Should we be ashamed of flying?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The aviation industry is one of the world's biggest contributors to climate change - but does a social movement begun in Sweden now threaten to stigmatise air travel?
It's called "flygskam", and Manuela Saragosa speaks to one of its originators, Susanna Elfors, whose tagsemester Facebook page helped convert her fellow Swedes to the environmental virtues of train travel. Meanwhile John Broderick, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester University explains just how big a carbon footprint an individual long-haul flight can have.
The movement is already having an impact on Scandinavian travel habits, and threatens to go worldwide. So what does the industry make of it? We ask Michael Gill of the International Air Transport Association, as well as Boet Kreiken of Dutch airline KLM, which is already calling on its customers to "fly responsibly".
Plus Manuela asks Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet guidebooks that first popularised travel to exotic corners of the globe, whether he feels guilty about having enabled the casual flying culture.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Aeroplane vapour trails; Credit: yellowpaul/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:06.5 | In this edition, so you're about to hop on a plane. |
| 0:10.0 | Well, shame on you. |
| 0:11.3 | Just think about how much carbon you're emitting. |
| 0:13.7 | A long haul flight from Dubai to London per person has emissions about the same saving as you would get for one year |
| 0:22.1 | from someone in the UK switching to an electric vehicle. |
| 0:25.4 | Flight shaming air travellers has become a thing in Sweden. |
| 0:29.0 | Will it take off elsewhere? |
| 0:30.5 | And how threatened should the aviation sector feel? |
| 0:33.5 | We don't believe people should feel guilty about flying. |
| 0:36.6 | On the contrary, I certainly feel proud to work for an industry that's taken a proactive approach in addressing our CO2 impact. |
| 0:43.7 | That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.5 | It's called Fligskum, flight shame in Swedish, and it's a growing movement in northern Europe. |
| 0:55.8 | The point is to encourage embarrassment or shame about taking a flight because of the aviation |
| 1:00.8 | sector's impact on climate change. But how did the Flikskam movement even start? |
| 1:05.9 | Well, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate activist, played a role. |
| 1:13.6 | In Stockholm, Susanna Elfors knows all about it. |
| 1:18.1 | She manages a Facebook group called Tag Semester or Train Holiday. |
| 1:23.3 | It's seen its membership spike to tens of thousands since the end of 2017. |
| 1:27.9 | The first four years, it was not so popular, but then something happened, |
| 1:30.2 | and I think it's because of Greta Tunberg. |
| 1:32.5 | What did she do that changed the game? Oh, actually, it was her mother, Malena Ernman, and she is a famous opera singer. |
... |
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