Wanderlost
29 September 2005 | Share:
We want to travel the globe. But at what cost?
You know the ice pack of Alaska is turning to slush, Siberian lakes are disappearing and Peruvian glaciers are dissolving in the wind. Polar ice caps are dumping fresh water into the oceans, and the oceans, less salty, won’t absorb enough carbon. You know cruising cars stalled on South Street raise the temperature in the urban jungle. And the heat, reflecting off the macadam, smacks you in the face.
You know past climate shifts have wiped away civilizations.
You read Elizabeth Kolbert’s epic three-part series in the New Yorker on global warming. It was more disheartening than last November’s election. My friend, the Arcadia University historian Peter Siskind, considered abandoning the four-hour weekend drive to the east end of Long Island, where he’d spent boyhood summers. After all he, a quotidian eschewer of the automobile, as I am, spends countless hours on SEPTA, and walking, no matter what.
Then came July. Long Island promised empty beaches, long swims, cool nights.
My family and I cashed in miles and flew to central Mexico, joining a stream of American travelers who chalk up 36 million visits abroad every year. For that, while Philadelphia wilted, we in coach class struck the match that burned the earth.
Greenhouse gases released at altitude by our Airbus A319 were 2.7 times as powerful as those released on the ground by Siskind’s 1989 Camry.
Yet it was our right to fly into Mexico City in search of another life. To practice what the Independent of London calls “one of the most liberating trends of the last half century” — that is, to discover places and people different from ourselves. For us, it meant we would speak Spanish well and visit the homes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Better still: The breeze across Mexico’s Bajio sent us further even than Main Street in East Hampton is from Allegheny Avenue.
Air travel is widely considered the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Serious governments (and by that I exclude ours) believe that even modest reductions in carbon production are unattainable without significantly reducing air travel.
Well-regarded scientists wonder if life on our globe can survive until the end of this century.
Air travel, and by that I include air cargo transportation, is the most reliable god of the contemporary world. Medieval man could only pray to the heavens. We access them at will (and for cheap). We are mobile, by right and self-identity. Cheap flights are currency from Madrid to Nairobi. Restaurants in the Chesapeake Bay order fresh lobster from Maine. UPS has it there the next morning. Chinese businessmen fly from Changchun to Shenyang to check on factory productivity — and then to Beijing to report to the boss.
Despite lines, security, uncomfortable seats and lousy food, air travel retains its power — and we rise above the clouds. The captain’s gravely voice tells us we’re flying over Savannah. He doesn’t say that each passenger has blown enough carbon to drive from Philadelphia to San Francisco and back three times.
He doesn’t tell us that by 2050, the aircraft will be responsible for more than one of every seven tons of climate-changing gases released.
That emissions from international flights, purposely exempt from the Kyoto accord, are a non-negotiable fact of the global economy. Lest we shatter dreams of open society and end delusions of worldliness. And that’s why Earth First!ers don’t mob an embracing family unloading the taxi at the gate. I’m changing the climate! Ask me how. And policy makers fly to conferences on global warming. It’s our modern teet. Only like any sustenance, it comes out as shit.
There remain alternatives. Other means of mass transportation, like trains and ships, though slower, produce significantly less carbon dioxide than airplanes, especially when air is used for short distances. Boeing and Airbus, if faced with extinction, will give their engineers a challenge. Perhaps we’ll save the earth from ourselves. But in the meantime, before we cue the music, it’s worth putting everything up for discussion, including air travel. Even the best gods go out of favor.