Don't fly if you can help it

Flying causes climate change

Flying or frying?  Air trips release huge quantities of greenhouse gases, and they do so up in the sky where they're more damaging.  If you can, try to find an alternative to flying, such as:

• Taking a train
• Vacationing closer to home
• Having longer visits instead of more frequent visits (e.g., a 2-week visit every 2 years, instead of a 1-week visit every year)
• Teleconferencing instead of face-to-face business meetings
• Traveling as a passenger on a cargo ship

So why am I running a site about cheap airfare if I recommend you don't fly?

Because I can get your attention this way.  Running a popular airfare guide on the net gives me an opportunity to get the message out about the problems with flying.  That is, ironically, I'm likely achieving a greater reduction in flying by keeping this site up, than by taking it down.  Without the hook of the cheap airfare tips I provide, you wouldn't be here reading this message right now.

Will people really consider not flying in order to help the environment?

Sure they will.  A BBC poll found that over half of them would.

Exactly how damaging is air travel?

A single roundtrip flight to Asia generates as much pollution as your car does for a whole year.

A single coast to coast roundtrip flight is equivalent to driving the average car 375 miles a month for a whole year.

Air travel is particularly damaging because of various factors related to the planes being up in the sky, vs. pollution which happens on the ground.

You can compare the impact of your air travel to your impact for driving and other things with my carbon footprint calculator.

 

Here's a handy excuse you can use...

Let's say you really want or need to fly.  Okay, let me give you an easy out: You can save 1.7 tons of carbon a year by going vegetarian.  (That's because meat requires horrific amounts of energy to produce.)  Go veggie, and you'll save more carbon (1.7 tons a year) as the typical American generates from flying (0.8 tons).  If you fly a lot, then go vegan and save a whopping 3.0 tons of carbon.

 

Want even more ways to justify flying?

There's no lack of ways to offset your carbon footprint from flying. For example:

• Use less electricity. The average home uses more energy than the average car. There's 6.5 tons here that you can whittle down to offset your flying. It's certainly possible—I use 85% less energy in my own home than the typical American.
• Stop driving, or at least keeping driving to a minimum. The average American would save 6 tons of carbon annually by ditching their car. I did it, so can you.
• Eat vegetarian or vegan. Yes, I mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating. If I can do this, you can too.

So why am I giving you all these excuses to keep flying?  Because as long as you save energy, it doesn't really matter how you save it.  Whether you stop flying or stop eating meat, you'll still save similar amounts of energy.  One's as good as the other.  Of course, I'd be happiest if you did both, but I'm coming at this from the angle that you might be able to do one thing.  So okay, pick one of the above.  You certainly have several choices.

 

And then there's carbon offsets...

If you haven't heard of these, here's how they work:  You invest in a project that prevents the same amount of pollution as was generated by your plane trip.  It could be something like a solar panel installation or a wind farm.

Now, the best thing is not to fly in the first place. But there are cases where you might want to buy a carbon offset:

1. You can't stop flying.
2. You can't reduce energy use in other parts of your life.
3. You've already heroically reduced all you can, but you can't get your energy use down to zero, of course, so you want to offset the pollution you can't help but cause.

Offsets are affordable. You can offset the damage from a roundtrip coast-to-coast flight for around $35.

I have a whole article about carbon offsets if you'd like to know more.

But the plane is going anyway!

You might think that your air travel doesn't do any damage, because the plane is flying anyway whether you buy a ticket or not.   But the reason it matters is that your purchase could be what causes the airline to add another flight, or to keep a unprofitable flight on the schedule rather than canceling it.  If that happened, you wouldn't want to feel personally responsible for all the fuel used by that whole flight, would you?  No, and that's why we consider that each of, say, 200 passengers is responsible for 1/200th of the fuel use on any flight.

Your ticket could be what keeps the plane in the air.  When fewer people flew in the late 2000s, airlines canceled unprofitable flights, rather than flying planes with lots of empty seats.  Rest assured some bean counter is sitting there figuring whether to drop a mildly unpopular flight.  If there are just enough people to make the flight barely profitable, they'll keep the flight—and we'll still have all the pollution associated with that flight.  You don't want your ticket to be responsible for the decision to keep a polluting plane in the air.

The flipside is also true:  Your purchase of a ticket might be what causes the airline to add another flight.  The airline doesn't want to turn away paying customers, and when flights are frequently full between two destinations, they'll add another flight to their schedule.  Yes, it's unlikely that you personally would be the cause of the airline adding another flight, but you need to consider all the other people contemplating a flight.  All of you together can provide the tipping point, and that's what makes your lone flight "count", even if it doesn't cause a new flight to be added that very time.

Consider this analogy:  You're among two hundred people sitting in a forest.  Each of you throws a single rock at a nearby bear.  Most of the time the bear is simply annoyed without taking action, but the 200th time someone throws a rock, it finally has enough and comes over and kills all of you.  Even though nothing happened on the first 199 throws, those throws still counted, because without them the bear wouldn't have grown more and more agitated and eventually attacked.  That last person isn't responsible for the bear attacking, all of you are.  So each of you has 1/200th of the blame, even before the bear ultimately went after you.

That's why on a 200-passenger plane, you're responsible for 1/200th of its pollution, no matter what.

 

Is air travel really damaging or isn't it?

The airlines are clearly on the defensive because of all the recent attention to the pollution caused by air travel.  So you're likely to see a big full-page promo in the in-light magazine saying that air travel is responsible for only about 1.6% of global warming gases.  Wow, when you put it that way, air travel isn't so significant for climate change, is it?

That's exactly what the airlines want you to think.  The first thing they're not telling you is that the effect of planes' gasses are magnified because they're released up in the sky, so that 1.6% figure should really be doubled or tripled. (The IPCC puts the figure at 3.5%. TIME)   And yes, even 5%, doesn't appear that large, but that's simply because most trips are not made on airplanes.  The only meaningful question is, is my taking a flight responsible for a significant amount of climate change pollution?  The answer is definitely yes.  A single coast-to-coast roundtrip flight causes as much climate change per passenger as driving a typical car 450 miles a month for a year.

CO₂ emissions from flying doubled between 1990 and 2004. (source)  When we need to be reducing our emissions, not increasing them, air travel certainly sends us in the wrong direction.

The airline ad will probably also tout changes they're making to improve efficiency.  That's nice, but what they won't tell you is that those changes might make only a 2% difference per year at best.

On the other hand, it's certainly true that other common activities are a lot more damaging than flying.  What this means is that you can reduce your impact a lot more by saving electricity or not driving or going vegetarian, than you can by forgoing an air flight.

 

Whether to drive or fly—which is worse?

Flying is worse than driving. Planes get a respectable 43 passenger miles per gallon (pMPG), but they cause 1.9 times as much climate change per gallon of fuel burned, by virtue of their being up in the sky. So when we consider climate change, the plane's efficiency is more like 22.6 pMPG. That's the "extra climate change effect" highlighted in the table.

Let's say you have a 23 mpg car. That already beats the plane at 22.6 mpg. But what if two people are traveling? On the plane it's still 22.6 pMPG per person, since we're already accounting for the fact that the plane carries multiple people. But put two people in a 23 mpg car and suddenly we're getting 46 pMPG.

The most efficient way to travel in the U.S. is by bus.  Inter-city buses get a whopping 125 pMPG.  By contrtast, Amtrak trains get only 56 pMPG, though this could be due to the trains having lots of empty seats or cabins. In any event, taking the train is better than flying.

Now let's put all this together, for a 3000-mile trip:

Passenger MPG	Pounds of CO2e / per passenger	Transportation Mode
125	540	Bus
82	750	Typical U.S. car, 4 people
61	1,000	Typical U.S. car, 3 people
56	1,050	Train (Amtrak)
43	1,170	Airplane, w/o considering extra climate change effect
41	1,500	Typical U.S. car, 2 people
23	2,223	Airplane after considering extra climate change effect
20	3,000	Typical U.S. car, 1 person

See sources

This isn't completely apples-to-apples because road trips take more distance than air trips.  So to be fair, reduce the MPG of the cars by 15% to compare more accurately to planes.

Is global warming for real?

Yes.  The consensus among real scientists is overwhelming.  If you thought there was still some question, it's because polluting industries have spent a lot of money trying to convince people that climate change is only a "theory" and that the scientific community is divided.   In fact, they don't even have to convince anyone, they're just trying to raise doubt in people's minds.  And they have.  Many people without the time to really research who's saying what can easily be left with the idea that there are two divided camps on the issue of climate change.

But there's not.  The scientific consensus is overwhelming. (Science Magazine, Wikipedia, NASA, New Scientist)  There is not a single major scientific body on the entire face of the planet whose position is that climate change isn't real or isn't man-made—or even that the evidence is mostly inconclusive.  On the contrary, every major scientific body agrees that climate change is real and that we're causing it.  If this is not consensus, then pray tell, what the heck would real consensus look like?!

The dissenters are mostly polluters who don't want to pay to clean up the mess they're making, and a few lone scientists—often on the payroll of the polluters.

The biggest review of the science was done by a group of the world's scientists, the IPCC, who concluded that climate change is "unequivocal" and that they're 90% sure that humans are responsible.  By 2007, even President Bush admitted that climate change is real and is caused by people.

Here are some good articles on other sites debunking climate-change deniers:

• Climate change doubt paid for by Exxon-Mobil
• Skeptical Science refutes 198 arguments against climate change
• New Scientist debunks climate myths
• How to talk to a global warming skeptic

(By the way, if you want to argue with me about climate change, then I'll expect you to have done your homework and to have actually seen how your arguments have been addressed in the compendiums above.)

Examples of people who used other ways to travel

International travel by cargo ship.  I've taken three trips between the U.S. and Europe or Asia by cargo ship. I hope to write about the experience someday, but here are the answers to the most commonly-asked questions:

• Crossing the Atlantic takes 6-9 days, and crossing the Pacific takes about 10 days each way, depending on the route.
• It costs around $100-150/day. That includes your cabin (usually large) and three meals a day.
• You don't have to work for your fare. (In fact, you can't, even if you want to.)
• You can book direct with the freighter company.  The largest is NSB.  There are also special travel agents who can book these trips for you like Freighter Travel NZ.
• Downsides:  Besides the time and the cost, there's no Internet or phone service (you can email short text messages from the captain's office but that's it), and sometimes there's the smell of bunker fuel.  There's no "going for a walk" because there's nowhere to walk — the decks are full of cargo containers.  There are small decks where you can sit and watch the sea.  There's a small exercise room, and the labor crew (usually Filipino) are very friendly and often up for playing games or singing karaoke when their shifts are over.  (There are about 22 total crew, about 13 labor crew and about 9 officers, usually European.)
  
• I generated 98% less carbon by going by ship.

Inspiring stories of people who have found alternatives to flying (BBC)

U.K. to Australia—without flying. Barbara Hadrill traveled across three continents in 2006 for a friend's wedding, all without flying. She wrote a book about the experience.

Train and Boat from Europe to Japan. Some people took this lengthy trip without flying and calculated that they generated only 481 kg of greenhouse gases, vs. 3540 kg. had they taken a plane.

Circled the globe without an airplane.  Andrew Curran, whom I met when we were both passengers on a cargo ship, went around the entire world by train, bus, and boat, and published a photo book of his adventures.

 

Related information

Seat 61. One of my favorite sites. A complete guide to trains (and often, ships) around the world.  I recently needed to know how to take a train to get from London to Valencia, Spain.  Seat 61 had the exact answer. It always does.

Japan Airlines' efforts to reduce energy use

Last update: July 2010