In the aftermath of the pandemic, when our skies were temporarily free of vapour trails and aircraft noise, and we had found new forms of enjoyment in staycations and slow travel, many wondered whether this was the opportunity for a radical but necessary green transformation of the aviation industry, as well as of our attitudes to flying and its carbon-intensive extractivist practices.
But the public furore over the rise of Air Passenger Duty (APD) announced by Jeremy Hunt in the recent Spring Budget confirms our worst fears: on all fronts, it’s back to ‘business as usual’ in aviation policy. What amounts to little more than an increase of £22 on the cost of a long-haul flight from London to Sydney (starting in April 2025) was rapidly disparaged as a ‘stealth tax’. And, if the industry is to be believed, it would put a nail in the coffin of the competitiveness of the wealth-creating British aviation industry, threatening its post-COVID-19 recovery and hampering its transition to net zero.
Incredibly, voices for the aviation industry continued to call for special treatment and tax concessions, while holding out the continued prospect of a technologically driven market solution to flying’s rapidly rising carbon emissions. Meanwhile, rightly frustrated with the absence of progress towards managing demand for aviation, Just Stop Oil declared that it would take action at airports this summer, denouncing our addiction to flying as ‘a key symbol of the carbon economy propped up by the fossil fuel elite destroying everything that we love’.
Here, then, is the nub of the matter: despite a plethora of initiatives, strategies and tactics over many decades, successive British governments have failed to depoliticise the contested policy space of aviation and they have not succeeded in their endeavours to secure the consent of citizens for increased airport infrastructure. Governments and politicians have also lacked the political will either to develop and implement a consistent programme of expansion or to establish a new sustainable policy settlement that addresses its impact on the environment and our climate. On the contrary, rather than grasping the nettle of this ‘thorny issue’, governments have wheeled out different ‘technologies of government’ – public inquiries, expert commissions and national consultations – not to mention associated techniques of forecasting, noise contours and cost-benefit analysis, to try and force through expansion.
When such measures have failed to resolve the issue or quell political opposition, governments have elaborated and disseminated ideological fantasies to try and conceal the antagonisms and contradictions embedded in aviation expansion and its negative environmental impacts. Hence, they have repeatedly propagated discourses that emphasise the threat of competition from other states (especially the USA) and from rival international hub airports, especially to the jewel in the crown that is Heathrow, where the failure to expand and invest in aviation would weaken UK power and interests. And such horrific images and narratives have been coupled with overblown promises of increased economic growth and prosperity for everyone if aviation is expanded.
In fact, in a self-fulfilling prediction of continued aviation expansion, numbers have been imbued with a fantasmatic power. For example, the production and consumption of passenger forecasts among policy makers and politicians, which considerably inflated their predicted growth over time, have served only to justify proposals for expansion in keeping with the underlying logic of predict and provide, in which it was simply assumed by policy makers that rising demand for air travel had to be met by government and the state. Numbers thus functioned as ‘real abstractions’ that organised and directed the practices of policy making, decisively shaping their outcomes. So even though forecasters and economists working in the Department for Transport harboured doubts about the accuracy of their measures, accepting the fallibility of their models, which were regularly criticised by academics and anti-expansion groups, they continued to act as if the data and their models were true, believing that their results were the best guides to developing plans and policy proposals.
However, the expansionist logic of ‘business as usual’ can no longer continue – it has run its course. The myths of technological fixes, efficiencies and carbon offsetting no longer provide the effective tools or policies to tackle the environmental injustices of aviation, if they ever did. Indeed, given that we are fast approaching a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we are now beyond the limits of demand management discourse, which suggests that efforts by governments to repress the demand for aviation through taxation are sufficient to address its growing contribution to carbon emissions. It is increasingly clear to many climate scientists and experts that we do not have the time for this logic of attenuation, which augments the politics of reform rather than transition and transformation. In short, we can no longer rely solely on the management of passenger demand, as there is currently no realistic prospect of ‘sustainable aviation’, where we can keep on flying on the false promise of more fuel-efficient or electric planes, biofuels and carbon offsetting. Instead, we need a radical rerouting of airport and aviation policy along a path of degrowth, which can lay the grounds for a more genuinely sustainable future.
In Contesting Aviation Expansion, we set out three policy scenarios for the future of the aviation industry: ‘business as usual’, ‘demand management’ and ‘green transformation’.
Arising from our genealogy of seven different problematizations of the politics of UK airport policy since 1945, the book sketches out an emergent path, which leads us away from a trajectory of unbridled aviation expansion to the project of a green restructuring of aviation.
This journey involves a radical divestment from aviation that can provide support for green jobs, social infrastructure and the foundational economy. But we also need to tackle our addiction to hypermobility, which ties our enjoyment to flying and mass global tourism. We thus need to promote the idea of an alternative hedonism, which is based on ‘slow travel’ and ‘slow living’, as well as a commitment to principles of sufficiency, rather than a one-dimensional logic of efficiency, while demanding new forms of political leadership and progressive alliances at the heart of a green state.
In short, we contend that it is only by elaborating a new hegemonic strategy of transformation – connecting aviation to broader visions of post-growth societies and other eco-egalitarian demands – that we will be able to break our addiction to flying and dependency on unsustainable and exclusionary forms of infrastructure. And this strategy requires action at all levels of government and across multiple spaces in civil society if we are to expose the contradictions of our commitment to a sustainable future and continued expansion of aviation.
Steven Griggs is Professor of Public Policy in the Business School at Staffordshire University where he is Co-director of the Centre for Business, Innovation and the Regions.
David Howarth is Professor of Social and Political Theory in the Department of Government and Co-director of the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex.
Contesting Aviation Expansion By Steven Griggs and David Howarth, is available on Bristol University Press here. £80.00 for the hardback and £27.99 for the EPUB.
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