Destination hotspot.

Recent weeks have seen record-setting heat waves in the United States and southern Europe. In Greece wildfires have been raging and thousands of tourists had to be evacuated from the island of Rhodes. Overall, July is set to be the planet’s hottest month ever recorded, leading the United Nations Secretary General to declare “The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.”

Scientists have pointed to “absolutely overwhelming” evidence of human-induced climate change in the latest wave of high temperatures. One contributing factor to climate change is air travel, though people argue as to how significant a factor it is. From what I’ve read, air travel causes about 3% of the warming all human activities cause. But make not mistake: that’s a lot. One stat I saw says that if the aviation sector were a nation, it would be among the top 10 global emitters, and that it is responsible for 12 per cent of transportation emissions. So it makes a real difference. And it’s almost entirely unnecessary.

Now personally I don’t travel much, and I think the last time I was on a plane was twenty years ago. But I get that a lot of people like to travel. Indeed, that’s the problem. It’s a sector that’s expected to grow significantly in the next couple of decades. Tourism is projected to generate up to 40% of total global CO2 emissions by 2050. The effect of such growth won’t help the planet, especially as any new energy efficiencies in air travel will be more than offset by more frequent flying.

But I’m not flight shaming here (flight shaming being the name of the anti-flying social movement). Like I say, I get that people want to travel. During the COVID lockdown I had to stand witness to two acquaintances, both retirees, literally break down in tears at the fact that they were somehow being cheated of going on more vacations before they died. It was embarrassing, but it revealed just how important travel is to a certain segment of the population. Because I guess there’s nothing else for them to do. So even if it’s not a feeling I share, I can at least say I get it.

Anyway, these recent headlines were brought home to me yesterday as I was talking to a friend whose sister and brother-in-law are currently vacationing in Greece. I gather they’ve been complaining about it. The heat. The fires. And it made me think of the cognitive dissonance this must involve.

The vacationing couple are wealthy retirees (she was a government lawyer, he was an academic) with no kids. And they travel a lot. They have three international vacations planned this year alone, and they travel deluxe all the way. But hearing about how they were grousing over the impact of climate change on their trip triggered me a bit.

As I see it there are several different responses one can have to living this kind of apex-consumer lifestyle in the present day.

(1) The travel Neros: this was a name given to a movement a while back where global warming was taken for granted, with frequent flying being a major contributing factor. But the travel Neros took the position that the world was going to burn to a crisp anyway so they were going to party while it fried. Maybe not socially responsible behaviour, but it’s a position that has its own integrity.

(2) The deniers: climate change is all a hoax foisted on us by the Chinese or global elites or killjoy environmentalists. Don’t listen to them! Keep consuming! After all, if you damage the economy in any way trying to save the planet, the cure will be worse than the disease! Not a position I agree with, but again at least it holds together as a belief system.

(3) Those who acknowledge climate change is real and air travel is only making things worse, but feel that their own personal contribution doesn’t make a difference: here is where I think the cognitive dissonance comes into play. “It would be better if people didn’t fly as much, but since they do it would be stupid for me to give up one of life’s great pleasures just for some benefit to the planet that I likely won’t benefit from anyway.” To my eye, this is just casuistry. How, I wonder, do the tourists in Europe this summer feel the heat and see the clouds of smoke on the horizon and say to themselves “This has nothing to do with me. I hope they get it all fixed up when I come back next year.”

As I say, the whole conversation I had with my friend ended up really triggering me and I said something about how what the the vacationers were experiencing in Greece was due in part to their being there in the first place. This was met with the response that that couldn’t be true because Canada has been wracked with forest fires this summer and those forests weren’t being overrun by tourists. Honestly. This was one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in a long time.

After I explained (in my typical, hard-to-follow and sputtering way) how climate was a global system and was affected by human activity everywhere, with its effects experienced differently in different places, I got a more realistic, though even more depressing response. The vacationers were retired, you see. And, well, what else was there for them to do? How were they going to stay occupied in their remaining years except by traveling? (And they had both taken early retirement and were only in their early 60s, so they potentially still have a lot of time ahead of them to, you know, burn.) And then there was the matter of their being rich. What else were they going to spend all their money on? What could they spend it on?

It may well be that our entire civilization is going to die of affluence and boredom.