Inspired by Blog Action Day. . .

Ah, travel. Nothing like packing those bags, boarding that plane, and taking flight to some distant land. If you’ve spent time on Sosauce then you’re likely as addicted to traveling as the rest of us. Thus, no need to spend any time writing about the joy of travel and how it enhances one’s life. We know that travel is good for the soul and in turn, humanity.

That’s why it’s so hard to come to grips with the fact that the act of travel itself is slowly killing our planet. And yes, I’m speaking of the dreaded CO2 emissions and the elephant in the hostel that is global warming. Each of us uses a minimum of 30 grams of carbon per passenger kilometer when traveling via air. When traveling by car you can get as low as 20 carbon grams per passenger kilometer. Buses and trains (when using electrical tram) can reduce one’s carbon consumption to 5 and 0 grams per passenger kilometer respectively. (Source: GRID-Arendal). All in all air travel only makes up 4-9% of CO2 emissions based on human activity but it’s the fastest growing, increasing 83% since 1990. As the above data shows, it’s also the “dirtiest” way to travel.

I don’t think any of this information comes as a surprise and I’m not trying to create a guilt trip. That would be entirely hypocritical of me as based on some simple calculations my personal carbon footprint is 15.1 tons of CO2 per year (almost 60% higher than the footprint for the average American) and flights resulted in over 85% of my emissions.

And let’s face it- those of us who love to travel aren’t going to stop flying. As much as I would love to take an old single-masted sloop to cross the Atlantic it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Fortunately, if you love to travel, and you do care, there are a few things you can do to lesson the impact of flying on our planet (many thanks to David Suzuki for this list):

1. Try to minimize the number of flights you take by combining trips. For example, book more than one meeting in your destination city, so you don’t need to fly there several times.
2. Fly during the daytime, because studies have shown that flights taken at night have a greater impact on the climate.
3. Fly economy, because more people per plane means fewer emissions per person.
4. Pack light, because lighter planes mean less fuel is burned.
5. Purchase carbon offsets to account for the emissions from your flight. If the airline or travel agent you are using doesn’t currently offer its customers the option of offsetting their flights, ask them to consider it.

As we press on toward finding and developing alternative fuels for flight (we just need more kids like William Kamkwamba), may we all take the above ideas into account and work to fly a little cleaner.

Read more posts by Sean

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 3:35 PM and is filed under Community Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.