by Will Jones
Air travel will soon be the preserve of the privileged, an airline boss has admitted, as Net Zero makes low-cost air travel a thing of the past. The truth the Net Zero is making us poorer is slowly leaking out, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
It would drive a new industrial revolution. It would create lots of ‘well-paid, green jobs’. And the wealth it would generate would lower prices, raise living standards and spark innovations that would transform whole industries.
For most of the last decade, corporate leaders have insisted that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy was win-win.
We would save the planet and get richer at the same time. But hold on. The Australian airline Qantas has just broken ranks, admitting that flying may soon be the preserve of only the privileged, while a wealth of research is making it clear that environmental goals have hammered the economy.
In reality, bosses are starting to admit what has been obvious for some time. Net Zero is making us poorer – and that means we have to rethink the way we go about reducing carbon emissions.
If you thought that summer flight to Malaga or Crete with the family was already looking eye-wateringly expensive, you have not seen anything yet. According to the data company Mabrian, budget – and the word “budget” is looking increasingly out of place for the no-frills aviation industry – flights to Spain will cost 26% more this year than last and those kinds of price rises are becoming the norm for many destinations.
But it will get a lot worse very soon. Vanessa Hudson, the Chief Executive of Qantas, admitted this week that flying may well become “so expensive that it’s something only for the privileged”.
It doesn’t stop there.
Chris Wright, Trump’s Energy Secretary, delivered some blunt truths on UK policy last month when he argued that our roll-out of wind farms and solar panels “had not delivered any benefits”. In fact, he said that British politicians were impoverishing citizens “in the delusion that this was somehow going to make the world a better place”.
Likewise, earlier this month, an analysis by Peel Hunt showed that the steep decline in electricity supply since the early 2000s had coincided with a sharp fall in the growth of living standards and that the two were inextricably linked.
There is no point in kidding ourselves any more. The Net Zero drive is making us poorer.
Let’s take aviation, for example. Vanessa Hudson’s point was that sustainable aviation fuel, which will soon be mandatory for at least 10% of an airline’s consumption, is far more expensive than the traditional fossil variety.
It can cost up to five times as much as kerosene and that increase means fares will have to rise prohibitively if airlines are to stay in business. We have only seen the start of the rise in ticket prices and there will be a lot more to come over the next few years. Very soon, only the wealthy will be able to fly and the rest of us will have to stay at home.
The trouble is, this is completely crazy.
Lynn goes on to explain how numerous industries, including tourism, exports and conferences, rely on affordable air travel. And manufacturing of course is already being hammered by high and rising energy costs.
“At least Qantas is being honest,” he says”. “So are a handful of other corporate leaders, even if the majority are still living in the la-la-land where there is no trade-off between hitting our environmental goals and maintaining our standards of living.”
Worth reading in full.
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The self impoverishment of the West continues and we in Britain are the leading lemming.
We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burdened-most-expensive-electricity-prices-in-world/
I hope you in the US can reverse some of the nonsense but it will be a struggle as too many seemingly intelligent people actually still believe the carbon dioxide emissions nonsense.
Maybe it’s time to revise our notions of intelligence. Swallowing ideas without chewing them up and seeing how the digestion goes is not intelligent.
Something weird has happened to their thinking, especially among airline execs, that is consistent with the philosophy of continuing beatings until morale improves.
The hive mind has been progressing and with Smart Phones, social media, instantaneous digital media, AI, and the promise of cranial computers, given censorship, etc., we are almost there.
Look on the bright side. Pretty soon, we’ll be so poor the Chinese and Russians won’t want to conquer us.
Looks like the Islamists will control the UK before too long, anyway.
They now make up what % of the population? I have no idea- probably not a lot- but probably they’re aggressive at getting into positions of authority?
The Protestants in England and Scotland were once a small proportion of the population and look what happened. In Scotland, the Protestant nobles, with the help of the English government and army, seized control of the three estates. They decreed the abolition of the Mass, the repudiation of the authority of the Pope and the establishment of Calvinist worship and discipline. The saying of the Mass and even attendance at Mass were made penal offences; for the first offence, confiscation of goods; for the second, exile; for the third, death was decreed. And all magistrates were empowered to put these decrees into operation.
We can already see the emergence of a trend in this direction in this country today. A foreign government (Saudi Arabia) is assisting the forces of Islam in this country. Political forces sympathetic to Islam are preparing to make “Islamophobia” an offence. Demands for Sharia law and Sharia courts. For four years a teacher in Yorkshire has been in hiding for fear of the local Moslem population. And so on.
Meanwhile, secular forces are attempting to make it illegal to cite various verses of the Bible in public and even silent prayer in certain places is now illegal. In Scotland, you cannot pray too loudly in your own home if you live within a certain distance of an abortion facility. The attack on Christianity is coming from two directions.
Tut tut! Sir Stalin clarified that the problem is Islamophobia. Anglostan will be a glorious caliphate.
Chinese tourists will visit the West- and take photos of the poor folks sitting on the stoops of their shacks in filthy clothes and looking hungry.
If people can’t afford to fly..
.. the airlines go out of business.
Huge losses on unused aircraft.
But they are still building Heathrow 2, aren’t they !!
Airlines out of business = more,cheaper private jets for those who can afford.
This scheme is like everything else they do.
Getting rid of small businesses,banks by either regulating or overprizing them out of the market.
It’s not the price if the planes that makes flying expensive. It’s the regulations, the expensive renewable fuel requirements, and the taxes.
If airlines can’t keep prices low, private airplanes won’t be cheaper.
What if Trump says something like… “sorry, you can only get normal aviation fuel in the USA”
Puts a ban on overpriced fake, “sustainable” crap ?
Will the planes using this fuel be allowed to land at foreign airports?
Good question.
What are foreign airlines required to do when landing in Australia? Can they land if they don’t use the expensive fuel?
Any long-haul flight to Australia will need to refuel there before taking off for the next leg, so even if they can use cheaper US fuel for the flight over, they will still have to buy more expensive fuel to make it back. So perhaps their costs won’t rise as much as airlines which do most/all flights within Australia, but they will still rise.
Fuel costs can be 60% or more of an airline’s operating expenses.
Perhaps all planes in and out of Australia will stop at Papua New Guinea for refueling. Just cut Australia’s servicing of the aircrafts out of the equation.
We’re for freedom of choice bnice and the free market. The nutters can buy all the biofuel they want for $45/gallon instead of $4.50 for the fossils.
If some countries force the use of biofuels.. that is not free choice.
Of course there’s no choice in the lost countries. I refer to the US.
This has been obvious to any thinking person from the very beginning
The legacy media in cohoots with governments, lunatic “charities” and other assorted interests have been selling the lie that it’s win-win
In other words, that black is white, 2+2=5
It is a scam, simple as that, and always was
And the masses unthinkingly accepted all this
Now that the reality is biting with sky high energy prices, high flight costs and other inflationary pressures, the masses are beginning to question the whole premise
The usual messaging (propaganda) is no longer effective, also due to fatigue, loss of trust in “science” following covid and the fact that the reasons are constantly shifting from saving the planet to creating jobs to lower energy prices, none of which look remotely plausible
I envisage much of the net zero crap to be dropped as quietly as possible over the coming years, starting with EV mandates on manufacturers, cancelling new wind/solar proposals and letting the scroungers living off subsidies go bust
The US of course is headed in that direction fast. The EU has been back peddling slowly for over a year. The UK remains a significant outlier
We have reached the ‘tipping point’
Yeah, the Net Zero tipping point is here.
It’s not the tipping point, the Climate Alarmists thought it would be. They thought the tipping point would have something to do with the climate, not the economic situation.
It’s the sun. No, it’s the moon.
But Net Zero has already been shown to be scientific nonsense. Why is anyone trying to use it as any sort of international goal?
Delusional Thinking and/or Greed, would be my guess.
10% for the Big Guy.
2000 jobs going at Grangemouth refinery, replaced by possibly a couple of hundred ‘green’ jobs.
Doesn’t seem much of a trade off to me…
It was a good run, England. You gave the world the Industrial Revolution but now your last steel mills are shutting down.
Chin up, mates! Diversity is your strength.
and the green jobs pay, on average, much less than the jobs that were lost.
If air travel is going to become the preserve of the priviliged then there’s clearly no need for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. Seems that not everybody is on board with the message that flights will become less common.
That is strictly to support increased flights from Islamabad and Lagos.
Story Tip
If you want to see a technically illiterate puff-piece from the new Chairperson of the UK Climate Change Committee:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/29/uk-net-zero-tsar-i-understand-why-people-are-angry/
She has degrees in Latin and Greek.
She may as well have written the piece in those languages for all the sense it makes 🙂
As many have noted, this he UK and many of the EU nations are ashamed of their heritage; and their putative leaders have accepted the Net Zero fantasy without carefully examining the consequences. The UK climate bureaucracy illustrates the problem—it is filled with people with no qualification to design a system to power an economy. Instead, they are “social scientists” and politicians who are consumed by righting past wrongs.
Perish the thought of providing power to industry, which in turn, employs the worker and drives the economy. Germany, of all nations, has led the charge; and its industry is exiting the home country rapidly. Perhaps it is the ingrained (and well deserved) guilt over the Third Reich, but it is destroying the economy.
Some have noted that Europe is becoming a vast Museum. The airline fuel regulations will likely devastate that critical segment of EU/UK economies. Trump and Vance are crude, but things are going to get very tough for the Europeans in short order.
China is licking their chops right now. They don’t need to conquer the rest of the world because the rest of the world is conquering itself, and paying China to manufacture the tools to do it. And somehow these virtue signaling nitwits think they will get China and India to follow their net zero fantasies? When they impoverish themselves they weaken their negotiating position. Waging your finger at China and India might play well for the cameras but it will yield no gains at all. So much silliness to achieve absolutely nothing.
When will WE learn to stop following the dumbest among us?!
You don’t see a slightly bigger picture. If the entire Circus World demolishes itself all the way into Third World with extra hubris, there would be only bug-eating proles in slum pods, a handful of Kardashians, Clintons etc lording over them and only slightly larger bunch of lackeys in between. But then, to whom would China sell all those toys?
As Florida governor Ron DeSantis has said: “decline is a choice.”
Today, policymakers setting “green” policies are oblivious to the reality that so-called “renewables, ONLY generate electricity but CANNOT make anything. In addition, everything that NEEDS Electricity is made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, coal, or natural gas.
WORLDWIDE
40,000 airports
9,000 commercial airports
1,200 international airports
95 BILLION gallons of aviation fuel worldwide
Net Zero “renewables” CANNOT make any fuels!
“ONLY generate electricity but CANNOT make anything.”
I’ve no idea what this means nor where it came from. I just made a large beef roast with carrots and potatoes using electricity – some of which came from wind towers and solar farms. So, whatever is meant by the above statement might be better expressed. If I knew the intent, I’d give it a try. 🤠
“ I just made a large beef roast with carrots and potatoes” – this is obviously a new kind of alchemy that could win over vegans!
‘well-paid, green jobs’
… Are a huge cost. This sounds like Joe Biden — the guy that can’t find his way off a platform without someone holding his elbow.
From the above article:
— Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph
Let’s see: fares rise to prohibitive prices levels, yet the airlines stay in business because of that??? I guess that’s logical in today’s MSM talk.
ROTFL. 🤪
The signal will be the reversal of the recent flow of immigration because it is better at home than in the USA or Europe. Soros will not pay for their trip home.
The ‘elite’ plan a new serfdom, of course.
If that has not been clear for decades, it is becoming clear to an IQ 70 immigrant by now.
Air travel only for rich elites is a small component.
The 15 minute city! mRNA vaccines! GMO foods. Insects on the menu. Own nothing and be HAPPY! Unreliable and intermittent power. The list is goes on and on.
The compliant morons, however, need only a charismatic leader and the elite will meet Mme Guillotine. Who will become the next Robespierre and then, Napoleon?
People should stop worrying about, aiming for, or even discussing Net Zero because it has become increasingly obvious that it’s an unattainable goal. With the current technology and unreliability of recently-introduced renewables, Net Zero, if at all possible, is probably unlikely in this century.
We don’t have a science problem, we don’t have a climate problem the only problem we have is a government one. Get the government out of the energy and transportation business and we will all live a healthier and happier life and one we can afford. It is that simple.
Looks like some countries must learn how to survive without tourism dollars. Otoh, their own populations will only be taking vacations at home.
Back in the day there was this Brit, the Duke of Wellington, who said that he was opposed to railways because they would encourage the poor to travel around.
So nothing has changed.
“… that means we have to rethink the way we go about reducing carbon emissions.” That means we have to acknowledge that we do not want to reduce carbon emissions, but rather should promote more efficient photosynthesis with higher levels of atmospheric CO2.
So let’s couple this with never ending demands for never ending increases in minimum wage.