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Did you know that one of the top human activities contributing to climate change is flying in an airplane?
(First of all, if you're not already convinced that climate change is a major and imminent threat, check out what Bill Clinton has to say about it--skip forward to about the 2:00 minute mark in the Web cast.)
Back to flying--a few comparisons:
- One return flight from Florida to the UK produces the equivalent carbon dioxide to a year's driving. (Source: The Guardian)
- A family of four flying between the U.S. and UK would cause more emissions than their entire domestic energy use in a year, and about twice the emissions from a car traveling 12,000 miles. (Source: Red Pepper Magazine)
Also--and this may sound a bit like a child's reasoning but it is indeed proven fact: the carbon dioxide emitted by airplanes is at least twice as damaging as that emitted by cars because it's injected directly into a higher layer of the atmosphere.
But as we all know, just as we humans add CO2 to the atmosphere, there are ways we are helping to reduce it as well. And so as well there are organizations out there acting as the middle men--whether for profit or not--helping people to offset their emissions from the comfort of their own living rooms. (This is where "doing the right thing" comes in.)
A few months ago I flew from New York to London to meet up with OneWorld colleagues from the UK and the Netherlands. (Those of you subscribed to the Daily Headlines will have seen my "Postcard from London.") After London, I flew to Lyon to visit a friend there for a few days. I took the train back to Paris (train journeys seem to impact the climate about 15 to 20 times less than equivalent plane flights, from what I can tell poking around the Internet) and then flew from Paris to New York.
Truth be told, the climate impact had no bearing on my initial decision to take the train--I just thought it would be cool to see the French countryside. But after reading this story in the Guardian about "the real price of cheap air travel" and seeing this press release from the UK Green Party today, which laughs at the low-fare airline Easyjet for essentially saying they are "less worse" than other airlines--on top of everything else I've learned about climate change through my work at OneWorld over the years, I have a whole new outlook on traveling.
From now on I'm taking the train whenever possible. For my monthly trips back and forth to D.C. I'll stick with the bus. (Have you seen what Amtrak costs these days along the Northeast Corridor?!) And when I do travel by plane, I'm paying to offset my emissions.
How does this work? The short answer is, you pay someone to do things that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by the same amount that your activities increase it. This can be done in many different ways--by supporting projects around the world that replace non-renewable fuels like coal with renewable ones like solar and wind, by promoting energy efficiency, and yes, by planting trees.
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| Paying my debt to society © www.ClimateCare.org |
I'm no businessman, but it sounds like they've thought this through. And check out how they calculate your emissions responsibility for flights:
"In summary, for long haul we take the average fuel burn figures for a Boeing 747 and an Airbus A360 as published by the EU. We divide this by the average number of seats (not occupied seats) and also subtract the amount of freight carried by the average long haul aircraft. We double the amount of CO2 emitted to take account of the enhanced atmospheric impacts of aviations. We then calculate the great circle distance between the airports in question. A similar method is used for short haul, except that we use a Boeing 737 as the reference aircraft."
So what does all this boil down to? Well, for my little European (work) vacation, $21.98.
Can 22 bucks really offset all that environmental damage? The people at Climate Care seem to think so, as do those at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, the Carbon Neutral Company (formerly Future Forests), and UK-based Key travel, among many others. Well, they all disagree slightly on the exact cost of offsetting your carbon emissions, but regardless of who you ask, compared to the price of the airline ticket and the price of doing nothing, it seems extremely reasonable to me.
Do you agree with Bill Clinton that climate change is "the only thing that...has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it and make a lot of the other efforts we're making irrelevant and impossible"? If so, and you want to get more involved in the global conversation about what we're doing--as individuals and societies--to combat the problem of climate change, check out OneWorld's Carbon Countdown Megablog today.