Why It’s So Hard to Make Decisions in a Climate Crisis
Or, should I have bought those plane tickets?
As the pandemic (kind of, we hope, maybe, a little, please?) becomes less of a crisis, a lot of us are looking forward to a big vacation this summer. Maybe you are in a position like mine. I’ve planned my first big trip in a couple of years. I’m excited to get out of the country and experience traveling again.
But there’s something that hinders my enjoyment of my upcoming vacation — my trip includes air travel, which means that my wife and I are going to dump about a metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to get where we’re going and back — about one-sixth of my total yearly “carbon footprint” in a few hours.
As I’ve bounced between feeling guilty and feeling OK about buying plane tickets in a climate emergency, it occurred to me that how one thinks through this problem reflects the difficulty we have as a society in grappling with the overall problem of climate change.
So, please accept this invitation into my weary brain as I wrestle with the ethics of buying plane tickets while the world is burning.
“Flying is the worst single thing you can do for the climate”
