Global climate change caused by our fossil fuel emissions is forcing us to assess many aspects of our behaviour. Flying is a particularly sensitive example because we have become accustomed to hopping on an airplane and dashing off at 700 or 800 kilometres per hour to some foreign country for the taste of another culture, for a change of scenery, for a family gathering, for an exotic adventure, or for a routine business deal. Not only are we destroying the uniqueness of the place that we came to experience by homogenizing the entire planet—the source of Yogi Berra’s oxymoronic comment that, “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”—but flying happens to be the single most polluting activity over which any single individual has control. This is because flying is a choice. So the subject of flying and its contribution to the 37.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2023, although uncomfortable, deserves some consideration.
Continue reading The Quadra Project – The Carbon Cost of FlyingTag Archives: carbon footprint
A Message for Luxury Yachts Appears at Cortes Bay
Three new signs have recently been greeting boaters arriving in Cortes Bay.
They say:
- “200 gal/740 l diesel = 2 tons CO2”
- “<2 tons CO2 per person per year = safe fair share”
- “luxury emissions wipe out life”
What the Cortes/Quadra Passenger Transportation Survey Discovered
282 people from Cortes, Quadra and the Outer Island’s as well as some visitors participated in CCEDA’s passenger transportation survey. They were asked about a variety of options for passengers in the islands, a bus, taxi, carpool, van pool, or rideshare.
“We found that the most popular option for all respondents was a bus on Quadra that included both ferries. Cortes and Outer-Island residents only need a bus that goes from the Cortes Ferry to the Quadra Ferry. They don’t necessarily need to go anywhere else on Quadra. It’s just that straight line that so many people take across Quadra. On Quadra, the most popular option was a bus that included both ferries, but also made a loop. It would be helpful for people living on Quadra and visitors to get around Quadra,” explained Jennifer Banks-Doll, Project Lead for Quadra Island.
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Beyond Personal Carbon Impacts, Seeking A More Sustainable Planet
How should we live on a planet where the rate of extreme weather events seem to be increasing, and humanity is the cause?
“We’re not doing well in terms of global temperatures at all. We’re on a dangerous trajectory. We are not going to keep below the 1.5°C on average limit, that seems really clear. We’re actually over 1.5°C in terms of individual years already, but the target was stated in terms of multi-year averages. It’s clear, with the inertia and the climate system, that we’re going to exceed that. It also seems quite clear that we’re going to exceed the 2.0°C limit the way things are going. We just don’t have the kind of policy action that we need internationally,” explained Dr Kai Chan, a professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at University of British Columbia, Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal ‘People and Nature‘ and co-founder of CoSphere for a community of small planet heroes.
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The Quadra Project – A Moral Dilemma
We don’t usually consider the moral implications of our carbon dioxide emissions, but an article in The Economist (December 23, 2023) presents this issue in the bluntest of terms. How many people are dying as a result of our personal contribution to the global warming crisis?
The mathematics to calculate this are not complicated. Consider the per capita emissions of each country in the world, count the number of people globally who die as a direct consequence of climate change, and it’s possible to determine the responsibility that each person has for the death of others.
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