We hope you will enjoy the third annual New Year’s Eve Eve party on #flyingless themes, at 4pm Eastern (9pm UK) Dec 30, with toasts and good cheer for 2021 from around the world. Here below is a Zoom registration link and a video from the previous year.
Greenwashing Aviation: A Webinar on Industry Efforts
With global air traffic markedly down, passenger airlines are doing their utmost to lay the foundation for a return to “normal.” One way they’re doing so is by touting their allegedly “green” endeavors. Fortunately, such “greenwashing” has not gone unchallenged.
Last month, Stay Grounded hosted a webinar titled “Greenwashing and False Solutions.” Stay Grounded is a global network made up of organizations fighting airport expansion; it also includes climate justice groups, NGOs, trade unions, and initiatives fostering alternatives to aviation and struggles against offset projects or biofuel plantations. Its November 6, 2020 webinar explored “the various elaborate ways in which the aviation industry is seeking to talk about ‘green aviation’.” The webinar featured invaluable presentations by five individuals:
Finlay Asher (Scotland), former aerospace engineer & aircraft engine designer, Rolls Royce;
Alethea Warrington (London, England) Campaigns Manager, Possible;
Almuth Ernsting (Edinburgh, Scotland), Co-Director of Biofuel Watch;
Gary Hughes (San Francisco Bay Area, California) California Policy Monitor, Biofuel Watch; and
Simone Lovera (Asunción, Paraguay) Executive Director, Global Forest Coalition.
FlyingLess is happy to be able to share the webinar with you here.
Confronting the climate crisis in an age of coronavirus
by Parke Wilde
The most recent in the wonderful series of online conferences in a “nearly carbon neutral” format starts today.
The title is, “Confronting the climate crisis with systemic alternatives in the age of coronavirus.”
This format of online video presentations with asynchronous text discussion, while preserving the sense of a time-limited event, has been developed and refined since 2016 by the Environmental Humanities Institute at the University of California Santa Barbara. This particular conference is sponsored by UCSB’s Environmental and Climate Justice Hub in cooperation with the Center for Climate Justice at UC Merced.
Joe Nevins, Peter Kalmus, and I participated in the first conference in this format, in 2016, for a session on flying less initiatives. Peter spoke about the inner lives of climate scientists.
In that 2016 session, Joe spoke about the false characterization of flying-less initiatives as “self-righteous, self-referential, ascetic bullshit.” And I introduced our approach to setting goals and measuring progress for flying less in academic communities.
I hope you enjoy the new UCSB conference this week.
Flying Less: Reducing Academia's Carbon Footprint 