
Carbon emissions from tourism are rising at an alarming rate - dilawar
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05108-x
======
Regardsyjc
What truly spells trouble for human life on earth are unsustainable business
practices.

Recycling is a bandaid. Fast fashion is a nightmare. Agriculture is one of the
biggest causes of carbon emissions.

It is unfortunate that travel is creating such an impact but I personally get
annoyed whenever I see an article try to make an individual feel guilty for
their contribution to climate change. Nothing one person could ever do could
hold a light to the amount of carbon released by industries. Not that you
shouldn't recycle but I find it weak reporting to guilt individuals rather
than actually talk about the real problem.

[https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-
emiss...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-
data)

[https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-
business/2017/jul/10...](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-
business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-
responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change)

~~~
jaredklewis
> Nothing one person could ever do could hold a light to the amount of carbon
> released by industries.

I feel this creates a bizarre boundary between "individuals" and "industries."
"Industries" didn't just magically spring up, created by an unknown exogenous
force. They are created by, for, and sustained by individuals.

I want a iPhone -> I buy it from Apple -> Apple sources said iPhone from a
host of companies wrecking extreme environmental havok. Because I didn't
directly create strip mine the precious metals required, I am somehow absolved
of all responsibility for the effects of someone else doing it? To me this
just seems like a big guilt laundering scheme.

It doesn't feel fair to lop on the blame on industries when we are consumers
supporting them.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not about forcing a divide, it's about recognizing that you can't solve
it from the customer side.

This is a coordination problem. Yes, all the individuals on the market for an
iPhone combined create the environment for a bunch of companies to damage the
environment. But in trying to tackle it on consumer end, you're basically
asking each individual in isolation to make a big personal sacrifice (of all
the personal, social and productivity benefits coming from a high-quality
smartphone) for distant, abstract, and completely uncertain gains. Uncertain,
because they depend on _most other individual_ to decide the same way. Most,
not every, so maybe I'll buy my iPhone but tell everyone else not to buy it -
every single one thinks.

There are _many_ other situations where this happens in life, and the solution
is universally to not depend on individuals, but create coordination
mechanisms that help force the issue from the top. Like environmental
regulations in this case. Or worker unions in case of employee/employer power
imbalance.

~~~
candiodari
Well, that's the whole thing about environmental regulation. The problem is
energy expenditure. Everything you do, down to breathing, expenses energy.
Some things more. Some things less.

A good proxy for energy is price. This is a heuristic of course, it's not
perfect.

So if you want to know what it would take to do good for the environment,
imagine that you can only spend half as much on everything. Your backpack,
your iPhone, ... everything. Not because you don't have the money, but because
environmental regulation means you can't spend it like that.

So only $20 restaurants. No iPhones, only cheap androids (no flagships) (or of
course, if you like featurephones that's fine). No BMW 5-series or SUV, just a
hatchback, and one of the smaller ones. And so on and so forth.

If you want to regulate this, that means those products would simply become
out of reach of the normal person. Not even because they don't have the money,
but because it's forbidden for them to spend it like that.

~~~
Regardsyjc
Renewable energy like solar are getting more cost efficient. One report says
that renewable energy will be consistently cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewa...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewable-
energy-cost-effective-fossil-fuels-2020/)

------
binarnosp
Pfff, it's so annoying that the peasants started flying and visiting places
like the Royals do./s

We peasant, unlike the Royals, cycle to work, recycle, don't spend million on
candles on our yacht (yachts pollute much more per passenger), but must feel
guilty for our once-a-year plane trip.

I feel the pain of climate change, but this must be a shared and planned
action, not just a one-off "tells the peasant to don't fly" action:

\- industries must change (and the aviation industry is creating cleaner
engines [1][2])

\- industries MUST be regulated (don't expect a corporation to act in the
public interest)

\- better public transport should allow us to leave our cars at home

\- cities must be planned so we can walk to the store, park, etc

[1] [http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/airbus-rolls-
ult...](http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/airbus-rolls-ultrafan-
demonstrator-fly-747-testbed) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geared_turbofan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geared_turbofan)

~~~
candiodari
But how else would royalty ever discuss the need for peasants to forego that
one plane trip ? I mean, they had to queue ! With only one person per plane. I
kid you not !

You know what that's called ? Sacrifice !

[http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/03/paris-un-global-warming-
su...](http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/03/paris-un-global-warming-summit-at-
private-airport/)

------
mirimir
That _is_ quite the clickbaity headline for _Nature_. I mean, global climate
change _may_ destroy human civilization, but it's ridiculous to say that it
"spell[s] trouble for the future of life on Earth". Archaea occur km below the
surface. I can't imagine that the atmosphere affects them much.

~~~
jacobolus
Humanity is causing a mass extinction, of the type that will take the planet’s
ecosystems hundreds of thousands of years (or much longer?) to recover some
kind of equilibrium after. For example, most of our coral reefs will die and
never return in the same form. The question now is how complete that
destruction will be.

I agree it’s a bit silly to lay that entirely at the feet of airplane travel,
but even if we could magically halt all other carbon emissions tomorrow, we
would still probably need to deal with carbon emissions airplane travel in the
near future if we want to avoid catastrophe.

As for the rest, I guess the question is whether you consider “trouble for
life on earth” to necessarily mean complete annihilation of all life vs. just
killing off most of the species and fundamentally altering most of the
ecosystems.

~~~
mirimir
Probably more like millions of years. Maybe 10-100 times that. But still, that
headline is ridiculous.

------
kasperni
This is one thing that worries me about a potential "nobody-is-going-to-work"
or just a future where a large group of the worlds population moves into the
middle class.

What are people going do with all their free time. Big cities and tourist
destinations are already cramped to the point where there are demonstrations
and you have to shut them down because of the toll it takes on the
environment.

[https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/aug/10/anti-
tourism-...](https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/aug/10/anti-tourism-
marches-spread-across-europe-venice-barcelona)

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2018/04/0...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2018/04/06/philippines-
not-only-country-shut-popular-tourist-destination/494902002/)

I cannot imagine how bad this will be in 10-20 years.

~~~
adrianN
As it is right now, it's impossible for a large part of humanity to consume at
western middle class levels. Arguably it's impossible for the current western
middle class to consume at its current levels.

------
baxtr
I don’t like that many of the climate articles are just alarming and not
actionable. So now what? Naming alternatives would be good. Don’t travel ever
again? Travel locally? Hitchhike?

~~~
jacobolus
You can’t do anything about problems you don’t know exist, and you can’t
prioritize systematically without some understanding of where the bottlenecks
are.

There’s no problem if some researchers exclusively focus their time on
discovering and describing problems. Someone else can explore possible
solutions. Someone else can try to plan/develop an implementation of each of
those. Someone else can work on political advocacy to build support for one or
another solution. Etc.

It seems you have already brainstormed a few personal steps you could take to
combat this problem at an individual level. But that isn’t going to cut it at
a societal level.

For that we probably need some combination of (a) less carbon-intensive but
still convenient modes of transportation, (b) globally implemented carbon
taxes [or the like] which force consumers to confront the true costs of their
consumption, including plane flights, (c) large-scale public education
campaigning, possibly including discouraging the public from traveling halfway
around the world multiple times per year, etc.

~~~
baxtr
Ok, good points there. I just feel with climate change: we’re way beyond the
information stage there. We all know that the climate is changing and that it
is man made. We need action. Action that is feasible on a personal level

~~~
zachwood
> We all know that the climate is changing and that it is man made.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. We don't even have a clear
majority in America.

[http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-
climat...](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-
climate/ps_2016-10-04_politics-of-climate_1-01/)

------
melling
The article has few details. Considering China’s rise in CO2 emissions to 30%,
I’d say industry and the use of coal to generate electricity is a much larger
problem.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions)

------
quickthrower2
Maybe the answer is to travel more?

Travel for a year, and you don't need to use planes at all. You have the time
to slowly make you way around a long distance. Hell you could walk.

Inbetween gap years, travel to closer destinations without a plane.

Travel forever, take a tent, and then you don't need a house.

~~~
mirimir
Been there, done that. It became less fun as I got older.

------
rdiddly
A big reason I can't take climate conferences seriously: everybody flies to
them.

~~~
tomtimtall
Anecdotal, and also not true.

~~~
vixen99
There are seemingly endless links to 'climate hypocrisy' but I suppose that's
all fake news. Is it anecdotal that 50,000 people attended the Paris Climate
Conference? Wouldn't video conferencing have sent a resounding message that
these attendees really did believe that doom is at hand?

~~~
jacobolus
There are something like 100,000 _flights per day_. Billions of passenger
trips per year. 50,000 people attending a single conference or not is not
going to have a significant effect on global climate, except as a symbolic
gesture.

What is needed are large-scale systemic changes, not canceling one or another
particular meeting.

~~~
smsm42
Me not flying to my once-a-year vacation is going to make effect 50,000 less
of that, and yet that's what Nature implies I should do if I believe them. But
if people that can produce 50000x effect with only minor inconvenience to them
don't do it, why should I do it for the price of very major inconvenience
(forgoing long awaited vacation and never seeing other countries again ever)?

~~~
jacobolus
Nature did not state that you personally should do any particular thing. They
only pointed out that travel accounts for 8% of global emissions and growing
(and at current carbon emissions levels the world will be altered dramatically
and irrevocably).

Individual people’s personal sacrifices are barely going to dent global carbon
emissions. We need to tackle these enormous global problems systematically.
For example, we might be able to substitute less carbon-intensive means of
long-distance transportation, impose significant taxes on jet fuel, figure out
ways of discouraging business travel by plane, or raise public awareness of
closer-to-home vacation destinations.

------
jblow
So is carbon offsetting really a thing, or not? If it is, well, these sites
that tell you how much to give based on flight length say it is really cheap.
So just make offsetting mandatory. The end.

~~~
hannob
Their calculations are... optimistic to say it carefully. I once researched
this a bit and stumbled upon "we don't calculate the emissions for building
and operating the airport, because it's already there" (of course not the
exact words, but you get the idea). Also they are usually using the
calculations from the emission trading system, which by itself is riddled with
fraud and loopholes.

But even more: This has diminishing returns. These schemes rely on getting
relatively cheap ways to reduce carbon emissions. If you scale this up you end
up not being able to do this any more.

------
hamilyon2
1) Traveling is one of biggest value for money you could buy.

2) Sibling comment mentions traveling more, but not on plane. Some careers
could afford that, I guess. Business owner can have a vacation, return after a
year and continue where he left. But simple math and reason says we cannot all
be in this priveleged position

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _1) Traveling is one of biggest value for money you could buy._

Wait, how? Going to the same place millions of people are going to every year,
taking the exact same photos you can find on Flickr, of exact same things,
from exactly the same spots? Experiencing the completely fake "local culture"
created for tourists? All to get some memories that will quickly fade away
into the general feeling of "I've been there, it was great"?

Maybe it's a personality thing. I've never been into tourism, and find it
weird, to say the least.

~~~
monort
Have you ever tried? You shouldn't be forced to travel like everybody else.
Like go only to a second largest city, go for the nature, visit only places
that have an eclipse, go to cities with conferences you'd like to attend, go
to places where your friends live.

------
skybrian
This is why we need carbon taxes. Not all travel is equally worthwhile, but
people need to make their own decisions about what to cut back on.

------
toomanybeersies
I wonder how overlanding compares to flying for carbon emissions.

Next year, I plan on overlanding from Bali to London, possibly kicking on to
New York and then the West Coast of the USA or Canada, depending on how much
money I have and spend on the way.

It would be interesting to see how that compares to flying for carbon
emissions.

Now I'm interested, so lets crunch some numbers:

The drive from Bali to London is roughly 18,000 km (Bali -> Bangkok -> Hanoi
-> Beijing -> Ulan Bator -> Moscow -> London). Using numbers from a
spreadsheet I found [1], a bus emits roughly 27 grams of CO2 per passenger km.
So the bus trip is 490 kg of CO2.

Flying emits 280 grams of CO2 per passenger km (from the same spreadsheet),
the flight is about 13,000 km (DPS-KUL-LHR). That's 3600 kg of CO2 emitted.
Clearly I'm saving the planet by taking the bus.

However, it takes time to drive from Bali to London, and just existing causes
CO2 emissions. According to Rome2Rio [2] it's almost 7 days (168 hours) of
non-stop travel. Let's assume 12 hours of travel a day, because we aren't
complete masochists, that's 14 days of traveling. The Rome2Rio route does
include trains, but let's imagine that it's busses all the way and they're
magically as fast as a train (which they are certainly not).

Apparently as a New Zealander I emit somewhere around 10 tonnes of CO2 per
year [3], let's imagine that I continue emitting that much while travelling
through the developing world. That's 27 kg per day. For 14 days that's 380 kg.
So the total emissions from overlanding from Bali to London is roughly 870 kg
of CO2, or around a quarter that of flying.

So, in summary: If you have too much time on your hands and want to save the
world, don't fly, take a bus. Of course, it will probably take me closer to 3
months than 14 days to get from Bali to London, which would clearly tip the
balance in favour of flying, but the trip isn't about getting from A to B, but
getting from A to Z and visiting the 24 letters in between, to terribly
paraphrase Grace Slick.

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon-
emissions-per-transport-type)

[2]
[https://www.rome2rio.com/trip/sbcgbmie](https://www.rome2rio.com/trip/sbcgbmie)

[3]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon-
emissions-per-person-capita)

~~~
skybrian
I don't think you should count CO2 used from existing because it's the same
either way.

Maybe a better way to think about it is to compare CO2 per day from different
ways of spending your time?

And this isn't something to minimize, but rather to make sure it's worth the
cost.

It seems like we should start by reducing business travel, since most people
don't enjoy it much? Also: combine trips when possible.

------
rpmcmurphy
Maybe this is all not such a bad thing. The worst case scenario is a mass
extinction that kills off large animals, clearing the way for whatever is
next, not unlike the Cambrian explosion. We elected Donald J Trump. We (large
animals at the top of the food chain) kind of deserve what's coming to us.

~~~
baxtr
Not our children though

