The list of things for which people in the UK think I’m morally degenerate keeps getting longer. The latest addition is, of course, because I use air travel. Personally I suspect that Bliar’s sudden devotion to the idea of punitive taxes on short-haul airlines has as much to do with the fuss that RyanAir kicked up over the recent security fiasco as it does to commitment to green principles, but the general point is good. Air travel does emit a lot of CO2.
In my defense I’d like to point out I don’t own a car, and I work from home, so for considerably more than half the days of the year I don’t use motorized transport of any sort. I therefore suspect that my carbon footprint is rather smaller than a lot of other people’s. But that, of course, is no excuse. As far as the media is concerned, people who use air transport are now on the same level as people who eat babies. And as I said, the point is a good one. What I’m wondering is, what the heck can I do about it?
The obvious thing to do is, of course, not to travel. But until the US government sees fit to allow me to stay here I’m afraid that isn’t an option. My home is here, and most of my work comes from here (even if I can do most of it remotely). If forced to stay in the UK I’d very soon be a drain on social services, one way or another. So I’m stuck.
It would be nice to be able to get a leisurely airship from Heathrow to New York, and then a fast train across country. Sadly neither of these is likely. Does anyone do passenger services across the Atlantic by sea these days? Cunard appears to only do cruises. As for trains in the US, Kevin advises me to allow at least 3-4 days for the trip, including one or more nights in Chicago because the train I come in on will be late and the one I’m due out on may be canceled. The cost is likely to be significantly more than the $6-700 I usually pay for a flight from Heathrow to San Francisco.
As I’m unlikely to be attending any more conventions, I’ve removed much of my need for air travel. However, I do have a commitment to be in Finland next July and I have to keep that. If Bliar manages to make intra-European flights from the UK prohibitively expensive I may need another way to travel. Kevin and I have been looking at the options, and the best ones appear to be the Newcastle-Gotenborg ferry, or a mostly train route to Copenhagen via Brussels and Hamburg. Either way I’d end up in Stockholm and catch the ferry to Helsinki. Both routes look like taking around 3 days each way, with a resulting need for expensive hotel nights.
Of course I suspect that even if air fare of out the UK are expensive, I’ll still have the option of Eurostar to Paris and a flight to Helsinki from there.
Anyway, the point is that I’m trying, and I’m not averse to more leisurely forms of travel. But if we are going to give up on aircraft we could do with some better alternatives.
Alas, I see that the option out of Newcastle is gone, as the ferry has been discontinued
It gets much more interesting if you do the sums – a task not helped by constant having to convert between metric and Imperial, but still not that hard. I did the sums for a Boeing 737-700 travelling between Edinburgh and London using easyJet’s load factors. Fuel consumption (which is directly related to CO2 output) was in the same ball park as driving there would’ve been, assuming I could drive. The figures would be even better using the A319 that now serves that particular route — there’s a reason the low-cost airlines go for brand new aircraft.
I think the green movement has started relying on the fact that most people can’t be bothered doing fairly basic arithmetic. Plus it’s easier to blame all those horrible other people rather than doing something yourself such as driving less or going veggie, both of which have a much bigger impact on the environment.
I have a new policy – every time a non-vegan person nags me about it, I go book myself on a gratuitous flight somewhere. Amsterdam was most excellent this weekend.
The Guardian had a big feature on this last week, in which they attempted to prove that it was much more carbon-efficient to go on vacation by train than by plane. I suspect they picked their examples fairly carefully. A train trip to Istambul is rather easier than one to Helsinki. Also I think they assumed that you would be leaving from London. If you happened to be starting from, say, Edinburgh, the sums might have been rather different.
I would’ve been more than happy to have taken the train to Amsterdam this weekend, but having to get all the way to London first is the killer (plus changing at Brussels, and then getting an inevitably slow train from there).
I say build a pair of high speed maglevs – one East Coast, one West!
High speed rail is good. I’ll leave Kevin to do the rant about maglev. (If it were me I would, of course, build Broad Gauge.)