Kicking the Habit: Air Travel in the Time of Climate Change

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Kicking the Habit: Air Travel in the Time of Climate Change
Air travel is neither just nor sustainable. So how can environmental justice activists make a global difference?


by Joseph Nevins
posted Dec 13, 2010


We live in a time of far-flung relationships, our families, colleagues, and friends often spread out across continents. These relationships mirror the global nature of many of our most pressing problems, such as global climate change—and they also contribute to those problems.

In Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet, Bill McKibben likens the biosphere to “a guy who smoked for forty years and then he had a stroke. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but the left side of his body doesn’t work either.” This new world, he says, requires new habits.

And, no doubt, many of us have adopted new habits—trying to use public transportation, buying local foods, rejecting bottled water. But the “savings” from such practices are wiped out by a habit that many of us not only refuse to kick, but also increasingly embrace: flying, the single most ecologically costly act of individual consumption.

Flights of Privilege

A round-trip flight between New York and Los Angeles on a typical commercial jet yields an estimated 715 kilos of CO2 per economy class passenger, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. But due to the height at which planes fly, combined with the mixture of gases and particles they emit, conventional air travel has an impact on the global climate that’s approximately 2.7 times worse than its carbon emissions alone, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As a result, that roundtrip flight’s “climatic forcing” is really 1,917 kilos, or almost two tons, of emissions—more than nine times the annual emissions of an average denizen of Haiti (as per U.S. Department of Energy figures). ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/kicking-the-habit-air-travel-in-a-time-of-climate-change

[ixion]

1. I'm doing my part...

in large part thanks to the ham-fisted keystone cop operations of the TSA. I used to enjoy flying, but now it's a total nightmare. It makes it woefully easy to not use the airlines.

[Dr.Phool]

2. Ditto that.

They've ruined flying.

And, I'm a Private Pilot, who used to just fly for fun.

[txlibdem]

3. Flying is so 100 years ago, give me high speed rail

Riding Japan's bullet train is an amazing experience, I highly recommend it. Or France's TGV, I'm told, is a fantastic way to travel.

The airlines caused their own demise when they started packing in passengers like sardines. Forget flying.

[Moostache]

4. Why do you think we have ZERO High Speed Rail in the US?

The aviation industry is just one of the many interests groups that are killing off America in the hopes of grabbing onto the last vestiges of "profit" they can squeeze out for themselves. The list is long and undistinguished....

[txlibdem]

6. You said it!

Now that our politicians and our courts have become filled with people who think along the same lines our nation is thoroughly and truly F*KED. There is no future for America now. We're either headed for a fascist takeover (welcome back Mr. Cheney!) or hopefully the people will finally wake up and realize that we have always had only one enemy: the rich. It's us or them and they hold all the reins of power now...

[tavalon]

5. I'm refusing to travel by plane

but that has more to do with the TSA. It was the final tipping point. I'll drive, take the bus or train if possible. Otherwise, phone calls will suffice.

[Uncle Joe]

7. We're sort of like alcoholics in regards to the elimination of burning carbon.

If we don't break the habit, fossil fuels will kill us, but in the short term it's damned if you do and damned if you don't.

The pollution in the atmosphere from jets' exhaust has shielded some energy from the sun reaching the surface of the Earth, so as flying is curtailed, the Earth's temperature will rise, there was a dramatic spike in the days after 9/11 when the sky turned blue and flying ceased.

Basically the warming effects of global warming climate change; is even more severe than what we're experiencing, its' been somewhat camouflaged by the pollution in the atmosphere.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.