Code Red versus the aviation industry: Don’t crash the planet
This time Code Red will target aviation! Why? While it’s not a secret for anybody that aviation is disastrous for the climate, maintains precarious working conditions, and has a harmful impact on nature, agriculture and health, the industry still benefits from numerous tax breaks and receives millions in subsidies. As a result, the industry keeps growing beyond planetary boundaries for the enjoyment of the 1% responsible for over half of passenger flight emissions. Yet it is the global majority of marginalised, financially precarious and racialised communities that pay the price. It is high time to start curbing down the aviation industry and make it undergo a radical turn, putting people and the planet first.
The aviation industry disrupts the climate…
Aviation is one of the transportation modes with the biggest climate impact. Airplanes don’t only emit CO2 – accounting for about 2.5% of global emissions – but also nitrogen oxides (NOx), black carbon, vapor trails and soot, which contribute twice as much to global warming as CO2 emissions. As a result, the climate impact of a flight can be up to 80 times higher than that of a train ride for the same route. And that climate impact is increasing year after year. Emissions from the airline industry are growing faster than any other mode of transportation, with projections showing that emissions will triple by 2050 if the industry doesn’t change course soon. That would represent a quarter of the global carbon budget left for a 1.5° C scenario. Although science clearly states that reducing flights is the only valid short-term solution, the industry continues to grow and sell green lies of “sustainable” aviation fuels and electric planes which provide no short term emission reductions.
…and is inherently unjust and largely unnecessary.
The problem are private jets, unnecessary cargo flights and excessive touristic flights. 80% of the world’s population has never flown, while 1% is responsible for more than half of the total emissions of passenger air travel. That includes leisurely flights and private flights. As to cargo flights, they serve high-speed transportation including online orders of low-quality goods such as fast fashion – a polluting practice linked to global capitalism that encourages overproduction and overconsumption, local job loss, and has a climate impact 100 times higher than that of shipping freight per ton of transported goods.
Commercial passenger flights are also on the rise, thanks in part to low-cost airlines using tax breaks and bad working conditions, thereby deepening the price discrepancy that forces people onto planes rather than the pricey trains for short distance travel. In the meantime, more private jets are flying than ever before, doubling their emissions between 2021 and 2022. While only the super-rich enjoy their jets, the global majority bears the consequences – from emissions-related illnesses to noise pollution, and of course increasingly extreme weather conditions, making it an outrageous violation of the principle of climate and social justice. While aviation can have some benefits in specific sectors and is indispensable for diasporas and displaced peoples to connect with their communities, most of the industry’s activities are unnecessary and inherently unjust.
Aviation thrives thanks to our subsidies and tax breaks…
Despite its disastrous climate impact, the aviation industry enjoys preferential treatment over other modes of transportation worldwide. Airline companies pay no taxes on kerosene and no VAT on airline tickets – unlike all other means of transportation such as cars and trains. As a result, Belgium misses out on as much as 700 million euros a year in taxes from aviation. Not only does aviation escape taxation: the sector is also hugely financed by public money – thus ultimately by citizens. Regional airports, for instance, benefit from millions in subsidies that allow low-cost airlines to reap huge profits. Airlines were also saved from bankruptcy by State aid during the corona pandemic. Finally, governments invest millions in infrastructure around airports. All this with taxpayers’ money that would be better spent on alternative public transport (such as trains), education, healthcare, loss and damage finance, reparations, or the energy revolution, at a time when so many people struggle to feed and heat themselves.
…at the expense of food security and health…
Aviation is not just airplanes: it requires cumbersome infrastructure such as airports that not only eats out a lot of space, but also locks us in this transportation system for decades. In a small country like Belgium, there is simply no room – nor need – for six international airports. On the over 2500 hectares now occupied by airports, we could feed over a thousand people each year, or capture over 20,000 tons of CO2 annually. Instead, airports are being extended onto agricultural lands which are essential for our food sovereignty. The continuing disappearing of natural and agricultural areas under concrete makes us vulnerable to extreme weather events, as the 2021 floods made clear.
The concentration of airports in this densely populated country constitutes a public health hazard. Well over half a million people living around airports are exposed to increased concentrations of ultrafine particles and disruption of their sleep (due to night flights), with an enormous impact on the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, resulting in asthma, heart disease and high blood pressure. Women are especially adversely affected by such air pollution. Residents around airports include marginalised and racialised communities in financial precarity who often have no choice but to live there due to the high cost of housing elsewhere, and see the number of flights and consequent pollution increase year on year. What’s more, it is not inconceivable that a plane could crash in a residential neighbourhood in Belgium, like at the Amsterdam Bijlmermeer.
…and maintaining difficult working conditions
Aviation is a major source of employment, but many of these jobs are carried out in increasingly precarious and difficult working conditions. Baggage handlers, warehouse storekeepers and ramp attendants often have to do dangerous, back-breaking work, which is often compounded by dubious practices on the part of employers, such as short-term and freelance contracts, under-staffing and night work. Even relatively valued professions such as cabin crew or pilots are now subject to social dumping, encouraged in particular by the rise of low-cost airlines.
These jobs come with significant costs to the community in terms of subsidies, investments and climate impact, and many low-skilled jobs are highly sensitive to outsourcing and automation. As aviation will have to degrow radically to ensure a livable future on the planet, many of these jobs will also disappear, making them particularly precarious. Conversely, a re-localisation of needed production-chains associated with a collective reduction in working hours could create new job opportunities at home in better working conditions. It is thus high time to invest all these public resources in the development of truly high-quality, meaningful and socially just jobs.
Time for action
While scientists agree that aviation must shrink in the short term to ensure a livable future on Earth, this industry continues to grow beyond planetary boundaries. Meanwhile, nuisances and health problems for local residents also grow, and people worldwide are terrorized by ever increasing extreme weather events. This disproportionately affects the people who contribute least to the problem – people living in financial precarity, and marginalised, and racialised communities here in Belgium and around the globe. This growth is driven by mass and luxury consumption, as well as by the many tax breaks and subsidies the sector continues to enjoy. The sector misuses public resources and space that we desperately need for the ecological and economic revolution. That’s why Code Red demands: an immediate end to aviation subsidies, a ban on private jets and the radical degrowth of the aviation sector.
From 15 to 17 December, we embark on a mass action for social and climate justice, against the aviation industry. Join us.
Why?
Extreme weather, floods, soil erosion, rising fuel and energy bills and rising prices for basic necessities. Our dependence on fossil fuels is taking its toll, to say the least. Oil, gas and coal are directly implicated in human rights abuses in the South and fuels numerous conflicts and wars around the world.
The climate, energy, social and economic crisis is driving the working and middle classes into poverty. The most vulnerable become even poorer because of huge energy bills. Meanwhile, big fossil companies like TotalEnergies make enormous profits. These multinationals are key players in the history of the current climate crisis. This history is one of land grabbing, persecution and colonialism. For years, they have worked to influence our societies with their poisonous green propaganda and crony capitalism. Their climate-destroying actions are even rewarded by our politicians through financial bonuses and various subsidies. The workers in this sector, who depend on their jobs for income, are kept in the dark about their future.
Time is running out and the challenge is enormous, but a viable future is still possible. That is what we are fighting for. For a society where the big polluters are held accountable for their actions, where everyone has fair access to energy and where citizens and workers are supported to move away from fossil fuels. A society that relies on renewable energy, combats pollution, makes us independent from dubious regimes and creates more peace. A society where the climate transition is not made on the back of the working class and with opportunities for paid work for all. A society with a better distribution of wealth, fundamental rights for all, lower energy bills, a better quality of life and a good future for our children.
Why Engie?
Engie is poisoning the climate
The company is planning to build up to three new fossil gas power plants in Belgium, even though climate scientists are clear that there is no room for new fossil infrastructure. Taking into account the entire chain of production, gas is just as polluting as coal, while its extraction worldwide has led to the destruction of biodiversity and serious human rights violations, especially in Latin American and African countries. We call for a ban on all fossil fuels.
Climate change is certainly not the only problem. Global water health, food security, eroding of democracy, armed conflicts, and the crossing of several planetary boundaries are at stake. By 2035, all electricity in Europe will have to be produced without fossil fuels if climate targets are to be met, which would prevent devastation. Currently, only one third of Europe’s electricity is renewable. Building new power plants today that will continue to burn fossil gas until 2050 is a conscious decision to make our planet unlivable. All the investments we make now must be devoted to energy saving and locally produced renewable energies, not to the development of fossil fuels.
Engie is lining their pockets with our money
In the midst of the energy crisis, the French company has paid 3.4 billion in dividends to its shareholders in 2022! Meanwhile, a huge number of people were living in the cold and fearing that they wouldn’t be able to pay their astronomical bills. On top of that, the company not only benefit from public subsidies and premiums that allow them to pay the bills, but they also receive subsidies to build their gas-powered power plant in Flémalle, which is disastrous for the climate. We demand affordable energy for all.
Engie’s shareholders have won the jackpot. The multinational company has pledged to return 65% of their profits to shareholders under any circumstances. We, the citizens, on the other hand, have to pay the bill for failed energy policies five times over: first, through the energy bill we receive in our mailboxes. Second, through the public subsidies granted during the crisis to Engie to pay for overbilling, subsidies amounting to 3.5 billion euros for the year 2022 alone. Third, we are paying for the subsidies for the construction of the new fossil gas power plants (1 billion euros in total, shared between Engie and Luminus). Fourth, we will soon have to pay for the shared operation of Engie’s nuclear power plants and for the storage of radioactive nuclear waste. Finally, the costs of environmental destruction and climate change – adaptation costs, additional health costs, etc – will also come out of our wallets, here but first and foremost in the countries that are victims of Engie’s neo-colonial policy.
Engie puts lives at risk
The company keeps largely obsolete nuclear reactors in operation, and passes on the problem of radioactive nuclear waste to future generations, which remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. The consequences of a nuclear accident in Doel or Tihange, in the middle of densely populated areas, would be catastrophic. Nuclear power is the most expensive way to produce electricity and makes us dependent on countries with dictatorial political regimes as well as fuelling a neo-colonial industry to source uranium and other materials. We demand safe energy without dictators.
The nuclear power plants of Tihange and Doel were built in the 1980s and are now completely obsolete. By keeping the reactors operational longer, the government and Engie are playing with the lives of millions of Belgians living in Antwerp, Liège and other densely populated areas, in the shadow of the nuclear plants. Fukushima, Chernobyl and Zaporijia show that nuclear power plants are never 100% safe. Moreover, protecting nuclear power plants requires a country to have a large military apparatus. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of years of radioactive waste for which there is no solution. We are leaving this heavy legacy to future generations. If you include all the costs of safety, decommissioning and storage of nuclear waste, it is the most expensive energy of all.
Nuclear power is the opposite of locally produced, cheap energy over which citizens have a say. Uranium – which is a finite resource – comes mainly from dictatorships like Russia and Kazakhstan. The fuels used by Engie to produce electricity come from repressive regimes such as Qatar and Kazakhstan, which reinforce their dominance through revenues from the extractivist economy. Engie even contributes to Russia’s war chest by using Russian uranium in its nuclear power plants.
Engie blocks the energy revolution
Less energy for rich, polluting consumers and enough clean energy for what really matters to us: everyday life, public transport, sustainable agriculture, healthcare, and other essential public sectors. This is the recipe for the energy revolution we want to see. Engie relies on dirty energy sources and wants to continue to increase their production capacity ad infinitum, including with fossil fuels. Engie, who can never have enough, is blocking the energy revolution.We want an energy system that is no longer owned by multinationals but democratically managed. One in which, there is enough clean energy for everyone, and where the over-consumption of the rich and highly-polluting industriesaredrastically reduced.
We can do without new gas and nuclear power plants if we distribute the available energy more fairly, while reducing polluting activities and over-consumption. The Belgian industrial sector accounts for almost half of our energy consumption. These are companies whose production often goes far beyond the limits of our planet. Some of this production will have to be stopped, after a democratic consideration of collective social interests. As a publically listed company, Engie has no interest in the necessary reduction of energy consumption. Worse still, the more energy is consumed, the more profit the company makes. This is exactly why Engie has no place in the future energy system.
Bye bye Engie
Clean, cheap, and reliable energy is not a luxury; it is a basic need! Energy is too important of a common good to be left to shareholders and speculators. We want the energy sector to be taken out of private ownership and democratically-managed by energy users and employees.Only then can we regain control of energy production and distribution and meet the needs of all in a fair and sustainable way, while preparing for resource scarcity. The system of capitalist overproduction and the waste that accompanies it must end. We must produce and consume for the needs of all, not for the profits of a few. With this action, we announce the end of Engie! We need a just retraining plan for the workers of Engie and other polluting industries, driven by trade unions and workers. We need meaningful jobs in a decarbonised economy.