Low Cost, Low Conscience

Imagine your next free weekend: You cruise out of class on Friday and fly to Los Angeles just in time to hit the clubs, hop to the Bay Area for some hiking in the Redwoods on Saturday, then cruise through Seattle on Sunday, loading up on enough coffee and smoked salmon to last you a week—and all of this for not much more than it would have cost you to take the bus to New York and back.

Sounds like fun, but could this be realistic?

Skybus, an airline that will make its inaugural flight in late May, hopes to bring this kind of travel within reach of almost every college student’s wallet, bringing to America what bargain-basement air carriers such as Ryanair brought to Europe: transcontinental flights at Fung-Wah prices—or less.

That scares me.

It scares me not because I fear Fung-Wah prices imply Fung-Wah sketchiness, nor because I fear that Harvard students will procrastinate by jetting around the country.

What scares me is that an airline ticket priced at $20 after all taxes and fees—which the Skybus website advertises will be available for at least 10 seats on every flight—makes sucker-punching the environment as easy as buying a t-shirt or a CD.

Skybus touts its jets as “the most modern, fuel-efficient… planes available today,” but the inescapable laws of physics and chemistry make air travel an incredibly energy-intense means of travel. According to data published in the New York Times, a Boeing 747 crossing the Atlantic emits nearly 2,800 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) for each person on board, and USA Today reports that you would have to drive an SUV for a month to emit as much CO2 as a jetliner emits per person on a New York to Denver flight. And because jetliners emit these greenhouse gasses high in the atmosphere, their heat-trapping effect is greatly magnified.

What’s even more worrisome is that when transatlantic air-travel is deregulated under the “Open Skies” treaty, which comes into effect in less than a year, traffic across the pond could increase by as much as 55 percent, according to estimates published in USA Today. The treaty will enable airlines to apply the ultra-cheap model to much longer, more heavily polluting flights.

As our understanding of what pollution does to the environment increases, it’s becoming clear that more leisure flights are the last thing the globe needs, and the last thing a responsible college student should consider.

Of course, when sunny beaches beckon you to leave frosty Cambridge behind, that is a tough pill to swallow. When the thermometer doesn’t hit 30 for weeks, even the strongest-willed environmentalist says “bring it on” to global warming. But you may think twice when you realize that your favorite place to spend time outdoors—be it a snow covered mountain or a sunny beach—could be meaningfully altered by the time your children want to enjoy it, and your decisions may be contributing to its demise.

The sad truth is that, low-cost airlines such as Skybus are also low-conscience airlines. The cost of air travel will be paid, if not by travelers, then by the environment. America should consider a way of factoring the externalities of air travel into the cost of a ticket, just has been proposed by the European Commission.

Air travel is obviously too important to the world—economically and socially—to be banned outright, but it should be priced proportionally to the havoc it wreaks on our environment.

Of course, that kind of carbon pricing system is, for the time being, politically and economically untenable in America. But if politicians and the voting public can’t be trusted to change their views, I hope that we potential consumers can at least let Skybus be someone else’s cross-country Fung Wah.





Jonathan B. Steinman ’10, a Crimson sports editor, lives in Grays Hall.