Is It Time to Scale Back Travel?

The pandemic has drastically reduced the number of people travelling, especially by air or on cruises. That's hard for industries and cities that rely on travel, but it's a good thing for the environment. Now that people are beginning to travel again, is it time to consider scaling back on travel to reduce the impacts on the planet? That's the point made in this New York Times opinion piece. 

I have written already about how the pandemic should prompt a rethinking of air travel. This is most true in the business world. Sure, there’s something magical about meeting face to face, but in an age of pretty good videoconferencing, there isn’t magic enough to justify the extreme environmental costs of routine flight. But flying is so carbon intensive — your share of the emissions from a single round-trip trans-Atlantic flight is almost enough to wipe out the gains you might get from living car-free for a year — that it’s worth considering limiting leisure plane trips, too. Some people can afford to travel to Europe every year, maybe even several times a year. I’m not one for flight shaming, but that level of indulgence ought to earn some measure of social opprobrium.

Cruises present an even better target for radical reform, if not outright prohibition. The early days of the pandemic highlighted the cruise industry’s vulnerability to contagion, but getting disease under control should be just the first step for this most polluting of conveyances. According to one study, a midsize cruise ship can emit as much particulate as one million cars. One cruise company alone, Carnival, was responsible for 10 times as much sulfur oxide as that emitted by the roughly 260 million passenger cars on European roads in 2017, a 2019 analysis found.

There may be a solution of sorts to some travel. I've been watching quite a few walking tour videos recently. People are creating videos of their walks in cities like London; some are even live streaming them. Given good internet access during a walk, it should be possible to hire a "personal walker" who could walk along a route that you pick and change the view to include things that you suggest during the walk. Perhaps it wouldn't be as pleasant as a walk in a foreign city, but it would be a lot better for the environment than flying on a jet for eight hours.