Steven, yes, unfortunately we've got ourselves into the situation where there are global relationships - whether business, friendships or family - that will often require long haul air travel: not all meetings are satisfactory when done via Zoom or Teams. (Although Zoom over the Internet is a lot better than the video systems and networks I reviewed in a 1991 study as part of my PgDip!) If one's child is born in the UK but its grandparents lives in North America or the Middle East they'll still want to visit it; if you're putting your company's UK client information into a US data processing and storage system best practice says your due diligence includes a site visit unless it's a major provider like Google, AWS or Microsoft, and if a friend has a life changing event you'll still want to visit them even if they live outside of Europe. And in business, sometimes those ancillary meet-ups at the coffee machine or in the pub after the formal one are the really useful ones ... plus, as you say, people have got used to foreign travel on an economy budget for holidays.An occasional leisure flight (one, perhaps twice, a year?) is going to be insignificant compared to the number of business flights each day or perhaps no worse than a daily drive of 120 miles to and from work in a non-electric car? The important thing about climate change is that people accept it's happening, reject the lies that it's fake and start changing habits where they can, considering the different viable alternatives for travel? It seems likely the economic structures will have to change over the next decade to avoid a climate catastrophe.And although there's talk of sustainable aviation fuel it seems that it's a case of theory and practice not agreeing. You can fly a plane adapted to use biomass fuel but, if one does the science and maths, the energy equations for the use of bio fuels, particularly for aviation, just do not stack up as a solution for net zero. This is because the photosynthesis process is so inefficient in converting solar energy into stored energy - for example, less than 1%, more realistically 0.1%, for creating wood for subsequent process - and that's before the energy required to convert the material into a usable aviation fuel. Hence, to produce the volume of fuel to satisfy the current market for it one would probably have to turn most of the food growing land over to producing aviation fuel! (And those wood burning fires are an ecological disaster, both from a climate and pollution aspect.)[This note on bio fuels is from a lecture on photosynthesis by Professor Bill Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College. His research is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and not by any industry body with a vested commercial interest.]
Michael Ixer ● 22d