Great discussion. Got the link from a reference in George Marshall’s Carbon Detox.

As a non-flyer (see stopflying.org), the suggestion from anonymous that stopping flying has no impact is very wrong. It has huge effects on family, friends and work colleagues. They find the adoption of this principle extraordinary and then have to engage about what its implications are. It has a quite profound effect well beyond immediate family.

On the issue of car travel versus flying, this is another avoidance and denial:

- someone has to make a start. My perspective is, the future of my kids is at risk, I have to do everything possible to remedy that. I cant wait for someone else to take the first step. I have to do everything I can to bring about the needed change as soon as possible.

- radiative forcing from air travel has to be factored in. It is not a factor in car emissions.

- overseas trips cant be made in a car.

- many same country trips would disappear without the convenience of air travel.

- I announce my car trips on a car pooling website. Cuts emissions drastically.

Tom

http://tinyurl.com/2ja2of

The carbon offsets they sell are of three types — renewable energy, energy efficiency, and reforestation projects.

I have no connection to this outfit other than having purchased some their renewable energy offsets.

My general impression is that the carbon offsets being promoted to members of environmental organizations, and other sustainability-oriented folks are trending toward the energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, probably because of the uncertainties associated with the efficacy of the reforestation projects.

My wife is in Houston right now attending to her aged father whose medical condition is bad and deteriorating. This is her 4th round-trip in the last year and probably won’t be her last. He can’t be moved here and she has to help him. She (and I) are under no illusions about the effect that all this air travel has on our environment. Neither of us has ever been big-time fliers. We would gladly ride the train if that were a realistic option in our situation.

But, given this necessity, at least we can help offset the carbon her travel is releasing. This makes one less stress on her at this sad time in her life.

As for needing to travel to understand other people, in many parts of the US you can talk to a wide vareity of people with all sorts of different cultural backgrounds and idea about important questions as what makes someone human and what is Good. Try reading essays by some from a different background. You might not get the understanding you’d get learning their lanuage and living emersed in their world for 40 years, but you’ll get more out of it than the average “only leave the compound on a guided tour, never talk to anyone but the guards and guides” 2 weeks in some exotic local.

MEA

First, it’s always better to not produce emissions. Carbon offsets, we all understand that, are sort of an invitation to keep on emitting, even perhaps increase emissions; we pretend our actions can be bought off, along with our conscience.

There are two types of carbon offsets: the ‘private’ kind and the ‘institutionalized’ kind.

Private:
You donate money that the receiver promises to invest in -mostly- planting trees. Anybody can set up such an undertaking, there is very little regulation. Not that all are crooks, but the way it’s set up leaves -plenty- room for abuse.
Also, there are many doubts about the amount of CO2 that can be absorbed by trees. It’s not an issue to deal with in-depth here, but there’s not much clear-cut about it. There are various reports that state that for instance Canada’s boreal forests are becoming net emitters, not absorbers, of GHG, likely due to global warming. So what a tree absorbs is questionable.
Then there are many different values attached to a ton of CO2, ranging from $1 to $200 or more; it’s anyone’s guess. The company that sells the offsets will (be free to) choose a price that gives them a profit, and one you will still be willing to pay. The good old supply and demand market (you can offset a transatlantic flight with some $20). No-one, though, really knows how much financial damage a ton of CO2 does. After all, what’s the market value of a polar bear?

Institutionalized:
Under treaties like the Kyoto Protocol, there are provisions for governments and industries to sell and buy carbon credits. Ironically, the EU gives away credits for free to companies, some of which make a nice profit selling them on the market. There are many projects that establish ‘green’ facilities in developing countries, paid for by the rich, who can then emit the same or more in their own backyard. Moreover, the systems are rife with question marks:
• A Kyoto loophole has allowed Chinese projects to rake in billions of dollars by taking out HFC-23, a gas 11,000 times as potent as CO2, with cheap scrubbers. HFC-23 is a rare gas, but it now surpasses CO2 in total trade value, with 6000% profit margins.
• At the recent Kyoto conference in Nairobi, there were protesters from India complaining that westerners were forcing “offset projects” on them that they didn’t want at all, in this case hydro-power dams that would destroy their rivers. These dams are supposedly cleaner than coal plants, but the locals didn’t want a coal plant in the first place.
• In North America, as in Europe, there are ‘green groups’ that make a lot of money from selling emissions credits, and not all of them run appropriate checks on the true effects of their projects. Ironically, they would have to fly around the world all the time to see how much they offset. Don’t look, don’t tell comes to mind.

In short, the idea is nice, but it’s poorly regulated, its effects are debatable, and it’s used mostly for profit purposes, not to ‘do good’, even by environmental groups..

I send my Dad 1 ticket per year (and yes, I told him about this and talked to him before I posted it), and last year he bought one too to come to my sister’s wedding. The total cost came to under $300 dollars. And it is financially something of a stretch for us – we save all year for my kids to be able to visit their grandfather for a week or so. I value that more than other things I could buy for the same amount of money. My family lives on about 35K per year, including our CSA and my husband’s teaching job, and we have lived on much less. Both of us can make considerably more money, doing things we don’t especially think are useful or ethical, but we don’t, and we’re content with what we have, and with what we have to do in order to enable our family to be together. What we hope to do is invite my father to come live here, since there is nothing keeping him in Washington. If not, we’ll have to rely on the internet and letters, as you say.

You are welcome to try and compete with my husband for his job as a professor of astrophysics. I’m sure if you mumble loud they’ll hire you instead .

I’m not going to discuss why I have my children with someone who is so obviously out to get a rise out of me. It really doesn’t matter what I say – you just want to troll. What I will say is that our family does everything it can to mitigate our climate and environmental impact – we certainly consume considerably less than the average family of four. But you are right – that doesn’t change the fact that I have four children, and that their lifetime impact, no matter how careful will be greater than two children’s.

Where you are wrong is that it makes no difference then what we do. My family has an ecological footprint less than 1/2 the size of most American families, despite our greater numbers – in fact, we made that calculation back when my husband’s grandparents lived with us, so that impact was more even more people. My kids are here – period, just like you are. But that doesn’t change that every reduction we make in our consumption is preferrable to what would have been had we not.

Your reasoning is flawed – we all of us start from where we are, and from there, we go to where we can. Do my kids live like Bangladeshi children? No. But do they consume like average American children – absolutely not, and each year we consume less – and increase our happiness.

The US can support its present population, and even some moderate degree of growth in all likelihood – at a dramatically reduced rate of consumption. That’s not a defense of having four kids, just an observation.

I wonder that you bother to reply, if this is all so very wasteful. Why not just spend your time chatting with the garbageman (we don’t have those out here in the country) instead – uses way less fossil fuels and saves everyone some time.

Cheers,

Sharon

Your life is your own Sharon, but please consider costs vs benefits here. If you speak half as well as you write, IMO the planet would benefit from your *not* turning down oppportunities to influence the influencers. You could donate the money to charity if that’s the issue, but please, we need more of your voice out there, not less.

in my opinion.

And re carbon offsets – my understanding is that what they do is ‘harvest’ the ‘low hanging fruit’ of energy efficiency, so for now, they’re effective.
(after the easy energy improvements have been addressed, they won’t be)

The author lives in the northeast.

“Every other year or so we’re invited to a major family event involving flight. One to two times per year, my father comes from Bellingham, WA to visit his grandchildren on the east coast.”
.
.
.”I need to have this conversation with my father. He likes Bellingham, and frankly, we often get along better when he lives 3000 miles from me. But I can’t in good conscience keep sending him plane tickets. For older people, we may have to press them to make unpleasant changes at hard times in their lives. For our children, we will have to explain why the school trip to Israel and the yearly visit to Grandma in Arizona is no longer ok.”

(Her dad is going to be so thrilled if he reads this.)

I just did a search on orbitz.com for round trip prices from NY to Seattle. $218 Lowest I saw, you might be able to beat it shopping over time. I’m going to assume this is the price for a coast to coast trip regardless of destination or origin. Will also be using round trip NY to Tel Aviv, $1226, probably more variance in price if you shop.

2 roundtrippers for grandpa, 4 for the kids to Arizona, 4 (eventually) to Israel for the kiddies, and assume 1 family trip a year for the whole family (Mom and Pop don’t travel much anymore).

12@$218 = $2616
4@$1226 = $4904
Total = $7520

I come from a world where people work two or three part-time minimum wage jobs to live.

Yet a woman who apparently can’t earn much at her job, has no trouble conceiving of spending this much on a frivolous luxury item. I say she can’t earn much, because I daily see multi-generational farm families that are very, very depressed. What does her husband do? Why does he apparently make so much money? Is he worth it? Could a warm body off the street that doesn’t mumble to himself do that job if he had the connections?

A female, assuming she is monogamously paired with a male has to bear 2.1 children to neither increase nor decrease the world’s population. I’m not going to pull out my combinatorics book and figure what’s involved with this statistic, but let’s assume there is a .05 chance that a given child will not reach reproductive maturity. 4*.05 = .2; 4-.2=3.8 or the “biological load” she delivers to the general population. Dividing by her personal “allocation” she is at 1.9, or she has made her stress on the earth 90% worse in the next generation.

Say 300 million Americans, no immigration. If none of them fly, half of them stay home with the four kids and work at the local organic co-op, we still have a problem in relatively short order.

The math does not work. And whatever values she seeks to impart to these kids, I don’t think they are going to live like Bangladeshi’s.

Of course this is an academic exercise. Peak oil is going to curtail airflight. Unless we have a wonderful solar or nuclear future with lots of excess energy to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for aircraft, only the very rich are going to fly.

Worldwide? Population isn’t going to make it that high. And not for any reason I would choose.

Know what happened in the old days when dad was dying 3000 miles away? You heard about it by mail or telegram. Your sister gets married? The same, and you weren’t there.

Know what pisses me? You chumps shouldn’t have the money to live like this. I see people every day that sound smarter, work harder, and damn sure make a lot less money than you guys. Based on what I’ve read you should be getting my coffee at the diner or picking up my garbage. And the waitress and the garbageman should have your jobs.

I wonder if, in combination with the carbon taxing other posters have already mentioned, a graduated reduction would be more feasibly enacted, starting with the shorter flights that are more polluting and more easily replaced, to give other forms of transportation a chance to catch up in providing service before just pulling the rug out of the air-traffic system alltogether. Then transcontinental and international travel, as well as the importance of relocalization to reduce the need for so much travel, might be better addressed without so much popular and political resistance. After all, we can talk until we’re blue in the face about how all air travel should stop now, but we all know (at least here in the greedy ol’ U.S.) it’s not going to happen like that barring a major–and local–catastrophe. No politician in office has the political will to do it, and aside from the few conscientiously objecting folks around, no private person will do it, either. I mean, there are still a significant number of people who don’t even believe in global warming yet (as hard as that is to comprehend). To try to pass by them a total ban on what a previous poster referred to as their “freedom” to travel, if you’ll pardon the pun, just won’t fly.

Don’t get me wrong–I totally agree with the view that the West’s love affair with travel is not as important as the lives of those in 3rd world countries who will be hardest hit by the effects of global warming. I’m simply thinking in terms of what might actually be accomplished short of circumstances forcing the change in lifestyle.

As to the “good Christian” that posted about “Unless the money cost of flying becomes prohibitive, I will not voluntarily limit my visits to them, and neither will they to me.” I have this reply.

I’ve heard the rhetoric… “it is a free country and whether I want to conserve or not is my choice”. Don’t ya just love this mindless (yet unfortunately all too common) “free country” perspective? Another version of it is “If I can afford to buy and drive a Hummer who are you to tell me I cannot.”

Who am I? I am one of the other 6.5 billion inhabitants of this planet effected by your behavior! The issue is not whether one person can financially afford to waste, the issue is can the earth and the other 6.5 billion inhabitants afford that kind of greed, and selfishness? When you are the only person on the earth and your behavior does not effect anyone else, then you can have your “free country” rhetoric, but until then consider we are a human family and what any one of us does effects the whole.

Ultimately, the only thing that is really going to change the behavior of most people is when it is too expensive for them to continue to waste. That is why I continue to be a strong advocate for much higher energy prices. A HEAVY carbon tax is just what we need, but at present we lack the political will to implement that.

Todd