Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

It’s often ironic or sarcastic when someone says that one man can make a difference.

But what if the subject is climate change and that one man is… Al Gore? VP Gore can and has made a difference all by himself, but the torch has now been passed to Bill Gates.

You can see the video of his TED speech here. The sum of it is that Bill Gates stood in front of a slideshow with a picture of the earth and a zero, and convinced everyone present as to the feasability of reducing emissions for each person on the planet down to zero.

Bill Gates broke it up into a PSEC formula, where P stands for People (as in population); S for services (airconditioners, refrigirators, etc); E for Efficiency (fuel efficiency, green buildings, etc); and C for the CO2 emissions per unit of energy.

The first two will actually add to emissions growth, and Bill Gates mentions that people should be able to use more services - not cut back. So the future doesn’t necessarily involve developed nations going back to the caves, with people cutting back on travel or using dirty towels and sheets in hotels.

The third one - E, will help reduce emissions, but the focus was on the last one - C, and this is where his zero kicks in. He calls for research and funding to create electrical grids based on clean energy with zero emissions.

To be noted that there was no techonological breakthrough, nor a gathering of world leaders like COP15. It’s just that when Bill Gates says it, and promises to throw the full financial muscle of his foundation - the biggest in the world, to make it happen, it seems more likely to happen. And the word spreads.

So now the climate change CW is shifting from incremental change to zero emissions for each person on the planet.

So, this month’s Travel & Leisure discusses the issue of whether it creates more greenhouse gases to drive, fly, or take a train. Their conclusion: train is by far the most eco-friendly solution and driving actually produces more emissions to travel the same distance than flying.

T&L’s data came from TerraPass, and without disputing their math (which isn’t laid out), I would say that there are a couple of factors left out of their analysis. For one, they ignore the NUMBER of people who will be driving versus flying. What I mean is that if you have a family of four, it is actually more efficient to drive to your destination than to fly. The reason is that the airplane emissions are on a per-person basis and calculated on plane capacity average plane fuel efficiency, etc.–whereas car emissions are for the vehicle and will not change much if you’re driving alone or if your traveling as a family.

Another factor that T&L conveniently ignores is the factor of fuel efficiency for different vehicles - from SUVs to sedans to hybrids. This obviously has an important effect on the desirability of flying versus driving.

We like to take a more nuanced approach, and so we’ve analyzed figures from the Department of the Environment in Britain which does a has done a more detailed job of comparing different modes of transportation, so we will use their figures and extrapolate from them.

The following are average figures for the amount of pounds of CO₂ per mile released into the atmosphere for each type of transportation:

Total Emissions Per Vehicle
SUV (15mpg) – 2.29 lbs/mi
Average Car (25 mpg) – 1.39 lbs/mi
Prius (55 mpg) - .61 lbs/mi
Motorcycle - .57 lbs/mi
RV – 4.58 lbs/mi

Total Emissions Per Person
Average Car/Single Driver – 1.39 lbs/mi
Average Car/Family of 4 - .34 lbs/mi
Train - .32 lbs/mi
Bus - .48 lbs/mi
Plane (250 mi trip) - .85 lbs/mi**
Plane (600 mi) - .69 lbs/mi**
Plane (3500 mi) - .56 lbs/mi**

Bottom Line:
If you have a choice of how to travel, buses and trains have the fewest carbon emissions. Planes and cars are less favorable options, and which one is more efficient depends on how many people you are traveling with and what car you would drive. A family of four would be better off driving than flying, whereas an individual might actually save emissions by flying.

**One other note: these emissions figures, which are taken from the UK’s DEFRA, do not take into account that emissions from planes have been shown to have a greater warming effect than emissions from land-based transportation. This further cements air travel as the most-polluting form of transport and means that ground transportation is nearly always preferable to flying.

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2006 was “carbon-neutral,” which gives you some sense of the fad that is carbon offsets. With the success of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, there is a rising wave of guilt about the carbon dioxide that we each produce in the course of our daily lives, and carbon offsets gave us a way to erase that CO₂ along with the guilt. “Carbon-neutral” is just a cooler, sexier, trendier way of communicating the same “guilt-free” consumer mentality that American culture is known for – e.g. “fat-free,” “low-cal,” etc.Well, the truth is, carbon offsets like those that TerraPass sells are a lot more complicated than all that. The principle behind an offset is that to compensate for your own carbon dioxide emissions, you buy a share in a project that is actively reducing carbon emissions somewhere in the world – including renewable energy projects, reforestation schemes, bio fuel production, and anything else that might be a carbon sink or prevent carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. We recognize the value of these carbon offsets while also acknowledging their limitations:

Carbon Offset Pros:

• In cases where emissions are inevitable, offsets provide a way to do something to remediate the effects.
• Offsets are a source of investment for renewable energy and other projects to mitigate climate change, therefore filling the void that some governments have left by not stepping in to regulate and/or limit carbon dioxide emissions.
• In many cases, offsets are a catalyst for change in the developing world, where renewable energy projects funded by the developed world could be the basis of a sustainable growth and development curve going forward.

Carbon Offset Cons:

• Buying offsets makes people feel that it’s okay to pollute if they simply compensate for their actions by buying credits.
• Offsets are unlikely to be as effective and permanent in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we are in emitting the carbon dioxide to begin with.
• The industry is almost completely unregulated and therefore largely not held accountable for the emissions promises it makes.

Our Bottom Line: Although we support the idea of purchasing offsets from a reputable company to mitigate inevitable carbon emissions, we think that the term “carbon-neutral” is misleading, because it lends too much credit to the effectiveness of the nascent carbon offset industry. It also takes attention away from non-global warming related environmental issues and what we can do individually to reduce our impact and need for offsets. Carbon offsets should be used in combination with the other environmentally responsible travel practices like selecting an environmentally-friendly hotel or choosing an environmentally-friendly destination, not as an indulgence that can be bought to pardon all of our environmental sins.

If you have not yet heard, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today!

Well, he happened to be in the SF Bay area at the time and a few Kangos got special access to his press conference today:

True to his cause he arrived in a sedan powered by bio diesel. The Conference was held at the Alliance for Climate Protection offices in Palo Alto.

First his wife Tipper Gore spoke saying that Al would be coming into the room 2 minutes to give a brief statement and also that he would not be answering questions; when he arrived he was greeted by 100+ news-people.

Then the former vice president thanked the Nobel Prize committee for selecting him the (shared) winner and he stated that he would donate the prize to green efforts; he also said that he was going to go to Europe to accept the prize in person.

Then he spoke briefly about the continuing effects of global warming on the polar ice caps: “polar scientists are now warning that at current rates the polar ice caps will be completely gone within only 27 years” (or language very similar, our Kango blogger was relying only on his memory)

Then Gore spoke passionately delivering a call in the form of an African proverb.

Gore said: “There is an old African proverb, If you want to go fast; go alone, if you want to go far; go together, we need to act both quickly and together to put an end to the climate crisis” (Again this quote is from memory)

With that, he concluded the press conference and thanked everyone for coming.

As he walked out of the room he was met with shouts from the press “Mr. Vice President Do you plan to run for president after winning this award?… Mr Vice President!”

With that; he left the room and he went to a private meeting with members of the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Gore’s Message is a one that is loud and clear: we need to act as one in the same direction if we want to go far and protect our planet.

This message starts with making simple green choices; while these changes can be very simple:

• Selecting an environmentally friendly hotel
• Flying greener
• And walking the walk

…but can collectively make a huge difference.

Gore: keep up the good work, we need you.