Lahore is preparing for winter as it has for a decade, with parents checking the air quality index before school and the smog war room reaching for its instruments. In the eighth most polluted city of the world last year, the annual average PM2.5 concentration was 88.9 micrograms per cubic metre, which is 17.8 times the WHO limit of 5.

We brace for staggered school timings ending in closures, drones scanning for crop residue burning, restrictions and fines on older vehicles and pockets of respite from artificial rain. Every one of those measures (several sensible, some overdue, and many unfair) asks something of somebody.

Meanwhile, what does Punjab’s most powerful office holder do? Make a trip to London aboard the government’s Gulfstream G500, a 2019 aircraft, to attend her daughter’s graduation ceremony.

It is against that ledger, and not the question of legality, that the use of the Punjab government’s aircraft is worth interrogating. The information minister has said the expenses were met personally. An adjournment motion moved in the Punjab Assembly puts the total estimated cost to the exchequer at around Rs12.5 million, including fuel, parking and related charges. An aviation expert calculated a one-way journey at $84,000 on the lower side. Whichever account is correct (and the receipts would settle it in an afternoon), the question of payment is a rather narrow one because carbon does not check who paid.

And it is the carbon cost that has been missing from the debate. Transport & Environment, the European transport campaign federation, estimates that a midsize private jet emits two tonnes of carbon dioxide in a single hour of flight. The Gulfstream G500 is a considerably larger aircraft. To put this into perspective, the average Pakistani produced 0.72 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024, according to Our World in Data. Therefore, just one hour of flight in the G500 releases more carbon dioxide than an ordinary Pakistani produces in two whole years!

What alternatives does a premier have? PIA’s direct Lahore to Heathrow service runs once a week only, which rightly eliminates the option for a chief executive needed in office. Effectively, only connecting flights remain, some even flying twice a day. The United Kingdom government publishes emission factors for long-haul travel, averaged across the aircraft and airlines serving British airports and inclusive of non-carbon warming effects: 0.12 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilometer flown in economy and 0.34 kilograms in business. If applied to a Lahore-to-London return, approximately 12,700 kilometers, the economy seat comes to an estimated 1.5 tonnes and the business seat to 4.3 tonnes. Only an hour of flight in a midsize private jet, then releases more carbon dioxide than an economy passenger’s entire return journey from Lahore to London. By any metric, and in any cabin, the seat on the government aircraft was the most carbon-intensive way to make the journey.

In the greater scheme of national emissions, the above calculated difference is a rounding error at most, and no serious argument holds that one aircraft movement determines the air quality of a city of thirteen million. But that is precisely why this episode matters. The province is in the middle of Suthra Punjab, billed as the largest integrated waste management program the country has attempted, deploying, by its own account, 172,273 sanitation workers across all 36 districts to lift nearly 55,000 tonnes of waste a day. A program of that scale succeeds or fails on whether ordinary households believe the request being made of them is serious: whether they segregate waste, use the containers provided, and stop burning refuse in the street. Citizen compliance can not be bought with enforcement; instead, it is borrowed against the credibility of the people making the request.

And the above-mentioned credibility is not a provincial matter alone. Pakistan produced 0.47 percent of global carbon emissions in 2024 and was ranked by Germanwatch as the country most affected by extreme weather in 2022, the year floods killed more than 1,700 people, displaced eight million, and caused $30 billion in losses by the government’s own estimate. On that record alone, the country has the strongest moral claim available in climate negotiations. But it weakens each time the delegation carrying it arrives in a way that undercuts it. The Ministry of Climate Change sent 35 officials to COP29 in Baku at a reported cost of over $1 million, financed, reportedly, by the National Disaster Risk Management Fund, a body capitalized to finance disaster resilience. Funds raised to build resilience, spent attending a conference about it. Nor is the provincial aircraft an isolated case: maintaining VIP air and road fleets is common to the federation and to every province, no matter which party holds them.

To be clear, this is not an argument that public officials must not travel, or that a chief minister must only fly economy on a commercial flight to attend a child’s graduation. It is an argument that the carbon cost of official travel must be treated as a priority rather than an afterthought, recorded and transparently published.

The smog season is now only weeks away. It remains to be seen whether a province that will shortly ask a hundred and thirty million people to change how they commute, how they farm and how they dispose of their waste is prepared to hold its own travel to the standard it is about to ask of them.