“Qantas flags $19 Sydney to Melbourne Jetstar flights.”
Well great, thanks Qantas.
The flying kangaroo is limping along the ground at the moment, running at 5% of capacity, as are most airlines. There is talk of $89 flights to Perth, but I won’t be taking one, no matter how much they pay me.
The push is to get people flying again, of course. To which the obvious question and riposte is: FFS, why? Well, we know why, but let’s take a step back and make the obvious points never made.
We have been hit with a national and global pandemic with no vaccine for it in sight, and a highly elastic reproduction rate which hovers around exponential spread. Through extraordinary measures and a huge amount of public solidarity, we have avoided the carnage seen elsewhere.
Maintaining that success will only occur if we rebuild slowly outwards from our current levels of activity, in a testable and reversible manner. That would suggest starting to think differently about a whole range of basic activities.
Offering loss-leader airfares to return air travel to previous volumes would appear to be the single worst thing we could do coming out of this.
Nothing indicates how visible the contradictions between the maintenance of capitalism and life now are than the rush to get flying again.
The notion of stimulating demand for flights renders clear the degree to which our economy is based on an artificially maintained level of service activities, to replace the industrial production and necessary labour which once lay at its core.
Such relentless priming has never been sustainable, and many of the corporations dependent upon it have been on life support since 2008. Many are now hoping that the jumpstart out of the lockdown will offer another round of free money, like the decade-long QE boondoggle, which is why everyone and their auntie is lining up to buy what’s left of Virgin Australia.
Restarting airlines is the most symbolic and high-volume activity around, and by that token, the single most disastrous thing we could do.
Prior to the advent of coronavirus, it was clear that flying was going to have to be addressed as an issue due to climate change.
Though it creates only 3% of global emissions, the amount per passenger is huge, as much as those in the undeveloped part of the global south expend in a year. The notion of “offsets” is problematic and complex at the very least.
And before this thing hit, the global airline industry was looking at an eightfold growth over the next quarter century. Sorry, folks your take off has been delayed.
Flight’s contribution to climate change is a slow-burn; to a potential second or third wave of the virus, a possible immediate lethality.
The smart thing to do would be to use the proximate crisis to address the distant one, and to recategorise flying entirely — rebuilding the industry from real demand outwards and setting prices in a manner that are affordable for necessary travel, but not loss-leaders that stimulate absurd and unnecessary jaunts (like kwikbux returns to Perth to bump up frequent flyer points, which is one thing the industry will surely be relying on to rebuild passenger numbers).
That’s particularly so as regards business travel, a vast amount of which is utterly unnecessary and which we now know — as we always did — could be replaced by teleconferencing.
The government should offer tax breaks to companies willing to make a full jump to such. (If only we had a properly invested in a national broadband network. Has anyone suggested that?)
Everyone knows what bulldust most business travel is, a mix of tedious summoning and excuses to get out of town for a while. The same could be done for tourism and holidays by investing in and promoting local destinations.
A lot of the “flying to resort X” was simply a novelty that began in the ’60s and ’70s and became a need. The current interruption offers a chance to question and/or dismantle many of the habits picked up in the Keynesian years, and then in our long boom.
That would mean restructuring parts of the economy in significant ways of course, taking whole sectors out of the commodity relationship. Labor could have made this proposition if it had done any work in the past about how we might live differently.
But it got on the “growth at all social costs” red eye and to do so now would look gimmicky.
So the moment will be missed, unless there is a very nasty revival of COVID-19 — or if a COVID-22 comes along with a much nastier punch. At that point, that restructuring will have to take place.
Nothing more likely to help that along than filling the skies and destroying the regional social distancing we have done so much to build up.
Capitalism v life takes off again.
Is Australia flirting too early with an end to lockdowns? Send your thoughts to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication.
Rod Sims belled the cat this morning. The $89 flight thing wasn’t about getting people flying again, it was about scaring off potential Virgin investors by threatening a price war.
Ah yeah, that makes sense. But thats even more marketised and inimical to overall best outcomes….
The notion of stimulating demand for flights renders clear the degree to which our economy is based on an artificially maintained level of service activities, to replace the industrial production and necessary labour which once lay at its core.
Hear Hear!
You can’t come to WA though, our borders remain firmly closed to you “filthy” outsiders! (that is a joke by the way, but the borders are closed and likely to remain firmly so for the time being. We can’t even travel outside our own region without a valid reason.)
And when pressure came to ‘unlock’ the regional lockdowns, those in them were quick to apply counter pressure to sustain the current status quo. My observation from NSW is that WA, SA, & NT have led the way in applying sensible policy in Oz and are better placed for relaxing current restrictions. The NT in particular is really showing policy creativity around return for re-opening that will sustain social distancing and other self protective measures.
Steps to the new normal business restart | Coronavirus (COVID-19)
https://coronavirus.nt.gov.au/steps-to-restart/business
Holidays to resorts, especially foreign ones, are popular with families because mum gets a holiday too.
Carbon offsets are an outright scam or fraud depending on particulars. They have lots of professional apologists who have very successfully obfuscated it. You either extract fossil fuels and burn them or you don’t. This releases carbon trapped underground and adds it to the terrestrial circulating supply. You can’t offset it by planting trees or anything like that. The released carbon remains in the terrestrial cycle until it is removed by getting trapped again underground in stable natural form. Even CCS can’t be guaranteed as long term removal.
A tree can be replaced with a tree. A tree where there was no tree is trapped carbon. So, the argument that a tree can replace burnt fuel has potential validity, but the process can be abused by clearing all the planted trees at some later date, or by completing a form that implies a tree is planted, but then never planting it.
A fully grown tree is carbon-neutral. At night it transpires (breathes) and burns sap, releasing carbon, to keep warm. In the day it photosynthesises and removes carbon.
The plants that are far better, are the earliest life forms, the ones that evolved when there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere. These only consume CO2 and emit Oxygen as a “waste gas””. Yeast, algae etc.
We might do better dumping, from a plane, a shower of powdered iron in the centre of oceans. Each would create an algal bloom that could soak up CO2, and also build up one of the base lifeforms in the marine food cycle.
Yes, carbon offsets are a scam. They cheat the purchaser, being inherently unable to put that carbon back underground. Even those promising only to “reduce” emissions elsewhere are spending the money on “clean” coal plants or new gas plants replacing old coal – a wickedly criminal sales pitch. Notice that these plans explicitly exclude expenditure on nuclear, which actually would eliminate carbon emissions.
Neither does fertilising the ocean vanish the fossil carbon from the air above it. After passing through the food chain, it settles as faecal detritus (aka shit) to the layer immediately under the warm surface layer. There it consumes oxygen and generates a backpressure of methane that escapes where the ocean overturns. Far from decreasing greenhouse gases, ocean fertilisation actually increases them.
Yes, but do Merimbula or Maroochydore have the kultcha? Ain’t no Uffitzies there.
And what about duty free grog and dirt cheap labour? Tatts and sex for nix?
Larkin would welcome lockdown
Hey Sonny. Merimbula is gorgeous, Maroochydore much less so, but I’m a Sydney-sider, so I would say that.
If you can’t comfortably drive there, in your electric car, perhaps you shouldn’t go. Mantra for the 2020s. You heard it here first.
Train? Bike? Feet?
Electric cars are still fossil-fuel dependent in resource extraction, manufacture and largely in providing electricity for. And they are as individualistic and socially damaging as their petrol cousins.
This is a standard claim, made by climate denialists, about electric vehicles.
It has been discredited countless times.
That fact that Bob the Builder”” is repeating this nonsense here, suggests he wont be changing his mind about anything.
So what follows is for anyone else:
First off, the energy required to build a car is a very, very, tiny fraction of a car’s total energy consumption, whether electric or not.
And secondly, electricity can come, and increasingly does come, from non-fossil fueled sources (nuclear, wind, photo-voltaic, etc).
Not climate denialist, quite the opposite. You are what I call a change denialist – we can go on just the same, except use magical green technology. The embedded energy in fossil fuels vs. renewables demonstrates the far smaller payoff from renewables (and marginal fossil fuels like those extracted by fracking), which can not logically sustain our current lifestyle – unless we further increase our energy/resources theft from the majority of the world’s population.
But the broader point I was making is that the car is a pox on not just the biological environment, but the social, urban and personal environment and is not the way of the future.
The way of the future is public transport and self-powered transport.
I am a business traveller.
Trade shows are the best way to generate leads and/or find sales distribution networks. Your bland assumption that business travel is about attending meetings is too simple a generalisation.
Similarly when you are finding new major customers (eg signing up a distributor) you would be crazy to do that on the basis of what you can see in a video. Similarly the distributor, unless they know you well, wants more than a few glossies and a video to be convinced to add your brands to theirs.
Also servicing issues can get quite messy. Sometimes it’s just cheaper to get someone over to service 100achines (and train people at the same time). Its also more likely that the real causes are found when you visit the site(s). Just shipping a pallet of problems home, fixing them, and shipping them back can very quickly get out of control.
I am a frequent flyer. I am a Director and shareholder in the business that pays for my flights.
Flying Business class is ludicrous. It is a sign of why SMEs are so much more efficient than corporations.
There is no logical reason why anyone should fly business at the expense of an employer.
Didnt say all business travel…
But take the point about trafe fairs. Yeah theyre necessary in competition. But what if the whole ‘fair’ was online. Do we really need trade fairs in the volume we have them?
Some of the biggest and “best” trade fairs – which Prissy Cryin is keen to promote Australia’s involvement in – are the international arms trade fairs. One imagines there will be special exemptions for them asap.
My product is a specialised machine tool used by welders. A “virtual” demonstration is not realistic.
I have also attended trade shows as a visitor.
In Hanover, there is an electronics show with over 1 million visitors a year, from all over the world. It is called CeBIT. I first attended this show in 1992, when the cost of an Economy airfare to Europe was 2.5 times (in real terms) what is was in 2019. It is incredible, and impossible to make virtual. It will restart, as will most such shows, in 2021.
The US shows we booked for later this year, in the USA, are very unlikely, especially the one in Chicago in September, but the one in November might happen – who knows? The next one is called Lamiera in Milan, in March 2021. I am reasonably confident that we will be exhibiting there.
The point is Guy, not whether such shows could be “virtual”, but whether they have a legitinate commercial purpose. It is that legitimacy you were attacking.
I re-read your article and you definitely do try to imply that most business travel has little or no point. And that argument is just plain wrong.
And what of non-commercial travel?
I have some really great friends in Ukraine. I spend the whole year yearning for the week or two when I can see them again. Taste their food, wine, beer. They don’t live here and Ukrainian food, wine, beer, and lifestyle are not here. Ignorance of Ukraine is what we mostly have in Australia.
Is my desire to use my money to buy a ticket to fly to Ukraine somehow illegitimate?
But business class travel (most business travellers are like me – at the back of the plane) is incredibly wasteful. Maybe the ATO should deem flying at a cost of anything more than full Economy as a Fringe Benefit?
And why should senior public servants get Business and/or First Class tickets?
And politicians? Let them pay the difference from their electoral budgets.
You are assuming Dave that you will be allowed to fly to Chicago and if you get there return to Oz. Your ticket may come with quarantine restrictions as part of the T & C for being issued with one. It’s time for some of that creativity of enterprise to find an adaptive route forward.
Like millions of others I have been using Zoom, why not also link to a 3D printer so your prospective customer could print a model version of your tool as a for instance. Babel or such might even allow you to deal with non Anglo customers.
Of course the above is all predicated on optical fibre connectivity. The real costs of the Turnbull led sabotage of the Oz effort to secure FTP will haunt us for many years to come.
I did not assume I would make either US show. I specifically stated that it was unlikely I could go.
At this stage, US domestic politics means both are likely to not be cancelled.
But Trump will also keep US borders closed until the Presidential election.
We have made some payments for the floor space. We hope to be able to not make any more payments, but contractually we are bound to pay the full amount. So right now we would prefer cancellation, but Trump’s base seems to be winning their fight to “open the economy”.
It is a worry.
Zoom etc cannot possible do what a major tradeshow does. It brings people together who have never heard of each other before.
The internet is a good medium for established players – known brands. It is useless for new entrants.
Nor will Zoom let me hug my friends, eat food, share wine and beer in Ukraine. I need my ” Ukrainian fix”. 🙂
Daveec,
I hope you don’t make out your Ukraine trips are for the benefit of your business and therefore tax deductible.
As a retired PAYG person, I have observed the tendency of small and medium business people to avoid tax by expensing everything they do on “The Business” so that the actual tax they pay is minuscule compared to the PAYG person whose tax is stolen from them by the employer and given to the government to provide lots of corporate welfare to the business community.
I agree with you on trade shows and the like. You cannot do everything by remote control over computer, however given the impact of transport and it’s infrastructure on climate change it’s time that a significant tax tax was placed on this travel to pay for it’s consequences instead of making it all tax deductible and therefore a cost on everyone.
Best regards
Rob
It’s not true that “the business that pays for my flights…” – it is a tax deduction which means that the rest of us pay for it in fewer social services due to lost tax revenue.
I’m not so sure about the tax deduction bit. It is a cost to the business, and revenue must be earned to pay to pay for it. Tax becomes payable on a profit, not on revenue.
What company expenses are legitimate in your eyes?
Do we need electric lighting and air conditioning in an office (or home office?) – maybe we can just work in sunlight and natural air.
Your argument seems to be that flying a staff member somewhere is of zero commercial benefit, and therefore an illegitimate company expense.
Did you spend even a minute thinking about this before putting fingers to a keyboard.
Are you seriously trying to suggest that I (or anyone) wants to be cooped up, sleepless, in an Economy seat for 20+ hours. I am 65, overweight. It is agony. I dread each flight to Europe or the USA and its return leg.
I do it because without it, international sales arent possible. And given how tiny the Australian market is, there is, in reality, only international sales.
In a show in Hanover, all I could afford was an Airbnb accommodation in a pull-out couch in the living room of a pair of students. I self impose a $US100 a day limit in accomodation costs. Hotels that might charge say 120 euro per night will charge 350 when a trade show is on.
And then the work setting up a booth and manning it each day of the show, then the mad scramble to tear it down, pack it, and rush to the airport to get to either the next one, or back home to Sydney for a week or so, to wash clothes, recover, and head off to the next.
110 days of hard work in 2019, 12 of them in the air. Do you seriously think that other start-ups, or SMEs operate differently?
Have you any idea how both stupid and insulting your comment was?
Maybe you should tell us what you do for a living and let me attack the legitimacy of what you do.
Man, so many words to show to fail to understand the critique of environmental damage being an externality…
Pollution damages the commons. As the commons of the planet is destroyed largely at the direction of business… and so, billions will become climate refugees instead. Water security will evaporate. Food security will become a far away dreams.
But none of those costs will register on the businesses balance sheet as a cost because someone else is paying for it.
And if you genuinely think that society will not survive if salespeople can’t jet off around the place to show off some new fandangled tools… well catastrophic climate change is gonna be so much worse.
B-double trucks burn an incredible amount of fuel travelling between Sydney and Melbourne.
I have done the sums, and compared it to the fuel burnt by planes ferrying people between Sydney and Melbourne. The latter is pathetically small.
And yet the Green politicians you probably love so much, tell you that those people in the plane are somehow singlehandedly destroying the earth.
Plus that we need an impossibly expensive train that will run empty because it will cost too much.
Do you hear them suggesting the rather simple idea of converting the Sydney-Melbourne route to an electrified High Speed rail (a tiny fraction of the cost of a VFT)?
Do you hear them do anything other than oppose rail-road interchanges to get trucks onto trains?
Next time you buy something at a shop or online, think how much fuel you just burnt. Think too, about how it could be done without using anywhere near so much fuel.
CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere too, by natural processes. It is not about stopping CO2 emission, but ensuring that it is balanced by extraction. And at a level where the earth’s climate is not tipped upside down.
If you really wanted to start saving the planet, then start with the low hanging fruit. For example the cost and waste of using trucks to do long-haul haulage. Or attacking the bureaucracy and overheads imposed on sea freight that make airfreight unnaturally cheaper for smaller weight loads. Or promoting electric car sales and usage.
Or maybe just dont alienate people who (hopefully) might not vote for Morrison/Dutton et al, by insulting them unfairly with banal, “holier-than-thou” lectures.
Perspective:
72% of greenhouse gases are due to the production of energy. Energy for electric grids, to power cars and trucks, warm houses, fly planes, and so on.
Of this 72%, 10% is consumed for transportation, with the great bulk of that being cars and trucks (over 70%). So, 7.2% for transportation
In the US it is 10%, but in the EU, 13.9% of that 7.2%, is the aviation sector. In the US, over 50% of the transport sector is consumed by passenger cars.
So, we are now down to 0.72% – 1% is aviation.
The aviation sector can be split into freight vs passengers, and since we are talking only international, it can be split into international vs domestic travel. Using an 80kg per pax equivalent, a tonne-kilometre of freight can be equated to 12.5 pax-kilometre.
In 2018 there were 262 billion tonne-kilometres transported by air. This equates to 3150 pax-kilometres. The passenger traffic was 8320 billion pax-kilometres.
Thus pax traffic constitutes around 72% of fuel used, assuming that fuel is mostly (weight * distance) related.
In the same year there were 2906 pax-kilometres of domestic travel vs 5332 billion pax kilometres of international traffic, ie whilst far fewer flights, international constitutes 65% of pax-kilometres.
So that reduces the contribution of international passenger flights to 0.33 – 0.47% of greenhouse gas contributions.
So, is it really logical to accuse some people, flying in a plane, of being the principal destoyers of the planet?
@davelec you’re doing a fantastic job of comprehensibly demolishing arguments that were never made.
Next step is to engage with things that were actually written.
ElectricDavyLand – you ought to look up “platitude”.
Your grasp of language seems on par with your maths, ie pretty dodgy.
In engineering, you say?
.
Maybe you should read the article properly before responding to points not made.
If your level of analysis here is any guide, it’s a wonder you are still in business …
I did read the article:
Guy Rundle wrote:
“That’s particularly so as regards business travel, a vast amount of which is utterly unnecessary and which we now know — as we always did — could be replaced by teleconferencing.”
A platitude never defended by a single fact. A fact that Guy felt was so “self-evident”, it didnt needed defending.
It is you, who clearly did not read the article.
As a frequent flyer for legitimate business reasons, and one legitimate personal reason, who mixes with many, many people flying for legitimate business reasons, I was honor bound to defend them, and myself from the slur.
You used a climate change denialist plattitude to make an attack on electric cars. Then rather than admit your mistake – ” Oh yes, you are right, the energy used to make a car is almost irrelevant”, you plow on with some rubbish about how good a greenie you are.
Stop attacking everyone who says things you dont like, and actually think about what you write/say.
And if it is genuinely your belief that using personal transportation devices, other than a pushbike, should be banned, then come right out and tell it up front, to give 98% of the world the chance to not bother reading your stuff.
I have spent a third of my working life commuting to/from work by bike, but after my heart attack, my cardiologist suggests I dont. And whilst riding a bike was my personal choice, I would never want to impose that choice on anyone else.
@davelec, if every person on the planet used planes in the same way you do… would it be sustainable?
If not, how do you justify your right to an disproportionate high environmental footprint?
There are ethical positions to justify it… we’re all captives to capitalism and maybe you have less autonomy than you think. Lots of people feel that they can’t realistically use exclusively pushbikes and public transport because the infrastructure isn’t sufficient to their needs.
But denying that your footprint exists is just intellectually dishonesty mate…
Replying to fletch: “@davelec, if every person on the planet used planes in the same way you do… would it be sustainable?” It wouldn’t. If every person on the planet drove the modest hatchback type car I drive that wouldn’t be sustainable either. Our modern lifestyle depends on not everyone attaining it. So that needs to change. Yes large scale air travel needs to be re-invented in a sustainable way if it’s to continue but treating it as a specially wasteful aspect of our economic activity ignores too much else. Especially in Australia air travel is often the only alternative to no travel. Rail could and should be improved and made competitive with subsidies like our subsidised roads but the available routes are limited.