This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
Have you seen Up in the Air? George Clooney’s character is a bachelor that flies around North America doing talks and firing employees of companies. He doesn’t have a real ‘home’ and his personal goal is to get American Airlines’s gold card of sorts, which only 10 other people in the world have.
I have to admit, I was jealous of Clooney’s character. And the one played by Vera Farmiga who is Clooney’s female counterpart. What an exciting career it is, to fly all over the place and get paid to do it. Until I read the chapter in Tzeporah Berman’s This Crazy Time last night on how “flying is by far the most polluting activity of our era.“
It’s true when you think about it. If you don’t HAVE to travel by air, you shouldn’t.
“A single vacation flight to the other side of the world can dump ten to twenty tons of greenhouse gas emissions per person. That’s nearly a decade’s worth of the climate change than an average European emits from all other personal transportation combined…A fifty-thousand-mile-a-year frequent flyer will annually dump between twenty-two and forty-four tons of GHG (greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere.”
I have been thinking of trying to take two air trips a year instead of one, and I’m definitely having second thoughts about it now. In fact, I’ll likely not fly anywhere all of 2013 because of some of the new investments I need to make, moving into a new home and getting a new computer… so even though I would like to party it up in NYC for my birthday, I am thinking a road trip down to Portland will likely suffice.
Travelling the world is still one of my biggest goals. But there can be a strategy to it. Instead of annual trips I can go on a bigger trip every two years. You only need two flights to travel in all of Europe. And I could do Eastern Canada and the US coast in one trip too.
Something to think about. I wonder if Richard Branson has a private jet and knows what that is doing to contribute to climate change?
