Europe’s Flight Shaming: Meet Asia’s flight pride

In most areas of activity the world's discourse is dominated by English speaking media and institutions. This has often led to misleading strategies being developed by the "older" world planners. Environmental issues are no exception with what happens in Europe tending to be radiated globally.

Combining the facts that English is the airline industry's central language and the high level of publicity that the European Union countries and the EU itself generate, it's understandable that the issue of "flight shaming" has arrived as a potential concern to the industry in Asia. But there, the reality is likely to be quite different.

Assuming such homogeneity of behaviour of course is potently misleading. The United States for example is officially fortunate enough not to suffer from global warming; the prospect of government imposed taxes to discourage air travel under the current administration is (perhaps with the exception of California) negligible. But more seriously, and more importantly, when it comes to air travel, defining the future global reality must necessarily be much more heavily weighted towards Asia, the source of much of the world's rapid growth and its population.

In terms of sheer numbers, the population of the EU is around half a billion; Asia's is eight times that. Very shortly, Asian air travel will dominate world operations on a similar scale.

Aside from accounting for a very significant and proportionally increasing volume of global emissions, the great bulk of the Asian population is very different aspirationally from its European counterparts.