Shaun Hendy: The case for not flying this year

International travel is a nice luxury but it's not helping the planet, argues Shaun Hendy. Photo / File

Try picturing a typical Kiwi, standing in an overcrowded departure lounge at Auckland airport, waiting to board their international flight.

Maybe you are thinking of a young backpacker heading off to London or Bangkok, or a couple on their way to Bali, perhaps, dressed like they are already on the beach? Or perhaps you've pictured someone in their 40s or 50s, dressed comfortably but carrying a briefcase, on their way to do business in Shanghai or San Francisco?

If you are Mike Hosking, you might be thinking irritably of the Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw, on his way to another talkfest. International air travel accounts for about 5 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, and if you talk to almost any scientist, they will tell you that all of us, James included, need to cut back.

But many of us have stood in that queue, waiting for that boarding call. Data from Stats NZ shows that most likely, we were travelling to see our friends and family. Perhaps, when you were last in the airport, you were on your way to introduce your child to their grandparents or to give a speech at your best friend's wedding. Maybe you were just on your way home for New Years.

Fossil fuels, and the airplanes that burn them, have enabled some of us to live our best lives. We've looked for life, love, and work in far off places, and known that our parents, grandparents, nephews and nieces are just a plane ticket away. Fossil fuels have brought us closer together and expanded our world. Without them, many of us would not be alive today.

But sometime in the next few decades society is going to have to come to grips with this sugar rush.

The discovery that slowly but surely, the ancient carbon that we were burning was rising into the atmosphere, absorbing heat, and warming the surface of the Earth, is the greatest piece of scientific detective work in my lifetime. For our next act we'll need all this ingenuity, and more.

It's not going to come down to individual action, even though some of us, Mike, James, and myself included, have disproportionately large carbon footprints. When I took a year off flying in 2018, I realised that what I did alone would not put a dent in global carbon emissions. The planes still flew. The jet fuel still burned.

But like Mike, I'm an optimist. I know that scientists at the Robinson Institute in Lower Hutt are working on superconducting electric engines that will make air travel more efficient, while researchers at Rotorua's Scion are looking at how to generate carbon-neutral biofuels from waste.

Climate change worries me - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot - but I think we are a long way from beat. When I grounded myself, I hoped that Kiwis might start to take this challenge seriously; that we would begin decarbonising our economy; that the rest of the world would see this and start to take the challenge seriously too.

We're all in this together, but some of us have a responsibility to lead the way.

• Professor Shaun Hendy is a physicist and science commentator.