A few weeks of beach holiday on a tropical island. To the powder snow far away. On a working visit to a European capital or visiting family overseas. Many people take the plane sometimes or regularly. Or have done so in the past. But flying, as is now known, is not good for the environment and contributes to climate change. The burden of a plane trip is even eight to twelve times as much as the same trip by train. And contributes one to four times as much to the greenhouse effect as the same journey by car – depending on the distance travelled.
These are hard figures, calculated and listed by Milieu Centraal, a partly government-funded organization that provides independent and practical advice on sustainability, energy and the environment.
In that light, the most recent figures from the Knowledge Institute for Mobility Policy (KiM) are quite harsh. From the report The Flying Dutchman 2024 it appears that a quarter of Dutch people are responsible for three quarters of all air travel. In fact, half of all air travel is made by just 13 percent of all Dutch people – the ‘frequent flyers’. They are therefore responsible for a disproportionately large burden on the environment.
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Because in this study, which spanned a year, half of the four thousand Dutch people surveyed did not fly at all. The total number of air journeys that Dutch people make is around 15 million per year, which on average amounts to 1.1 air journeys per person per year, but in practice it is very unevenly distributed.
It is extra interesting that the group of frequent flyers, people who fly at least three times a year, not only often falls into the highest income group above average, but is also often highly educated. And highly educated people, as is known from other research, are very concerned about the climate, just like the elderly, women and people who live in urban areas. At the same time – also investigated – the group of highly educated people in particular does not act on this concern: they do not or hardly adapt their behavior.
It is also called the ‘climate split’ – thinking one thing, doing another. Or ‘moral licensing’, a psychological process in which people try to justify ‘bad’ behavior (for example flying) by emphasizing what they do well (the CO2-compensating emissions, eating less meat, having solar panels).
And so humans have several psychological mechanisms to justify – or maintain – their own behavior. Useful for survival, disastrous when it comes to tackling perhaps the greatest threat of our time: the dangerous consequences of climate change that are becoming increasingly acute.
It is therefore important that highly educated people also critically question themselves. Of course, the government must take measures, and the business community is responsible for its own emissions. But that does not absolve the individual citizen from his or her duty to examine his or her own behavior. Combating further global warming is a responsibility of all of us.
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