Hey, you can witness how I weighed up my flygskam (Swedish for flight shame) below. As per the audio, over the next two weeks I’ll be sharing with the membership community various insights, videos, chats with big minds that speak to ways of doing better dialogue, finding common ground in complex times and so on.
My anxious calculations:
A return flight to Tel Aviv costs 3.99 tonnes of CO2.
A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 tonnes of CO2 per year.
This graph below shows how all mindful lifestyle choices weigh up against flying, although it uses slightly different figures. I suspect it takes into consideration things like, for instance, if you life car-free you might be catching buses a fair bit, which have their emissions. I tend to mostly walk or ride a bike.
Bear in mind the above figures do not factor in the emissions used to make the car.
The carbon footprint of a new car:
6 tonnes CO2: Citroen C1, basic spec
17 tonnes CO2: Ford Mondeo, medium spec
35 tonnes CO2: Land Rover Discovery, top of the range
A few other factors:
I don’t kid myself buying offsets does what it claims to do in full. I’ll write a post on this soon. The writer and environmentalist George Monbiot compares carbon offsetting to the sale of medieval Catholic indulgences, where the rich could buy themselves out of sin. Monbiot writes that from sellers of offsets, “you can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction”. Yep.
This moral philosopher outlines the utilitarian case.
I’ve done an audio and written rundown on the issue before, here.
This link has great tips for cutting your emissions, via the way you book, by around 20% to 45%
Sarah xx
I'm on an Israel and Palestine peace dialogue trip