Don't fly if you can
help it
 Flying
causes climate change
Flying or frying? Air trips help fry the
planet by releasing huge quantities of greenhouse
gases, and they do so up in the sky where they're
more damaging. If you can, please try to find an
alternative to flying, such as:
- Taking
a train
- Vacationing closer to home
- Having longer visits instead of more
frequent visits (e.g., a
2-week visit every 2 years, instead of a 1-week
visit every year)
- Teleconferencing instead of face-to-face
business meetings
- Traveling as a passenger on a cargo
ship
So why am I running a site about cheap airfare
if I recommend you don't fly?
Because I can get your attention
this way. Running one of the more popular
airfare guides on the net gives me an
opportunity to get the message out about the
problems with flying. That is, ironically,
I'm likely achieving a greater reduction in
flying by keeping this site up, than by
taking it down. Without the hook of the cheap
airfare tips I provide, you wouldn't be here
reading this message right now.
Will people really consider not flying in
order to help the environment?
Sure they will. A BBC
poll found that over half of them would.
Exactly how damaging is air travel?
A single roundtrip flight to
Asia generates as much pollution as your car
does for a whole year.
A single coast to coast roundtrip
flight is equivalent to driving the average car
375 miles a month for a whole year.
Air travel is particularly damaging because
of various factors related to the planes being
up in the sky, vs. pollution which happens on
the ground.
You can compare the impact of your air travel
to your impact for driving and other things with
my carbon
footprint calculator.
Here's a handy excuse you can
use...
Let's say you really want or need to
fly. Okay, let me give you an easy out: You can
save 1.7 tons of carbon a year by going
vegetarian. (That's because meat
requires horrific amounts of energy to
produce.) Go veggie, and you'll save more carbon
(1.7 tons a year) as the typical American
generates from flying (0.8 tons). If you fly a
lot, then go vegan and save a whopping 3.0 tons
of carbon.
Want even more ways to justify
flying?
There's no lack of ways to offset your
carbon footprint from flying. For example:
- Using
less electricity. The average home uses
more energy than the average car. There's 6.5
tons here that you can whittle down to offset
your flying. It's certainly possible -- I use
85% less energy in my own home than the
typical American.
- Stop
driving, or at least keeping driving to a
minimum. The average American would save 6
tons of carbon annualy by ditching their car.
I did it, so can you.
- Eating
vegetarian or vegan. Yes, I mentioned
this before, but it's worth repeating. If I
can do this, you can too.
So why am I giving you all these excuses to
keep flying? Because as long as you save energy,
it doesn't really matter how you save it.
Whether you stop flying or stop eating meat,
you'll still save similar amounts of energy.
One's as good as the other. Of course, I'd be
happiest if you did both, but I'm coming at this
from the angle that you might be able to do
one thing. So okay, pick one of the
above. You certainly have several choices.
And then there's carbon offsets...
If you haven't heard of these,
here's how they work: You invest in a
project that prevents the same amount of
pollution as was generated by your plane trip.
It could be something like a solar panel
installation or a wind farm.
Now, the best thing is not to fly in the
first place. But there are cases where you might
want to buy a carbon offset:
- You're unwilling or unable to stop
flying.
- You're unwilling or unable to reduce
energy use in other parts of your life.
- You've already heroically reduced all you
can, but you can't get your energy use down
to zero, of course, so you want to offset the
pollution you can't help but cause.
Offsets are affordable. You can offset the
damage from a roundtrip coast-to-coast flight
for around $35.
I have a
whole article about carbon offsets if you'd
like to know more.
But the plane is going anyway!
You might think that your air travel
doesn't do any damage, because the plane is
flying anyway whether you buy a ticket or
not. But the reason it matters is that your
purchase could be what causes the airline to add
another flight, or to keep a slightly
unprofitable flight rather than canceling it. If
that happened, you wouldn't want to feel
personally responsible for all the
fuel used by that whole flight, would
you? No, and that's why we consider that each
of, say, 200 passengers is responsible for
1/200th of the fuel use on any flight.
Your ticket could be what keeps the plane
in the air. Recently the airlines have been
canceling unprofitable flights, as the cost of
fuel keeps rising. Rest assured some bean
counter is sitting there figuring whether to
drop a mildly unpopular flight. If there are
just enough people to make the flight barely
profitable, they'll keep the flight -- and we'll
still have all the pollution associated with
that flight. You don't want your ticket to be
responsible for the decision to keep a polluting
plane in the air.
The flipside is also true: Your purchase
of a ticket might be what causes the airline to
add another flight. The airline doesn't want
to turn away paying customers, and when flights
are frequently full between two destinations,
they'll add another flight to their schedule.
Yes, it's unlikely that you personally would be
the cause of the airline adding another flight,
but you need to consider all the other people
contemplating a flight. All of you together can
provide the tipping point, and that's what makes
your lone flight "count", even if it doesn't
cause a new flight to be added that very
time.
Consider this analogy: You're among two
hundred people sitting in a forest. Each of
you throws a single rock at a nearby bear. Most
of the time the bear doesn't care, but the 200th
time a rock is thrown at it, it finally has
enough and comes over and kills all of you. Even
though nothing happened on the first 199 throws,
those throws still counted, because without them
the bear wouldn't have attacked. That last
person isn't responsible for the bear attacking,
all of you are. So each of you has 1/200th of
the blame, even before the bear ultimately went
after you.
That's why on a 200-passenger plane,
you're responsible for 1/200th of its pollution,
no matter what.
Is air travel really damaging or isn't
it?
The airlines are clearly on the
defensive because of all the recent attention to
the pollution caused by air travel. So
you're likely to see a big full-page promo in
the in-light magazine saying that air travel is
responsible for only about 1.6% of global
warming gases. Wow, when you put it that way,
air travel isn't so significant for climate
change, is it?
That's exactly what the airlines want you
to think. The first thing they're not
telling you is that the effect of planes' gases
are magnified because they're released up in the
sky, so that 1.6% figure should really be
doubled or tripled. (The IPCC puts the figure at
3.5%. TIME,
Aug. 2007)
And yes, even 5%, doesn't appear
that large, but that's simply because most trips
are not made on airplanes. The only meaningful
question is, Is my taking a flight responsible
for a significant amount of climate change
pollution? The answer is definitely yes. A
single coast-to-coast roundtrip flight
causes as much climate change per passenger as
driving a typical car 450 miles a month for a
year.
CO2 emissions from flying
doubled between 1990 and 2004.
(source)
When we need to be reducing our emissions, not
increasing them, air travel certainly sends us
in the wrong direction.
The airline ad will probably also tout
changes they're making to improve efficiency.
That's nice, but what they won't tell you is
that those changes might make only a 2%
difference per year at best.
On the other hand, it's certainly true that
other common activities are a lot more damaging
than flying. What this means is that you can
reduce your impact a lot more by saving
electricity or not
driving or going
vegetarian, than you can by
forgoing an air flight.
Whether to drive or fly -- which is
worse?
Flying is worse than driving.
Planes get a respectable 43 passenger miles per
gallon (pMPG), but they cause 1.9 times as much
climate change per gallon of fuel burned, by
virtue of their being up in the sky. So when we
consider climate change, the plane's efficiency
is more like 22.6 pMPG. That's the
"extra climate change
effect" highlighted in the table.
Let's say you have a 23 mpg car. That
already beats the plane at 22.6 mpg. But what if
two people are traveling? On the plane it's
still 22.6 pMPG per person, since we're already
accounting for the fact that the plane carries
multiple people. But put two people in a 23 mpg
car and suddenly we're getting 46 pMPG.
The most efficient way to travel in the
U.S. is by bus. Inter-city buses get a
whopping 125 pMPG. By contrtast, Amtrak trains
get only 45 pMPG, though this could be do to the
trains having lots of empty seats or cabins. In
any event, taking the train is better than
flying.
Now let's put all this together, for a
3000-mile trip:
|
Passenger
MPG
|
Pounds
of CO2e /
per passenger
|
Transportation
Mode
|
|
125
|
540
|
Bus
|
|
82
|
750
|
Typical U.S. car, 4
people
|
|
61
|
1000
|
Typical U.S. car, 3
people
|
|
45
|
1,290
|
Train (Amtrak)
|
|
43
|
1,170
|
Airplane, w/o
considering extra climate change
effect
|
|
41
|
1,500
|
Typical U.S. car, 2
people
|
|
23
|
2,223
|
Airplane after considering
extra climate change effect
|
|
20
|
3,000
|
Typical U.S. car, 1
person
|
See sources
& calculations
Is global warming for real?
Yes. The consensus among real
scientists is overwhelming. If you thought
there was still some question, it's because
polluting
industries have spent a lot of money trying
to convince people that climate change is only a
"theory" and that the scientific community is
divided. In fact, they don't even have to
convince anyone, they're just trying to raise
doubt in people's minds. And they have. Many
people without the time to really research who's
saying what can easily be left with the idea
that there are two divided camps on the issue of
climate change.
But there's not. The scientific
consensus is overwhelming.
(Science
Magazine,
Wikipedia,
New
Scientist)
There is not a single major scientific
body on the entire face of the planet whose
position is that climate change isn't real or
isn't man-made -- or even that the evidence is
mostly inconclusive. On the contrary, every
major scientific body agrees that climate change
is real and that we're causing it. If this is
not consensus, then pray tell, what the heck
would real consensus look like?!
The dissenters are mostly polluters who don't
want to pay to clean up the mess they're making,
and a few lone scientists -- often on the
payroll of the polluters.
The biggest review of the science was done by
a group of the world's scientists, the IPCC, who
concluded
that climate change is "unequivocal" and that
they're 90% sure that humans are responsible. By
2007, even
President Bush admitted that climate change
is real and is caused by people.
Here are some good articles on other sites
debunking climate-change deniers:
(By the way, if you want to argue with me
about climate change, then I'll expect you to
have done your homework and to have actually
seen how your arguments have been addressed in
the compendiums above.)
Examples of people who used other ways to
travel
Transatlantic
by cargo ship. In February
2009 your humble webmaster traveled between
Europe and the U.S. by cargo ship. I hope to
write about the experience someday, but here
are the answers to the four most
commonly-asked questions:
- The trip takes 6-9 days each way
depending on the route.
- It costs around $100/day.
- I booked through FreighterCruises.com.
- I generated 50 times
less carbon by going by ship.
Inspiring
stories of people who have found alternatives
to flying (BBC)
U.K.
to Australia -- without flying.
Barbara Hadrill traveled across three
continents in 2006 for a friend's wedding,
all without flying. She wrote a book about
the experience.
Train
and Boat from Europe to Japan.
Some people took this lengthy trip without
flying and calculated that they generated
only 481 kg of greenhouse gases, vs. 3540 kg.
had they taken a plane.
Related information
Seat
61. One of my favorite sites.
A complete guide to trains (and often, ships)
around the world. I recently needed to know
how to take a train to get from London to
Valencia, Span. Seat 61 had the exact answer.
It always does.
Japan
Airlines' efforts to reduce energy
use
Sources for the MPG and
Pounds of CO2 per passenger
table:
U.S.
aircraft used 19,704
gallons of fuel and traveled 848
billion passenger miles in June 2007 to May
2008, which works out to 43 pMPG. Note that David
Lawyer gets 45.6
pMPG for 2005 using the DOE's Transportation
Energy Data Book. Radiative
forcing factor of 1.9 (PDF) from Carbon
Independent, further attributed to Dr. David Lee of
the Centre for Air Transport and the Environment.
Carbon output of 0.39 lbs/mile for long flights
from my Carbon
Footprint Calculator.
Buses (intercity) get 125 pMPG according
to David
Lawyer and 184 pMPG according to Greyhound.
Obviously I'm using the independent figure, not
trusting the industry's. Motorcoach Industries
(MCI) says that buses get 6.7
mpg (p. 14). Dividing that into Lawyer's figure
of 125 pMPG, we get an average of 18.7 passengers
per trip.
MCI also says that buses generate 1.49
kg/mile (on the same page), which is 3.3
lbs/mile.
Dividing 3.3 lbs/mile by 18.7 passengers
gives 0.18 lbs./p-mile. B.E.S.T. and
Enviroduck use figures of 0.20
and 0.25
lbs./p-mile but they don't say where they
got their numbers. Anyway, with standard buses
seating 49-57
passengers, far higher than the 18.7 we assumed,
as more people ride there's a lot of potential
for the pounds per passenger to go even
lower.
Trains. Amtrak nets only 45 pMPG
according to Lawyer.
The BBC says U.K. trains produce 80-165
g/p-km of CO2. I can't find a good source for
U.S. trains, but they can't be that different. This
works out to 0.28-0.58 lbs/p-mi, or an average of
0.43/p-mi. Note that Virgin claims its trains
produce only 0.04
to 0.12 lbs./p-mile, but doesn't explain why
their figures are so much lower than everyone
else's, so I'm skeptical. But if they're right,
then train travel is even greener than my table
makes it appear.
Cars from my carbon
calculator sources. A car produces about 20.4
lbs. of CO2 per gallon and the typical U.S. car,
amazingly and conveniently, also gets about 20.4
miles to the gallon (the same number), making
emissions an even 1 pound per 1 mile
traveled.
Last update:
February 2009
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