How to reconcile the aspiration for mobility and the fight against climate change, when experts predict that air travel will continue to break records in the coming years, with 4.9 billion passengers in 2024? Economist Jean-Pascal Gayant presents the state of affairs. And the challenge.
A recent study has sought to assess the global growth of greenhouse gas emissions related to tourism. Between 2009 and 2019, this growth was 3.5% per year. The authors of the study predict that it will be 3 to 4% per year in the future, which corresponds to a doubling of emissions every 20 years. These catastrophic prospects for the environment are primarily driven by transportation, particularly by air transport, whose activity sets new records every year. The United States, China, and India alone account for 39% of global emissions due to tourism, and notably, it is domestic trips (more than international trips) that are responsible for the dramatic level of greenhouse gas emissions.
The “polluting emitters” around the world are therefore not just wealthy Americans traveling the globe for leisure on sunny beaches. A significant portion of trips is related to professional, family, and friendly travel by the middle class in advanced and emerging countries: the typical air transport user is as much the young professional coming to spend a week with family as the retired couple taking a getaway to a European capital. This is the reality we face: we are all at fault, and we will not be able to effectively combat climate change without significantly altering our mobility habits.
Mobility, an essential right
However, these mobility opportunities have become an essential right in the eyes of citizens of liberal democracies. Just as we enjoy freedom of thought and expression, we claim the right to knowledge and advocate for openness to others. Mobility is a condition of this spirit of progress and fraternity. Imagine that we are now forced to a very limited number of trips: a retreat into ourselves would be inevitable, our knowledge of other peoples and cultures would be limited to the distorted image offered by social networks, young professionals would forgo job opportunities, and insularity and endogamy would become the norm again…
Mobility is both a factor of personal fulfillment and an oxygenation of societies. While the supply of food can largely be reorganized through short circuits, the supply of intellectual goods cannot be satisfied by just the nearby neighbor.
The challenge of reconciling the aspiration for mobility and the fight against climate change is one of the most unsolvable questions posed to our time. The climate emergency poses the obvious risk of a significant limitation of human mobility. Such a constraint will be seen as unacceptable by the vast majority of them. Which government in a liberal democracy would dare to venture in such a direction at the risk of trampling on the principles of freedom that are its essence and without which it loses its legitimacy? We can already hear the authoritarian undertones of some climate activists who wish to claim the right to restrict citizens’ mobility in the name of a higher principle of preserving the planet and its animal kingdom, at the risk of descending into a new form of tyranny.
Source ouest-france.fr