We shouldn't have to fly everywhere but time is money. Air transport is not environmentally friendly

The vapor trail footprint

I had to fly over to Ireland last night. It takes about seven hours. So there we are, a few hundred people sitting side by side, taking off, flying through the air and landing again. I think about the human species every time I fly. There we are, we took dirt out of the earth, we worked it and mixed it this way and that, and from this process we built these cylinders that fly above the earth and have incredibly few accidents. 

A few things always strikes me from this. One is the arrogance of our species. We take dirt out of the earth fashion it and create a machine which goes up and defies gravity. For over seven hours last night I was over the land mass of North America and the deep waters of the North Atlantic.If anything had gone wrong we would have all been killed. What an arrogant species we are. But there I was flying away.

The second thing that strikes me is the incredible achievements of our species. As I have said we have taken the dirt out of the earth and built these incredible flying machines and organize them to fly through the air with the minimum of accidents. Sometimes where I live in Chicago I see as many thirteen planes coming in to land at O'Hare one after another. . It is a tribute to our species that there are so few accidents.

But we cannot leave it there. Flying is a terrible polluting and global warming process. It should not be taking place at all. It is extremely destructive to the environment. I emigrated from Ireland in 1965. No working class person could afford to fly then. The only flying for working class people then was where the capitalists flew them to war to kill and be killed. I emigrated by boat, a liner from Liverpool to Montreal. It took a week. It was great holiday. The first one I ever had.

In a sane socialist society the pace of work would be dramatically reduced. We would not be forced to fly. We could eliminate flying. We could find a way to make liners and ships, which are also extremely polluting stop being so. We could have a sustainable world economy and transport and traveling system. But on the basis of capitalism this will never happen. The future of the human species and the planet depends on us ending capitalism and creating a democratic international socialist society. Capitalism will destroy the planet and life on earth as we know it.

Talking about polluting and flying. There is plenty of it in the skies over Libya at the moment. And I wonder are they using the ammunition with the nuclear tipped killing materials which they did in Iraq and which are killing tens of thousands with cancer at the present. Capitalism is a mad system.

Sean.