Scientist Wants To See Frequent Flyer Programs Banned

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Dr. Richard Carmichael is, according to his Twitter account, a Chartered Psychologist at Imperial College London and he has written a report on “Behavior change, public engagement and Net Zero” in which he looks at what choices people can/should be making that can contribute to reducing emissions that lead to climate change.

In his report, Dr. Carmichael suggests that governments should not be imposing aviation fuel taxes which would increase airfares for everyone who flies but, instead, should be considering an “Air Miles levy” aimed at “excessive flying by frequent flyers”.

I don’t actually have much of an objection to that suggestion.

I believe in climate change, I believe that climate change is man-made (at least to a very significant degree), and I believe that aviation is a significant contributor when it comes to the production of gases that contribute to climate change. Had Dr. Carmichael left things at that I probably wouldn’t be writing this post.

Unfortunately, in a recent article published by the New York Times, Dr. Carmeichel moved away from his area of expertise and allowed himself to be quoted as saying the following:

“Mileage runs may be tiny on a global climate change impact sort of level, but it’s the most grotesque kind of behavior you can imagine, the worst behavior done for no reason rather than you’re rewarded for doing it.”

I originally found a rehash of the actual quote in a tweet sent out by the Grantham Institue at Imperial College and, because it was only a rehash of the quote in the NYT, I misunderstood it to mean that Dr. Carmichael believed that rewarding people for flying is the worst possible single action you can take for climate change.

I challenged Dr. Carmichael on his comment and he was good enough to respond and to correct my misunderstanding…but I still didn’t understand two things:

1. Why was Dr. Carmichael bothering to attack mileage runs when, by his own admission, they are “tiny on a global climate change impact sort of level”? Presumably there are a good number of significantly more pressing and more important climate change contributors we (and he) should be focusing on.
2. Why was he bothering to attack mileage runs when anyone who knows anything about frequent flyer programs could tell him that mileage runs have been dying a rapid death for a number of years?

I’m not going to go through our entire discussion tweet by tweet (you can see it all here) but my back and forth with Dr. Carmichael got us to a situation where he typed this:

Right. So now we know that Dr. Carmichael believes that reward programs that stimulate extra flying should be banned….but based on what?

He’s already on the record as having said that mileage runs have a “tiny effect on climate change” and he’s just admitted that his report hasn’t actually looked into what effect frequent flyer programs have on climate change and yet he wants such programs banned…there’s no scientific reasoning here.

I replied to his tweet (apologies for the typo!)…

…and this was his response:

Wow. I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting that response.

Dr. Carmichael is essentially saying that he has no scientific data to back up why frequent flyer programs should be banned but, nevertheless, it’s still “rational and practical” to ban such programs anyway.

I tried to get him to explain himself further but my final tweet went unanswered.

I have a huge amount of respect for scientists and I have an incredible amount of respect for those who continue to make strong arguments for controlling climate change in the face of a significant number of narrow-minded opponents who have nothing but self-interest at heart…but Dr. Carmichael is doing climate change activists no favors with this nonsense.

We cannot have scientists calling for bans in the name of climate change action without rigorous scientific evidence to back up the need for such bans. 

We already have significant numbers of know-nothing politicians denying the existence of climate change and claiming (rather unbelievably) that there’s no scientific data to back up the fact that humans are causing the planet’s climate to change, so we certainly don’t need scientists giving them more ammunition.

People who deny climate change will be only too happy to wave around comments like those made by Dr. Carmichael to “prove” that scientists are happy to demand bans without any scientific proof that bans are needed, and that’s likely to make it a lot harder to persuade the public to accept bans on things that genuinely need banning.

Bottom Line

If Dr. Carmichael had scientific data to show that frequent flyer programs cause a significant amount of people to fly for no other reason than for the rewards that the programs offer, I’d be happy to listen to his calls to curtail the programs’ activities – some things are more important than elite upgrades and premium cabin awards.

As it is, not only is no scientific evidence being supplied to support the need to ban frequent flyer programs, there’s not even a suggestion that any research is being done to find any evidence in the first place so the call to ban such programs is ill-considered, baseless and more than a little ridiculous.

Scientists like Dr. Carmichael should continue fighting the good fight by sticking to what they know, what they understand and what they can back up with actual scientific data. They should leave baseless and uneducated statements to politicians in the pay of “big energy” and do everything possible not to stoop to their level.