It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it...

I’m writing this at a height of 8km, flying somewhere over the beautiful north of Italy, on my way back from Thessaloniki in Greece, where I attended the EuroSlag Conference. Two startling ideas came out of the meeting; the possibility that CO₂ might come to be treated on the same basis as waste in the waste hierarchy (avoidance being preferred to disposal/sequestration, for example); and the possibility of a net-zero CO₂ iron and steel industry by 2050. It was a useful trip, with good food and a little bit of running and bird-watching as well (each to their own), but I can’t help but feel a little bit guilty.

We are all now being told that we should feel guilty about flying and in fact, there’s a word for it: ‘flygskam,’ Swedish for ‘flight-shame.’ Air transport accounts for 2% of man-made carbon emissions (around 895Mt of CO₂ in 2018). In a warming world, driven by our emissions of greenhouse gases, air travel is firmly in the sights of campaigners and increasingly of politicians, responding to voter concerns. However, air travel is something that we have come to expect as our ‘right.’ We expect to be able to cross continents in a few hours, to jet off on a family holiday at reasonable cost and to travel to visit customers and contacts wherever they may be. Air travel comes as part of today’s ‘lifestyle,’ along with ubiquitous electricity, WiFi, driving your own car, exotic foods, cheap clothes and plenty more things besides that we take for granted - even to the point where we consider them as ‘rights.’ Politicians are going to struggle to take away these ‘rights’ even if we, the voters, really do want action on climate change.

I would argue that it is not air travel per se that is what we are being urged to feel guilty about, but the CO₂ emissions associated with it - and it does not have to be this way. I hope that climate campaigners (and in a way we are all climate campaigners now) would be happy if we could transport people and goods around the world with no CO₂ emissions and no environmental impact. It sounds far-fetched, but it might be possible in the future. The first flights have already taken place with bio-jet and other sustainable low-CO₂ fuels, and electric planes are now heading towards production. If politicians want to do something about the environmental impacts of air travel, then they should strongly encourage development of non-fossil-fuel options for air travel. They should not curtail my ‘right’ to travel.

In the same way, there are ‘eco’ options for most of the other sources of carbon emissions, which ‘just’ need to be developed and to become mainstream. The large-scale substitution of renewable energy sources for coal is underway in some countries (but notably not yet in India and China), while there is a growing awareness of the environmental impact of all forms of meat production (but especially beef and lamb), which can be addressed through changes in diet. That does necessarily mean going vegetarian, but might mean switching to meats with lower environmental impacts such as chicken or pork. As my daughter Elizabeth put it, “It’s all about demand.” For example, if we - humanity - demand less beef and more chicken, the environmental impact of our diets will drop.

The same goes for building materials. Politicians should only seek to level the playing field, not skew it, by properly reflecting the environmental costs inherent in the production and use of building materials. Building products that are energy-intensive to produce should (and largely do) have that cost reflected in their price (unless, of course, the producers can find cheaper forms of non-fossil energy such as alternative fuels). Building products that aid in energy efficiency, such as all forms of insulation, will be properly priced on the basis of the advantages that their long-term use can bestow on their users. Mineral wool, for example, can save 200 times more energy in use than the energy used to manufacture it - and other types of insulation have similar performance. For the benefits that it bestows, insulation is remarkably cheap. Gypsum wallboard is a fantastic building material in terms of CO₂ emissions and recyclability, but it remains unable to take on the weight-bearing tasks currently undertaken by steel and concrete. Both of these materials are coming in for an increasing ‘bashing’ for their poor CO₂ credentials. While much progress has been made by the cement sector, it remains hampered by the need to decarbonise CaCO₃ to CaO, releasing CO₂ even before you consider the fuels needed to heat a cement kiln to 1500°C.

In the future, our schools, hospitals, bridges and roads can still be built, but they will use net-zero CO₂ versions of today’s building materials, with low embodied-energy, fully-recyclable, air-quality-enhancing wallboards and full insulation. We can continue to live our lives, but we will live them in a low-CO₂ paradigm.

This is all possible: As Ella Fitzgerald sang in 1939, “It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it... and that’s what gets results.”