Am I a carbon criminal for creating 7.4 tonnes of pollution, thereby bringing forward the day of judgment when we will all get our just deserts by roasting in a technological, post-enlightenment version of Dante’s Inferno? Since none of my trips was strictly necessary for my survival, nor even for my ability to earn a decent living, I suspect that many readers will instinctively condemn me as a criminal, or at least a self-indulgent sinner. That certainly seems the gist of the moralistic debate in Britain about the contribution of air travel to climate change.

On the Today programme, for example, I recently heard the interviewer claiming, to a beleaguered representative of the Government or some pro-business lobby, that air travel was set to become the biggest single contributor to global warming. So why was the Government not taking some action to stop people flying? When it was pointed out that, according to the best estimates, air travel would create only 5 per cent of global carbon emissions by 2050, the interviewer seamlessly and quite unrepentantly changed his story: “Yes, but flying is the fastest growing cause of climate change” — a statistic that could only be true because aircraft emissions are increasing from such a low, almost infinitesimal, starting point, at present accounting for just 2 per cent of global CO2.

Why do I raise this issue? Because the debate on air travel suggests that many people in Britain, including most of the media and large parts of the political elite, still see the world through a Marxist prism: they still distrust economic incentives and market forces, preferring a benign, omniscient government to solve all social problems. Worst of all, they still feel instinctively that society is in a permanent state of class war.

Let’s start with economics. Every serious study of aircraft pollution has concluded that the surest way of reducing emissions would be to bring airlines into the European regime for carbon trading. The idea is that airlines would be allocated an annual limit for carbon emissions, which they could trade among themselves. In order to expand beyond these limits, airlines would have buy “carbon credits” from earthbound industries such as power stations, steelmakers and motor manufacturers, who would then find ways of reducing their carbon emissions by an equivalent amount.

The merit of emissions trading is not just that it forces passengers to pay for pollution and airlines to become more efficient, since this would also be true of taxing airline fuel. The real advantage is that carbon trading allows airlines to pay for carbon reduction on the ground instead of in the air. And because there are many ways of reducing ground-based emissions readily available, every pound spent on ground-based carbon reductions is hundreds of times more effective than the same amount spent in the air.

To illustrate, let me return to my own globetrotting this month. The voluntary carbon reduction scheme introduced by British Airways on their website shows that a passenger who wants to offset the entire 1.2 tonnes of carbon created by a transatlantic round trip needs to spend only £9 on planting new trees or subsidising an energy-efficiency programme in rural India. By contrast, an additional £9 per ticket fuel tax would achieve absolutely no carbon reduction, since it would not be remotely sufficient to deter people from flying. As for promoting technological improvements in aircraft, a fuel tax would add nothing to the incentives that airlines already face. BA, for example, spends £1.4 billion each year on fuel; so any technology that can save fuel is already worth adopting. This, indeed, is why airlines go on spending billions on new generations of aircraft and why jets replaced propellers decades ago.

Why, then, do environmentalists campaign for new airline taxes (which would be totally ineffective) or for outright bans on air travel (which will never happen), instead of arguing calmly for the economically rational solution of bringing airlines into a carbon-trading scheme?

Here we come back to the true political content of the flying debate. Opponents of flying are less interested in the practical prospects for reducing carbon emissions than they are in forcing politicians to “take a stand” against frivolous travel — ideally by banning it outright in the utopian visions of the authoritarian Greens. And behind the puritan contempt for travellers’ self-indulgence lies an even deeper political agenda.

Airline travel is seen instinctively as a luxury, an indulgence of the prosperous classes. Denouncing air travel is therefore like sabotaging fox hunts, rioting against globalisation in the City of London or terrorising universities over “animal rights”.

On closer inspection none of these single-issue protests has much to do with its putative objectives. Just as opponents of air travel are not really focused on the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions, the people who campaign against hunting or animal experiments are not really concerned about minimising animal suffering. If they were, they would be campaigning against meat-eating instead of pharmaceuticals, picketing abbatoirs instead of university labs and throwing blood at leather shoes and sheepskins instead of mink furs.

What, then, are these new protest movements really about? They seem primarily a way of expressing contempt for the rich and privileged, showing solidarity with the poor and downtrodden and creating an imaginary vanguard for a 21st-century version of Marxist class war. The end of communism and the rise of Tony Blair have left left-wing radicals with few options. So let them campaign for punitive taxes on air travel. Even if they succeeded, they would be less harm than old Labour’s 98 per cent income tax.

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