The Carbon Footprint Of Visiting Family
As I'm writing this post, I'm at the airport waiting for my flight to London. This weekend I'm visiting my sister who just moved into her new home.
While watching the planes take off and land, I was wondering what exactly the carbon footprint of my flight is. Well, after some googling I found many calculators to compute the footprint of my flight. According to co2.myclimate.org I will be wasting 0.254 tons of CO2.
CO2 amount flight Eindhoven - Stansted: 0.254 t
That made me wonder, how much annual CO2 "budget" does a world citizen have in order to not overshoot the earth's resources? Well, the same website gave me the answer. If the average amount of CO2 per person is 2.0 metric tons per year, we would spend the total annual budget.
To give you some perspective, carbonpositivelife.com provides some interesting numbers. The average American citizen wastes 19.78 metric tons per year, while the average person in Zambia uses only 0.23 tons!
Wait what...
This would mean the roundtrip flight I'm about to take, just to visit my sister for the weekend, will use up more CO2 than the average Zambian would in a whole year! We live in a mighty skewed world!
I knew that flying Is one of the worst things you can do when trying to reduce your carbon footprint. But that it was *so bad, I never thought!
A piece of advice for the frequent flyer
If you want to change the way we use up our planets recourses, a good start is to look at your traveling habits. Do you fly often, check if you can take the train. Heck, driving would even be better! Below is an overview of some trips and their footprint for train vs plane.
Image taken from: seat61.com
Another alternative, when flying is the only option, is donating money to projects that compensate your wasted CO2. There are many websites that can help you with this. To name a few in no particular order:
Some of these provide compensation not only for flying but many other carbon-heavy activities. I also didn't check how "legit" these websites are, however, I read several positive articles on greenseat.nl. I actually just bought my CO2 compensation there :)
I wish everyone a great holiday weekend (mine started today)! And if you have to travel, check your CO2 footprint and compensate if possible!
Thanks for stopping by!
Hope you had a great weekend-trip despite making an impact on your C02 footprint. The facts are interesting, I do myself try to take the train instead, but need to calculate more travel time in some cases. I used to fly a lot all over the world, but now I haven't taken a plane in over three years, I must admit that a combination of fear of flying, budget and three little kids is the reason for that and not my well thought good decision to save in on C02.
Yeah, after writing this post it made me realize I should always check the alternatives before booking anything. I think traveling by train to England might even be nicer for me since I can probably travel on a work day and do "home office" in the train :). Traveling with kids can be challenging I guess. I also never understand how parents can afford long flights with two or three kids. So expensive!
Working on the train is a great idea, it's usually from city to city, no shuttle, hassle waiting or checking in, lines and so on... Sometimes when all of that is included the train travel doesn't take that much longer. A lot easier to work on the train as well. I actually find it quite productive! And yes, traveling with three kids makes everything too expensive so needs a lot of planning. :)
Congratulations @michelmake: this post has been upvoted by @minnowhelpme!!
This is a free upvote bot, part of the project called @steemrepo , made for you by the witness @yanosh01.
Thanks for being here!!