I went to L.A. last week for the Annual Meeting of a Non-Profit’s Advisory Council that I serve on. The organization is called One Green Thing, and it focuses on addressing climate anxiety, and how doing “green things” can help address it – while also helping the climate. Some of us had never met before, and it was great to connect in person. We spent a total of somewhere around 16 hours together. It is tough to do a 16 hour Zoom Call.
I hardly fly anywhere these days. But when I do, I find planning a flight has gotten much more complicated. First, I do whatever I can to avoid a connection, even if I am not checking bags. I do this recognizing that it requires more time from point A to point B, but also that there is a higher potential the myriad of complications that can arise with connections. In addition, there are more emissions from plane’s during take-off, and connections have two take-offs, and not just one. Also, connections end up flying more miles, as they are likely not a direct flight path.
The second thing I do as of late is try to avoid a Max plane. Maybe I am overreacting, but it seems that there is a little bit too much news out there about that model such that it makes one think.
With those factors in mind, I used Google Flights to search for flights and looked at what other information was available to sort potential flights by.
One of them was the emissions of each possible flight. This was represented by a number with a plus or minus sign in front of it, which was showing whether a particular flight was above or below the average for all flights going between my two cities (in this case, NY, and LA)
But the two criteria that most people use in choosing a flight – cost and departure/arrival time. I am one of those people, and that is when things got complicated for my trip.
If I had chosen emissions as my prime criteria, I could have booked a same-cost flight on several airlines, but my flight timing was seriously thrown awry if I did that.
So … I had to (gulp) choose a flight with higher emissions. To do otherwise, it would have screwed up my schedule so badly it might have taken an extra day of travel and an extra night in a hotel.
The next thing I could have done was purchase carbon offsets for my travel, but I didn’t do that. My reason is that there has been considerable shade thrown on offsets, particularly ones related to deforestation and reforestation, which is what the airlines in many cases have used. There have been major scandals. Offsets have burned up in wildfires.
In the 1990’s, I was involved in the birth of the offsets movement and was not only a supporter but a promoter of them. They made so much sense, as in “if you can do something carbon-positive over ‘there’ more cheaply than doing some over ‘here’, do it over there” But now I must admit I am not sure how to think or what to do about offsets.
So where does all this leave me?
It leaves me squarely in the mindset that having consumers think about the environmental and emissions profile of their purchases is a good thing. All of us should be doing that. But as I showed with my example above, it be challenging for other reasons to factor it in. Furthermore, even if that starts to get better, the cumulative reduction will not be enough to make the necessary dent in overall emissions.
The only way to get the amount of carbon reductions we need to have a chance of keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations low is to make the emitters reduce. And that means policy - making policy as fast as we can and making it fast-acting policy. That means emission standards, fuel standards, building standards, appliance standards, renewable energy standards, etc. It means not allowing new gas hook-ups. It means carbon pricing and carbon tax policy.
For the airline industry, this all means that planes must be much more efficient, and airplane fuel has to be much cleaner.
For transportation overall, it means measures to force all modes to become cleaner, whether it is autos & trucks, air travel, or ocean-going shipping.
Consumers are funny animals that make purchasing choices for all sorts of reasons. They can change their wants and willingness very quickly based on choices that have nothing to do with emissions impact. Just look at what is happening with EVs, where manufacturers suddenly see hybrid vehicles as a better bet for the near term based on a shift in consumer thinking on EVs.
Moreover, products change, and get better over time in all sorts of ways and we are in a consumer-driven economy and society where many people love to buy the next new thing. Most of us keep things for a while, though. In the case of autos, a snapshot by the folks at Kelly Blue Book in mid-2023 showed that the average was 12.5 years. That kind of natural turn-over doesn't yield emissions big enough and soon enough.
We need to make sure that consumers make the right choices when it comes to emissions and carbon footprint. But if we only focus on that, and not on making the corporate world reduce the emissions it has control over and is responsible for, we are missing the mountain because we are only looking at the molehill.