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https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/sep/06/flight-shame-climate-impact-tourism-boom-covid-environment-net-zero>
"For some people, summer holidays are a relaxing break from daily life, a
blissful chance to hit the sunbed and lie flat for as long as humanly possible.
Other people are on the hunt for new places and adventure – plummeting down a
hill on the back of a bike or tied to flimsy fabric and pulled through the air.
Others still are on a quest for culture, cuisine or enlightenment – or,
ideally, all three and then a nap. Travel is, most people seem to feel,
amazing.
The result has been an economic boon for some parts of the world that has
shifted money across oceans and into impoverished communities. But it has come
at a cost to the planet that travellers have long overlooked.
Summer 2024 has been the hottest on record, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change
Service said on Friday, with a warning that the “devastating” consequences of
extreme heat will keep getting worse without urgent action to cut greenhouse
gas pollution.
But the carbon footprint of the tourism sector, which hovers at about 8% of
planet-heating emissions, is likely to soar as more of the world attains
European and North American levels of wealth. What makes its climate impact
more alarming than many other sectors of the economy is that the single biggest
source of its pollution – flying – is fiendishly difficult to decarbonise.
Tried and tested options such as trains are limited by time and space. Electric
planes could work well over short distances but crash into the walls of physics
when trying to cross oceans. The most promising alternatives to paraffin are
costly synthetic fuels – derived from carbon captured from the atmosphere and
hydrogen made with renewable energy – and biodiesel, which would take up vast
amounts of land.
Some industry players have touted more eccentric fuels such as chip fat but
these, too, struggle at scale. “You want everybody running around collecting
fucking cooking oil?” Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, asked the
Guardian in December. “There isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power
more than one day’s aviation.”
The environmental demands that a traveller makes on arrival stack up too. Waste
litters previously pristine nature, crowds swarm towns built for far fewer
people, and water taken for pools and baths leave locals fuming in
drought-stricken resorts. Protests against “overtourism” have broken out across
southern Europe in response to the damage done by unthinking visitors.
The tourism sector has started to tackle some of these problems as criticism
has mounted. The industry can even make sizeable savings on its emissions by
putting solar panels on hotels, offering electric rental vehicles instead of
combustion-engine cars, and swapping steaks for plant-based burgers on
restaurant menus.
But the journeys there and back are likely to rub up against engineering limits
for decades. The tension between the hunger for travel and the bleak prospects
of rapid technological progress has left transport scientists scratching their
heads."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
