WorldViewAccording to the Central Statistics Office Irish people are now making seven million trips abroad every year, two-thirds of them on holidays, writes Paul Gillespie
For the first time marginally more people are now leaving here than coming. Adding together the two figures, and allowing for trips in and out of Northern Ireland we must now be one of the most travelled peoples anywhere in the world - and the numbers are set to increase assuming continued prosperity and the desire of many more to see the world.
Since most of these journeys are by air it makes sense to extrapolate the increase from airport records. At Dublin airport passenger numbers doubled between 1997 and 2006 and it is planned to see them double again by 2030, reaching an estimated 30 million within 10 years from the current 22 million or so. This huge increase explains much about the airport's congestion in comparative terms and the Government's commitment to meet the demand by building more capacity.
But it also tells a story about the environmental impact of aviation. From that perspective a stark fact is revealed: increases in air travel on this scale over the next two decades are environmentally unsustainable - and therefore economically so. Research by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and many other groups shows that aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon and other global warming emissions. The explosion of cheap travel means that it will continue exponentially, far outstripping the ability of new energy-saving technologies to compensate for its environmental impact.
Although this is from a relatively low base of perhaps 2 per cent of overall global emissions there are large regional variations. In the UK, for example, 5.5 per cent of emissions are attributable to aviation. Given the huge increase in Ireland's air travel the figures here are probably comparable and set to increase at a similar pace. We are therefore vulnerable to the same kind of policy contradiction that this week animated public discussion in the UK surrounding the protests against expanding Heathrow airport. Our own preoccupation with Aer Lingus's transfer of Heathrow slots from Shannon to Belfast has obscured that story, but it badly needs to be told.
Simply put, we cannot expand air travel at that pace and also meet international obligations to cut carbon and other emissions so as to reduce global warming. The Tyndall Centre study calculates that according to different scenarios and subject to changing scientific findings about the multiplier effects of air travel on the climate (which means they have a warming effect 250 per cent greater than the effect of carbon alone), the share of UK emission quota taken up by aviation would amount variously to 25, 50 or 100 per cent by 2050. That is incompatible with the government's commitment to reduce its emissions by 60 per cent by then.
Only an anomaly in the international regime for measuring emissions allows them to avoid that fact. International flights do not count at present in the national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions because there is no agreement on how to allocate them. It is a bizarre example of how national/foreign boundaries affect what is essentially a global problem.
If this is not overcome in the next round of negotiations on global warming there is little hope that they can make any overall progress. So the prudent course would be to assume it will be resolved, probably by agreeing to split the difference between arriving and departing journeys between countries.
Comparable figures for Ireland are not so readily available, reflecting the lack of political and public debate here on these issues. There are none so blind as those who cannot see . . . There is little incentive for any of the political parties or major interest groups to make noise on the subject given the immense surge in the travelling public and the changed economic circumstances this reflects. We should expect deafness, blindness and sceptical or denialist resistance to the latest scientific findings, not to mention spectacular contradictions between political words and deeds.
But there are some straws in the wind. Writing in these pages on Thursday, Oisín Coghlan, director of Friends of the Earth in Ireland, calculated that on current trends aviation would use up the whole Irish quota for emissions by 2037. We may choose as an island people to use up more of our quotas in this way, but that would mean unacceptable sacrifices elsewhere.
One of the speakers at the Heathrow protests last weekend was the radical environmental campaigner, author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot.
Reviewing his book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning in The Irish Times last November the now Minister for Energy and Natural Resources Éamon Ryan noted that Monbiot shows from his detailed research and 47 pages of extensive references that technological solutions are possible in most areas; "but when he comes to aviation he sees no alternative but a radical 90 per cent cutback in the amount of flying we do." This could be achieved partly by personal carbon allowances which would allow us to make a long-haul journey only if we saved for years.
Ryan concluded his sympathetic review with a summary of Monbiot's case that citizens of the industrial democracies responsible for most global warming pollution face a choice between planning for austerity and engaging in a Faustian pact over the next 25 years whereby we can live like kings but then be damned forever.
Ryan's wife, the writer and journalist Victoria White, writing in the current issue of Studies, argues that we don't need to travel to save the planet and ourselves. Also inspired by Monbiot's books, she concludes that "in this country politicians rarely do anything we don't ask them to do. We have to start telling them that we want less. We don't want to go further, we want to go less far".
Now that the Greens are in power we should expect to hear more about such choices and the policy implications involved. As one of the most open economies in the world we cannot avoid the logic of international environmental regulation. It will take courageous leadership to bring these lessons home.