Times: How dare Prince Harry fly to Shanghai to ‘promote greener travel’

On Monday, Prince Harry popped up in Shanghai for the Envision 2025 conference. He was the keynote speaker, and his speech was on behalf of Travalyst, which he founded in 2019. As I said earlier this week, the royal reporters were absolutely furious about Harry’s trip to Shanghai. First off, they had no idea he was in China, thus proving that they have no sources in the Sussex camp. Secondly, those reporters had to scrap their “King Charles is in North America but he REFUSES to see his son, Harry snubbed again” stories. So, those royal reporters have taken all of their anger, all of their incandescent rage, and they’ve channeled into… bitching about Harry flying to Shanghai. From the Times of London’s “Prince Harry flies from LA to Shanghai to promote greener travel.”

Prince Harry has made a surprise visit to China to give a speech highlighting the importance of sustainable travel. The Duke of Sussex made the long-haul trip to Shanghai to remind travel industry executives of the urgency to meet “vital climate and conservation targets by 2030”.

He was invited to a tourism conference in his capacity as the founder of Travalyst, a sustainable travel organisation whose motto is “changing the way we travel, for good”. Travalyst is working with companies including Google and Skyscanner to develop an online tool that shows carbon emissions for every flight. The aim of this “travel impact model” is to allow anyone booking flights to see a single, consistent estimate of a given flight’s carbon emissions, and how that compares to a typical flight on that same route. Travalyst and its partners claim that a standard model for the industry will allow consumers to choose flights with the lowest carbon emissions, in the same way they shop around for the cheapest seats.

It is not known what flight Harry took to China. Travalyst declined to share its own model’s estimates for the amount of harmful emissions caused by an average first-class return flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai, when asked by The Times. On average, a passenger travelling first-class on a return flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai causes the equivalent of 6311.32kg or 6.31 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the conversion model used by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. These emissions could be anywhere between 10 and 100 times higher in a private jet, depending on the type of aircraft.

According to the carbon emissions calculator of FlightFree USA, a campaign group urging people to fly less, “avoiding this trip [Los Angeles to Shanghai] is as climate friendly as carpooling for 3.7 years”. The calculator also claimed that a passenger who mades a return flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai, for example, would cause more emissions of greenhouse gases in a single trip than 3.5 billion people emit over the course of a year.

[From The Times]

I read this to myself in a pissy British accent with an air of triumphant bitchiness, which is how it’s meant to be read. This is how they’re “punishing” Harry for going to Shanghai without telling them, and making them scrap their “king snubs son” stories. My favorite part is “Travalyst declined to share its own model’s estimates for the amount of harmful emissions caused by an average first-class return flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai.” Doesn’t Travalyst make all of that information available online for people booking flights? Was it impossible for the cheapskates at the Times to book the round-trip LA-Shanghai flight and just gather the data themselves? But if they did that, they couldn’t pretend that Harry is hiding information from them!

But honestly, it’s not even that I have an issue with this kind of “green-advocate prince takes a commercial flight, won’t someone think of the carbon emissions” reporting. My issue is that the same carbon-emission concern-trolling is never applied to the prince who travels everywhere by helicopter and borrowed private planes. The prince who created an environmental busywork scheme in which celebrities are flown in to pose with said prince. Surely, someone could calculate the carbon emissions of bringing Heidi Klum to South Africa just so Prince William could hang out with a “supermodel” at Earthshot last year.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.