The ‘best tip’ idiomatic phrase is usually a shorthand for allowing people who can afford to spend more of their private income to spend considerably less. Out of this fascination for cheapness for the relatively well endowed financially comes the fact that the true costs of environmentally polluting practices are not paid by those who ‘pay’ for the services that pollute at ‘budget’ rate.
Let’s take ‘budget air travel’, for the true costs of that are too often just discounted, so that the damage they cause cannot be repaired. Take this estimate reported from a BBC documentary (at this website).
Whilst the polluters scoff at environment crisis warnings (or see them as not caused by those polluters having multiple annual holidays), very few, when it comes to their pocket and their sense of entitlement to consume the world as a commodity known as a ‘holiday’, allow themselves to care much for a future in which, after all they must reason somewhere deep inside themselves, they will be dead anyway. “Who cares”, they mutter, “for people yet unborn” (who must adapt like the poor are already doing, they suppose). In fact such ideas are forbidden to enter conscious thought.
I am not sure that the principle of ‘the polluter pays’ has as yet ever yielded any advantage to optimising the negative effects of climate change – global warming, rising sea-levels or water and air pollution, let alone the effects of airports in so many other ways. You are not going to get people advocating greener policy through just raising prices and stopping relatively rich people from travelling to areas unspoiled yet by the economic activity they also see as their right.
The concept of budget air travel as king is achieved by less polluting alternatives with higher costs, because less invested in according to the Grantham Institute, as in this infographic of relative costs over different domains of travel from London to Barcelona:
Note, of course the discrepancy of cost of travel relative to the ‘cost’ that no-one pays (yet – we save up the debt for the children we claim to love) in CO2 emissions, whilst time taken is relatively only 4 hours twenty minutes longer (less than double), although with admittedly involving many more inconvenient changes of vehicle probably for the passenger. We no longer talk much about carbon footprint because of the threat that poses to exposing inequality, the least favoured topic of our mean times, and perhaps for the better reason that non-CO2 emissions can also increase undesirable effects of climate change.
The best ‘tip’ then for travel to distant climes is choose the cooler months for the effects of your selfish actions are making the warmer months too hot for YOUR comfort. But we won’t listen. People defend the entitlements that spring up from inequalities in the freedom to exploit resources that damage the poorest most and don’t largely vote for a politics that wishes to address these issues because with varying degrees of acknowledgement, few wish to give up the benefits of gas-guzzling cars sweeping across areas parched to ones less so (whilst these survive) and ‘budget’ air travel – these are their rights after all.
So tip away. Who will blame you and those who take your advice.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxx
