Stefan Gössling
Stefan Gössling is a professor of Tourism Research at Linnaeus University and Human Ecology at Lund University. His research focuses on the sustainability of tourism, transport, and mobilities.
He co-edited the book Climate Change and Aviation: Issues, Challenges and Solutions, co-writing its chapter on people who travel most—“hypermobility.” He wrote Carbon Management in Tourism: Mitigating the Impacts on Climate Change.
From his home page:
About my work
I have studied interrelationships of tourism, transport and sustainability for a quarter of a century.
In the early 1990s, my work focused on aviation and the sector’s contribution to emissions of greenhouse gases. Since then I have started to investigate a wide range of different transport modes from diverse scientific perspectives, including the car, bicycle, and e-scooter.
I am specifically interested in climate policy and transport governance; ICT in tourism, transport and mobility contexts; transport economics; urban planning; and social norm change in consumer cultures. I am feeling most at home in interdisciplinary frameworks embracing geography, economics, sociology and psychology.
My work has been conducted in a wide range of cultural and geographical settings in the European Union, the Middle East, East Africa/Western Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean. I have also worked as a consultant on behalf of numerous governments and companies, as well as supranational organisations including UNWTO, UNEP, UNDP, OECD and World Bank.
My ambition is to contribute to basic and applied science, with the overall objective to develop solutions for a growing number of environmental problems.
755: Stefan Gössling: Busting self-serving myths about flying
People who fly think most people fly, but it’s more like a few percent. A small fraction of people fly, let alone across oceans or multiple times per year. If you fly, it’s probably your action that hurts people most through its environmental impact, but you probably rationalize and justify it. Unlike many other polluting activities, most of the money you spend on flying goes to polluting, displacing people and wildlife from their land to extract fuel and minerals, and lobbying governments to pollute and extract more.
Stefan has been reporting and publishing on flying for decades longer than I’ve worked on it. I met him following a panel he participated in hosted by Stay Grounded on the impacts of flying on people and wildlife. That talk was on frequent flyer programs, but Stay Grounded works on many related issues.
After sharing his background, Stefan talks about his research. My biggest takeaway: People believe a lot of myths about flying. Partly the industry promotes the myths, but people will do whatever mental gymnastics they have to to accept those myths, even when they’re blatantly false. Some things Stefan shares:
- Around 2 – 4 percent of people fly in a given year outside their country
- People who fly think more like half the population flies
- Flying is heavily subsidizes, so poor people help fund rich people flying
- Airports and airlines are often supported and bailed out by taxes
- Poor people are hurt more
Stefan shares more information in more detail. Despite knowing much of it, even I was outraged anew at new things I learned of how much flying hurts people and how much people who fly pay to cause more of that suffering, while telling themselves they are helping. Of course, they aren’t choosing to fly from reasoning things out. They want to travel without effort, feel inner conflict at hurting people, and try to resolve their inner conflict by rationalizing and justifying their choices.
Here is the post I refer to, documenting the travels of a guy whose email newsletter I subscribe to: What do you think of this person’s flying habits? (part 1).