Flights of French fancy make us paws for thought

Almost one half of Millennials and their baby sibling Gen-Zs combined approve of a flight cap (48 per cent) with the 18 to 24-year-olds heaving towards a 60 per cent thumbs up for remaining on solid ground. Picture: istock

A French engineer and climate activist has sent a shiver down the spines of the commercial airline and tourist industries alike. Jean-Marc Jancovici has argued a universal quota should be imposed on air travel in order to mitigate climate change.

Jancovici, 61 is a scaremonger from way back who believes nuclear energy is our best answer to climate change. Renewables, bah! He rarely eats meat, works from home, boasts that he doesn’t own a mobile phone and cycles about the suburbs of Paris.

In short, he’s the sort of man perfectly groomed for the NSW branch of the Australian Greens only to fall over at preselection amid surreptitious rumours of his womanising. Jancovici routinely wags his finger at the world and in his latest admonition has suggested a limit on commercial airline flights of four per person.

French engineer and climate activist Jean-Marc Jancovici.

That’s four flights per woman or man for life.

This caused quite a hubbub in La Republique Francaise. In an ensuing poll almost two thirds (64 per cent) of respondents said they would consider flying less for environmental reasons with 41 per cent of all respondents agreeing with the four flight maximum.

We could attribute this to the French being crazy and we’d be half-right but unsurprisingly, the figures are heavily tilted along age demographic lines with almost one half of millennials and their baby sibling Gen-Zs combined approving of the cap (48 per cent) with the 18-to-24-year-olds heaving towards a 60 per cent thumbs up for remaining on solid ground.

I have questions, so many questions. Would a domestic flight count? What if you live on an island, even a really big one? Would those who have already chalked up four flights or more to date be permanently grounded? And why, oh why, would a generation of people form a belief that travelling beyond the provincial is in itself, a guilt-soaked panoply of despair?

The answer may in part lie with Jancovici himself. He wrote a comic entitled Le Monde Sans Fin, illustrated by cartoonist Christophe Blain. It was published in October 2021. In a boon for publisher and author alike, it has sold more than 380,000 copies in France alone, outselling Asterix. It has sold over half a million copies worldwide. The English language edition, World Without End, was published in June 2022.

Laughably, it is referred to as a graphic novel. It’s a comic. That’s not to say comics are not a perfectly valid form of expression but let’s call them what they are. There remains a stain on comics largely created by book publishers and in order to appear to rise above it, they have hit the euphemism button knowing too, that readers might feel a little bit better about themselves while they look at the pictures.

Jancovici’s comic is a doom scroll featuring bleak images of cities choked with people and fumes living in a world spun out of control. Happy ending-wise, there is a possibility that we can secure our collective human existence but only if we do everything that Jean-Marc Jancovici says.

Intriguingly, anti-nuclear activists in France have been hitting up bookstores armed with an extensive errata sheet. Their modus operandi is to convince book wallahs they represent the publishing companies and ask to insert the errata into the inside cover of the comic. The French publisher, Dargue, has threatened legal action.

The point is that many young adults – we could call them the Great Thunberg generation – have been brow beaten into a deep state of fear by material from doomsayers like Jancovici at such a profound level that the post-adolescent urge to cut the familial cord and travel the world has been actively suppressed. Life is hard but it’s not as if the planet is going to glow orange and burst into flames even in their lifetimes.

It’s not the fault of the young. They are merely victims of a grim inculcation. Climate change offers all manner of destructive calamities both seen and understood or unforeseen and vaguely predictable, but being repeatedly warned of an eminent global Armageddon is bound to have a profound collective psychological effect that leads to a joyless nihilism not unlike the one members of previous generations experienced enduring the sabre rattling of the nuclear superpowers.

This remains a live, if severely diminished, threat in the post-Cold War era, Russian threats of limited tactical nuclear strikes in Ukraine and the nuclear ambitions of a North Korean man-child notwithstanding. Oh, and the mullahs in Iran.

Back when we were in the Gen Z’s shoes we learned to deal with the prospect of impending existential oblivion. US President Ronald Reagan, who despised nuclear weapons and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev ran a red line through hundreds of nuclear warheads. Sting sang a song, and we got through it.

But the problem is much larger than thermonuclear oblivion because in what might come as a shock to Jean-Marc Jancovici at a sudden cardiac arrest level, there are commercial flight charter companies offering air travel for dogs. Cats, too. Any pet, really, but the marketing pitch is aimed directly at Fido.

Should dogs fall under the four flight limit? Picture: istock

For a rather substantial fee, why not charter a jet and say goodbye to those long queues in airports? Bring pup along and he, too, can lounge around on the expensive leather seats. Or if dog owners fret at the thought of lightly sedated lapdogs in cages in cargo holds of commercial aircraft, why not book them on a chartered jet where they get to ride upfront but can’t have the window open?

My question to Jancovici and his ilk is, should dogs fall under the four flight limit? There are arguments to and for. Dogs have a life expectancy less than a quarter of humans. So, possibly it should be less for dogs, down from four to two flights. Or maybe, owners should pack as much adventure into their pooch’s life because the clock runs faster in the canine world. Spot has been to Disneyland but he is yet to cross the threshold at Euro Disney. How could he make a detailed comparison otherwise?

Besides, you know the dogs are going to enjoy travelling a lot more than Gen Z.