Four notes. That’s all it takes. Dum-Dum-Dah-Dum, and every platform in France stands to attention like an army awaiting a general, an announcement is coming, and it’s almost certainly that a train is running late. Those four notes have become the soundtrack of my year. I can hum them in my sleep, which either means I’ve assimilated into French rail culture, or that I need a hobby.
But the start of my year was haunted by a different soundtrack, from up above on Pech David hill; the thunderous drone of Toulouse-Blangac Airport. Ordinary planes, obviously, but also, and this is the bit I still can’t quite believe I found charming, the Beluga: Airbus’s absurd whale-shaped cargo plane, lumbering overhead like something had gone hilariously wrong at the factory, Industry and Infrastructure, Goal 9, wearing a jet engine [1].
We’d sit, watch, point. Someone was legally required to say “there’s another” as if it were breaking news in aerospace’s hometown. Golden hour, cheap wine, a flying whale. A wonderful evening but a strange thing to admit about watching one the planet’s most carbon-intensive industries as free entertainment.
I didn’t clock the irony out of any great moral clarity. I clocked it out of guilt. Somewhere around the fourth Beluga I filmed for an aesthetic instagram story, I did some research. While those clips were Instagram gold, aviation produces 2.5% of global CO2 emissions and is responsible for 4% of overall warming [3]. A statistic small enough to feel harmless but large enough to earn Climate Action its own goal, Goal 13.
That’s the kind of fact that leaves you feeling stuck; studying abroad, wanting to travel, keen to stay climate conscious.
Luckily, Occitanie’s regional trains drop to €1 the first weekend of every month [4], a policy that I first treated as a cheat code for cheap weekend, before realising that was the whole point: Sustainable Cities and Communities, Goal 11, disguised as a bargain fare. Carcassonne, Albi, the Pyrenees, all for less than a coffee, on a network that emits 90% less CO2 than the equivalent flight, Responsible Consumption, Goal 12, one train ticket at a time [5]. Regions incentivising sustainable travel, local towns, local food, planet saved. Everyone wins!
So when I have a free weekend, I’m not gunning it to the airport for a polluting flight, but heading to some historic corner I haven’t seen yet, hoping for some luck on availability, and waiting for those same four notes on the platform, smug as ever.
I still watch the planes. I haven’t stopped finding the Beluga funny, nothing will fix that. It’s a flying whale. But now my journeys start on rail, not the runway, and I no longer look up at a plane without doing the maths. Goal 13, four notes at a time.
References
– https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/commercial-aircraft/freighter/beluga
– https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
– https://www.ter.sncf.com/occitanie/tarifs-cartes/bons-plans/premier-week-end-un-eur
– https://www.sncf-voyageurs.com/en/discover-our-company/csr-and-transitions/calculating-the-carbon-footprint-of-transport/
