It’s true, but I think it’s still important that we all own our part in the climate debacle.
The people who fly more and who fly in comfort (private jet and business class) are more wasteful, but there are also fewer of those people. It’s us— the unwashed masses- who are responsible for the majority of air travel, and if we all cut back on one flight a year it would make a difference.
A big moment for me was plugging my own numbers into a carbon calculator. I was totally shocked. I thought I was doing great by not owning a car, bringing a canvas bag for my groceries etc. What I found was that the handful of flights I took in a year were equal in carbon impact to an entire year’s worth of would-be car commuting, and that didn’t even include any international travel.
It was so easy to be on board with the canvas bag, but cutting back on travel was like noooo. Those are the facts though — air travel has an outsize impact on climate change, and I’m part of the problem regardless of what the CEOs are doing. Plenty of people who earn less money than me never fly, and I’d hope those people would be willing to recycle and stop using plastic bags, instead of justifying it by saying… well… I never fly like those elitists so screw it.
