Flying the Environmentally Unfriendly Skies
In order to join my family for a weekend in Lake Tahoe, I hopped on a Southwest flight from San Diego to Reno. Despite the fact that air travel is a form of mass transit, it is extremely energy intensive, due to the large distances covered and the necessity of putting a huge steel pipe up in the air. For a quick overview of air travel’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions, check out the last couple paragraphs of this page.
Flying therefore represents a conundrum for environmentalists. Unlike driving, which often can be avoided through the use of alternatives such as walking, biking and mass transit, air travel has no reasonable substitute (unless you are John Madden). Thus the decision is ultimately between air travel and no travel. A couple air carriers have attempted to solve this issue by offering carbon offsets alongside plane tickets at the time of purchase, and Boeing is about to introduce its 787, which it touts as one of the most efficient passenger aircraft ever produced. These are positive changes, but it would still be better, environmentally speaking, to avoid a flight rather than take a flight in a 787 with carbon offsets.
Ultimately, then, I think air travel is one of the hardest activities to cut down at the source. On the other hand, certain attitude changes could make an impact. A friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, recently flew from Hong Kong to Toronto for acupuncture. Presumably he could have saved some money and the environment by finding a suitable (if not quite equal, apparently some of the best acupuncturists in the world are in Toronto) acupuncturist in Hong Kong. Further, I often find that short trips to Europe are often met with a bizarre form of moral approbation. When someone announces, “I’m going over to France to spend a couple weeks in the countryside,” one often hears in response, “Oh good for you!” I could be wrong on this, but I feel like travel for entertainment is morally equivalent to sitting on the couch and watching sports for two weeks (if not morally worse due to the substantial environmental impact). Both activities are simply entertainment.
August 17th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Some hard truths.
Rail, of course, is much more efficient than air travel. Much of travel in the US could actually be dealt with pretty efficiently using high speed trains, especially on the coasts where there actually _is_ the density. At 200 mph, this would mean people could go from San Diego to Los Angeles in an hour, and from San Diego to San Francisco in four to five hours.
The most fantastical implementation I’ve heard talked about, though, is SWISSMETRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro).
In my heart of hearts, though, I’d prefer to see systems that are more robust and less susceptible to, oh, a bombing (or even a simple crash).