Is Google Flight’s new “emissions” function just more greenwashing?

If you’ve searched for airfare using the world’s most popular search engine in the last couple of years, you may have noticed that there’s an additional bit of info for each ticket. Alongside a flight’s duration, the number of stops and price, you can also see the flight’s emissions in kilograms of CO2, and relative to average emissions for that particular trip. Now, you can also filter your options by their relative emissions, and only show those with less-than-typical quantities.

At first glance, this might seem like useful info—like knowing whether or not the eggs we buy are organic. But the politics and business of greenhouse gas emissions aren’t quite so straightforward. What does this little metric mean exactly, and how heavily should you weigh it when buying airfare?

According to Google, the less-polluting trips are usually because of more fuel-efficient aircraft and direct flights. First-class and other premium options are allocated a greater percentage of a flight’s total emissions because their seats take up more space. The emissions are calculated based on estimates by the European Environment Agency, which is part of the European Union and a solid source of data.

But how much a flight’s emissions should matter to you on a per-ticket basis is a little bit more complicated. Broadly speaking, reducing carbon emissions from human activity should be a high priority for everyone: The more greenhouse gasses (ahem, like carbon) that we emit into the atmosphere, the more the planet will warm, and the more intense the effects will be.

Air travel is a carbon-intensive activity, with total industry emissions on par with the annual emissions of entire countries like Germany and Japan. But after the shock of that fact settles, it’s important to remember that figure still only adds up to a small slice of a very big pie—only 2.4 percent of all emissions globally, as our most-recent records show. 

So, reducing the carbon emissions from air travel, while not a silver bullet, is definitely worthwhile. But there’s a very limited degree to which individuals can make a meaningful impact through purchasing decisions since one person’s choice to take a flight with 17 percent fewer emissions than average is mathematically negligible globally.

Fossil fuel companies know this and have been pushing the idea of individual responsibility for greenhouse gasses from everyday actions like commuting or buying food for decades. Encouraging people to reduce their carbon footprint was an effective way to diffuse concern over global warming and slow regulations or policy measures that would systematically reduce fossil fuel use, and therefore greenhouse gas emissions (and their profits).

“Corporate America, in general, has always tried to, with the help of all kinds of other actors, put the onus of environmental protection in general and dealing with climate change on individuals,” Riley Dunlap, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, told Grist.org.

If someone wants to know the climate impact of their flight and plan accordingly, more power to them. The danger with greenwashing like Google Flight’s new emissions function isn’t that people will make the more climate-friendly choice; it’s that it will mollify their sense of urgency, keep them from demanding the actions necessary to make system-level changes on governmental and industry levels, and lead us to let big corporations off the hook.

The goal shouldn’t be to make businesses offer a climate-friendly option available to consumers. The goal needs to be to make all options low- or no-emission by raising emissions standards and investing in alternative transportation options like high-speed rail and electric planes (to their credit, Google includes options by other modes of transportation, like trains, in the search results when they exist for the given itinerary).

It’s especially important to remember the big picture with products like flights, which are usually chosen based on a bunch of factors that feel more urgent at the moment than planetary warming—such as price, convenience, and schedule.

So next time you’re shopping for flights, instead of letting the little column of percentages telling you where each flight stacks up relative to the others in order to inspire climate guilt or complacency, take them as a reminder that all your options need to be low- or no-emissions. Buy the airfare you need, because it’s a drop in the global emissions bucket. Let that percentage keep you focused on the emissions standards and alternative infrastructure you can support while voting or talking with your community.