The flying club

A senior charity boss recently told me that during his career he has flown to the US over 50 times, and whilst travelling was novel at the start of his career, it is now a tedious chore. He chided what he referred to as ‘the flying club’, an international gravy train of hypocritical and self-important charity folk jaunting from conference to conference, decrying the horrors of impending climate chaos while chalking up more airmiles than Richard Branson.

As part of a new generation of carbon cautious do-gooders engulfed in today’s flying club, I had to agree with him that the broader value of such events is questionable for everyone but the airlines. And in my short stint as a conference regular the novelty has largely worn off already. 28 hours in a city like Bratislava can quickly prove that it’s not all glamorous. (Especially when a passport gets lots on arrival, costing not only the hours finding the police station, getting the police report, registering at the embassy, getting passport photos, applying for a temporary passport, waiting for three hours, and then going to collect it, but also costing £75 for a piece of paper that’s only good for one journey.)

New technologies are coming in to reduce the need for flying by enabling ‘face to face’ communication without the lost time or money, or additional carbon emissions. The most impressive of these is the emergent, Star Trek-esque telepresence.

But on the whole these technologies are still expensive, and skype is too unreliable, to really compete with face to face interaction. And the world’s biggest donor for civil society, the European Commission, remain a firm believer that travel is the answer to every problem, this being one of the few project expenses to receive no budget ceiling in funding proposals, encouraging applicants to pad out this section to grow the other, restricted areas of their costs. (As an aside, if that sounds confusing and boring, feel for the poor guy that had to write this; a devilishly handsome and unsung hero if ever there was one.)

Of course the civil society flying club is a minnow compared to its colossal corporate and public sector cousins. Both of these titanic gravy trains are now on their way to moralise about to descent on Copenhagen to decry the horrors of impending climate chaos while chalking up more airmiles than… Neil Armstrong?