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Environment & Energy
Showing Original Post only (View all)How Far Can We Get Without Flying? [View all]
from YES! Magazine:
How Far Can We Get Without Flying?
When a climate scientist decided to stop flying to cut his carbon emissions, he got a glimpse of the post-oil future.
Peter Kalmus
posted Feb 11, 2016
Im a climate scientist who doesnt fly. I try to avoid burning fossil fuels, because its clear that doing so causes real harm to humans and to nonhumans, today and far into the future. I dont like harming others, so I dont fly. Back in 2010, though, I was awash in cognitive dissonance. My awareness of global warming had risen to a fever pitch, but I hadnt yet made real changes to my daily life. This disconnect made me feel panicked and disempowered.
Then one evening in 2011, I gathered my utility bills and did some Internet research. I looked up the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by burning a gallon of gasoline and a therm (about 100 cubic feet) of natural gas, I found an estimate for emissions from producing the food for a typical American diet and an estimate for generating a kilowatt-hour of electricity in California, and I averaged the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Environmental Protection Agency estimates for CO2 emissions per mile from flying. With these data, I made a basic pie chart of my personal greenhouse gas emissions for 2010.
This picture came as a surprise. Id assumed that electricity and driving were my largest sources of emissions. Instead, it turned out that the 50,000 miles Id flown that year (two international and half a dozen domestic flights, typical for postdocs in the sciences who are expected to attend conferences and meetings) utterly dominated my emissions.
Hour for hour, theres no better way to warm the planet than to fly in a plane. If you fly coach from Los Angeles to Paris and back, youve just emitted 3 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, 10 times what an average Kenyan emits in an entire year. Flying first class doubles these numbers. .............(more)
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/life-after-oil/how-far-can-we-get-without-flying-20160211
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Unrealistic. The world economy and society would utterly collapse without airplanes.
longship
Feb 2016
#5
Our global economy is built on unrealistic beliefs, such as infinite growth on finite resources
NickB79
Feb 2016
#18
Same thing with buses vs cars, but nobody is giving up their cars there either
The2ndWheel
Feb 2016
#15