Turned on my feed in the crew bus upon arrival to find a certain airline making international headlines for being the first in the world to abandon its 2030 climate targets, setting the stage for more to follow.
Not that anyone ever trusted an airline to voluntarily reduce its own emissions, or doubted that talk of such commitments can only be a hollow branding exercise for the industry in the absence of mandatory emissions reductions, but the abruptness of this particular announcement does show up how brazen and cynical all the assurances of Sustainable Aviation Fuels, ‘fuel-efficient’ jets and non-existent electric aircraft were all along. They can’t even commit to their own greenwashing. This is particularly so when airlines continue to boast about their climate commitments as a mainstay of their branding alongside the commodified imagery of ‘nature’ tourism.
The airline industry has effectively admitted that there can be no ‘green’ aviation within the logic of the market. But we already knew this.
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CBC News reports:
“Heat warnings have been forecast for most of B.C. this weekend, continuing a trend of prolonged hot weather that has led people to make more than 200 calls to paramedics this month. Most of central and eastern B.C., including large cities in the Interior like Kamloops and Kelowna, was under a heat warning Saturday, as was Eastern Vancouver Island and inland sections of the North Coast.”
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In the next browser tab, the collapse of another airline in ‘Australia’. Hundreds of workers now on the dole queue. The dependence of entire regional areas including remote Aboriginal communities upon this airline owing to the underfunding of other forms of transport infrastructure has brought talk of bringing sections of aviation under public ownership onto the agenda. Should raising demands for placing major airlines under public control not be a bare minimum for any talk of decarbonising this industry?
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Israeli occupation forces bombed a drinking water reservoir in Gaza before gloating about this on social media.
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While none of us should be surprised by the climate inaction of airline executives, a dangerous consequence of the climate fatalism of fossil capital is the potential for these diminished horizons of possibility - a form of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism - to percolate into the culture of the galley. Beyond deadly turbulence already posing an immediate safety risk to crew, we are workers who live lives outside work on a burning planet. We should be furious about the refusal of the industry to meet even the most modest of climate targets set by the Paris Agreement. How do we broach the question of climate justice at work when the time of flight attendant life often feels radically disconnected from that of the ‘real’ world?
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Crew are no strangers to disaster. The recent traumas of Covid redundancies continue to loom large over galley conversations four years on. Precarity is built into this industry in which mass layoffs feel almost periodic and cyclical, with the Rex collapse being only the latest example of the lives of airline workers being shaped by the vicissitudes of market forces.
Few in this line of work really believe that anything called ‘job security’ exists anymore in this industry. Many hold onto side gigs ‘just in case’. This sense of anxiety about the next round of layoffs being only a downturn away is bound up with the precarious conditions of life itself on an increasingly inhospitable planet. A version of this ecological vulnerability irrupted during the pandemic, but as the aviation worker-led climate campaign group Safe Landing warns, the next “crash landing” for the industry may soon be around the corner without drastic emissions reductions to stall runaway climate change.
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An account of fossil capital’s structure of desire should form at least part of any explanation of the tethering of aviation workers to the ideological and material conditions that expedite the ongoing destruction of the planet. To what extent can an implicatory denial of the climate crisis, marked by a passive acceptance of the status quo in full knowledge of the extent of ongoing ecological collapse, become what Deleuze termed a ‘microfascism’ capable of being channelled into new reactionary configurations in the current moment?
The desire to continue burning fossil fuels in the face of climate collapse, as well as the aestheticisation of flying, is in large part constituted within a fantasy of ‘freedom’. As Alberto Toscano writes in Late Fascism, neither liberal nor neoliberal conceptions of ‘freedom’ have been historically alien to the fascist imaginary. Trump, for instance, infamously rebranded fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom”. In the current convergence of reactionary desires, a defence of the ‘freedom’ to pollute supplies a narcissistic enjoyment of the status quo that mirrors the seductions of nationalism.
In White Skin, Black Fuel, the Zetkin Collective maps out the contours of fossil fascism, a mobile formation that oscillates between celebrations of petro-modernity and an ethno-nationalist romanticisation of nature. The death drive of climate nihilism may be understood within this ideological formation as constituted within both a wounded attachment to fossil capital and an enjoyment of neoliberalism’s ongoing dismantling of social ties. As the Collective write in the latest Salvage magazine, a fetish for the individual automobility of the private car figures prominently in the latest iterations of fossil fascism. Here, a defence of the individual car owner against climate regulations, renewables and expanded public transport condenses a broader set of reactionary anxieties. Among these is a desire for the privatised nuclear family, whereby the anti-LGBTQ slogan ‘leave our kids alone’ slides into demands to ‘leave our cars alone’.
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The most dangerous form of turbulence is invisible and impersonal. Clear air turbulence, the result of warm air rising into cool air, is unexpected, unpredictable and undetectable. Like the mystifications of the market’s invisible hand, its rising incidences are no less historical in their provenance.
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The airline industry’s excuses for climate inaction boil down to predictable claims that emissions reductions are ‘unrealistic’, that ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuels’ are unavailable in sufficient quantities, and that such fuels are unaffordable without significant public subsidies. While it may be the case that alternative fuels are currently unable to satisfy aviation’s extractivist appetite, the industry’s demands for biofuels subsidies distract from the climate movement’s calls for the kinds of investments in rail and other public transit required for a decarbonisation of the transport grid. And the point of decent public transport would surely be to reduce the growth of the aviation industry.
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Recorded temperatures in Antarctica reached 28 degrees Celsius above normal levels in July.
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As crew, we rarely refer to ourselves as ‘transport’ or ‘public transport’ workers, preferring instead to confine ourselves within a narrowly sectional occupational identity. But should we perhaps start assuming this expanded class position as a possible ground for organising around this climate emergency? To do so would be to place ourselves alongside bus, maritime and rail workers within a recognition of the social significance of the work we perform.
A ‘just transition’ for aviation could proceed from integrating aviation into - and subordinating it to - a broader public transport system as part of a democratically-coordinated decarbonisation of society, while banning socially useless forms of flying, starting with private jets. The UK PCS Union argues exactly this in a pamphlet on public ownership of the aviation sector. The identity of ‘transport worker’ emerges here as a potential site of utopian possibility. As the union puts it, “we envisage a new definition of transport worker defined by the integrated nature of their sector rather than by the mode of transport.”
Reimagining air transit as a form of public transport, and airline workers as public transport workers, may not only undercut the individualism of fossil capitalist desire, but form the basis for new alliances with other essential workers (as we were called in 2020) within a reorganisation of society towards a livable planet. To continue in this speculative mode, such lines of solidarity could also be forged with care workers and other pink-collar professions, and particularly in non-extractivist sectors that are going to be essential to any low carbon future, whether in healthcare or education.
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Four dead and hundreds without power as Tropical Storm Debby hits Ron DeSantis’ Florida. The fourth this year, in a state where climate change has been ‘deleted’ from state laws.