It is the last day of school for my children, and the holidays (that’s “holidays” in the UK as opposed to “Holidays” in the USA) start here. In the middle of a torrential downpour through which I’m going to have to transfer all of our camping gear into the car, and then trundle down to the South Downs – small but beautiful range of hills in Southern England – to put up the tent, probably in the same downpour.
But we’re going to love it, because we don’t do normal holidays. At this time of year millions of people will be flying around the world, on longer and longer journeys each year as flights get cheaper and carbon becomes ever more passe a subject for those who only care about boasting about how far they went, and didn’t those poor people have such charming manners when we took photos of them!
Ahem.
As I said, we’re not like that. We are spending 3 days in a camp site in a wood, then 5 days in a camp site in some more beautiful countryside near the sea, then another 2 days in a camp site near to Cheddar caves (yes, where the cheese comes from), then finally 3 days in a small chalet on the Isle Of Wight. All probably in the rain.
Total carbon dioxide emissions for travel : about 80kg
Total carbon emissions just for a flight for our family to Spain : 1300kg
So I don’t feel at all guilty about driving, especially when I look up on our journey to the South Downs, and see the jets flying from Gatwick Airport with their chemtrails behind them. And they’ll probably get food poisoning, anyway.
Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.org
And kitted out member of The Sietch
Wait… you don’t feel guilty about emitting 80 kg of GHG because if you flew to Spain it’d be about 15 times worse? So, on that logic, you don’t mind if I kill this baby, right, ’cause it’s not exactly genocide.
I’ve flown before, and I can’t say I regret it, because I didn’t understand at the time what I was doing. Now I do, and I plan never to fly in a jet again (at least until something radical happens to the efficiency, and I won’t be pushing that). But I can’t see how that makes it any more easy for me to make a car trip anywhere. If I have to get somewhere, I still take the lowest impact route I can. And you live in the UK! You can catch a bus almost anywhere! And the you could hike! I’d love it if it were that easy in Australia.
But even then, I would wonder if it’s really neccesary to burn ANY fuel just to get somewhere for enjoyment. You are, to quote a close friend, chasing the golden buddha. Will you holiday really bring you the break you need, or deserve? And will it outweigh the possible chaos-theory spinoffs of continuing to support (albeit passively) the status quo – that of working hard so you can burn fossil fuels (no matter how large or small), so you can get away from where you work so hard to earn money to pay for fossil fuel conumptioninaneverendingcircle… ?
Sometimes I think we should all just stop. Then start again, but a lot slower.
What a disappointing response – killing babies, that just looks desparate.
My 15x reduction compared to the millions of people flying off this summer is the kind of thing we SHOULD be seeking. I have 2 children, they want to go camping, not go to Disneyland or some sunny place in the Mediterranean. They choose this because they have been taught to understand MODERATION.
That’s what we need, not people having a go just because they can’t think of something better to say.
An exaggeration, sure. But the point was that if we go traipsing off all over the country, or world, regardless of how we do it, if we’re doing it by burning fossil fuels, then we’re still doing something inherently unsustainable. (I just thought: especially in places like Australia and the UK, where not only are we burning fossil fuels, but we have to have them shipped to us from half way ’round the world before we can use them…)
I apologise if the hyperbole of my (admittedly in-bad-taste) metaphor got in the way of the deeper message. It’s easy to forget that irony and sarcasm don’t work in written media.
I agree with your point about moderation, but I personally believe that the level of moderation or fossil fuel use required at this time is at the point where all but the most necessary car trips are out of the question.