Both?

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.12.07 | 7:04 AM ET

As former Lonely Planet global travel editor Don George pointed out in a recent interview with World Hum, the travel equation is getting very complicated. When asked how he sees travel changing, George replied, “When you think about the effects of airplane pollution, for example, it becomes a more complicated equation—the good you do as a traveler and the harm you do.” At World Hum, we’ve been tracking the environmental impact of travel since the site began almost six years ago. In that time I can’t remember a more sobering breakdown of the travel equation, as George put it, than the one in the latest edition of the Christian Science Monitor.

Gregory M. Lamb writes:

Now two factors are conspiring to make airline travel a hot topic in the global-warming debate: If current trends continue, the number of airline tickets sold per year will double to more than 9 billion by 2025, according to a new study by the Airports Council International. At the same time, experts see no viable jet-fuel alternative to kerosene. While some modest fuel-conservation measures still can be taken, more and more people are concluding that fewer flights may be the only way to cut airline emissions significantly.

The result of fewer flights could be a dramatic rise in the price of air travel. In Britain, in fact, “the government has just upped a tax on airline flights from £10 to £40 ($19 to $76), depending on the length of the flight, in the name of reducing air travel and CO2 emissions,” Lamb writes.

What might things look like in 30 years? Writes Lamb: “People may look back at the early 21st century with both fondness and horror as the Era of the Cheap Airline Flight.”

Photo by el7bara (Flickr, Creative Commons)