“Europe will suffer jet fuel shortages in just three weeks if the Strait of Hormuz does not reopen”, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe has said, “particularly with the approach of the summer tourism season”.

Oh good!

We have to find a way to stop people, and freight, flying. We’ll never get close to Net Zero if we don’t.

Forget all the hype around Aviation Biofuel; opinion suggests that there will be too limited a supply and it will be too expensive (see here, for example).

Flying people and stuff around the world to the unnecessary extent we do is just not sustainable.

Moreover, although it is slowly being cleaned up, shipping is no better, given the bunker fuel most big ships still run on.

No, I’m not saying we have to stop flying (or shipping) entirely, but we need to be much more circumspect and use it only where really necessary. We need to go back to making and growing as much as we can as locally as we can – accepting that there are some (pseudo-)essentials of modern life that we can’t.

As I’ve asked before … Do you really need to fly to Australia, or USA, just for a 2 hour meeting with a client (which could just as easily be done over a video call), because the client says so? That’s a question of skewed business and management ethics.

Why do we ship, for example, wine, apples and lamb from the Antipodes – or airfreight runner beans from Kenya – to UK when we have lots of these commodities on our doorstep in Europe, if not at home. In reverse why do we fly long-haul for a few days break? These are questions of skewed marketing and consumer ethics.

We need to update our ethics – both personal and societal. Maybe an oil crisis will help the paradigm shift.