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I loved flying, but the headlines of how oil extraction destroys communities and wildlife, burning it warms the globe, and flying everywhere tears apart communi
by spodek 5y ago
I loved flying, but the headlines of how oil extraction destroys communities and wildlife, burning it warms the globe, and flying everywhere tears apart communities, families, and cultures, creating craving and dissatisfaction . . . I couldn't do it anymore. My excuses that flying only contributed a little, that one day planes would be electric, etc collapsed as they became so clearly self-serving, ignoring the actual effects, not just the ones I wanted.
Once I accepted I couldn't see everything I wanted, I learned to appreciate where I was more. Now, not having flown by choice since 2016, I've learned to appreciate different cultures more, gain more control over a career I thought required flying (again, self-serving specious logic disappeared as I overcame the addiction), and spend more time with family. I experience more variety of food and more connection to culture.
Past experience tells me this community values flying and devalues reversing course from technology solving everything, but I'll take the downvotes if you disagree: the values of the lifestyle the article, however beautiful the images, cause most of our environmental, social, and cultural problems, even as people living those values profess to want to solve them.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoI know I'm extraordinarily biased in this situation, but I really hope that sailing makes something of a comeback as an eco-friendly means of international travel. Not flying shouldn't mean no more travelling, just that travelling happens at a bit more of a sedate pace. The act of sailing doesn't harm the environment at all, and even now some yachts have eliminated their marine diesel engines altogether in favour of a sail/electric setup which I imagine could scale up as massive battery banks get more and more feasible. There's also been nearly a century of innovation in materials science since the last clipper ships and even they were pretty fast.
- mellavora 5y agoWow, this would be so amazing. The supposed problem with sail is that it takes "too long" (what, 2-3 weeks NY to London?). But if you could work remotely that whole time, you haven't lost the time. This would be such a beautiful future!
- ubercore 5y agoIf you're worried about the environment, though, think of all the consumption and waste generated by people traveling at sea for two to three weeks.
- snowwrestler 5y agoComparative reasoning seems valid here. It’s not like consumption and waste are zero for a person sitting at home for two to three weeks.
- entropicgravity 5y agoExactly, these people are emitting CO2 24/7 regardless.
- i_am_proteus 5y agoThere's already a viable-but-not-utilized intermediate step, which is travel by motorized ship. Queen Mary 2 travels various transatlantic (and other international routes), but rates are rather high. One can also book passage on cargo ships, but price comes out to $100-120 a night, which, given that passage includes room and board, isn't unreasonable. Ship travel trades off cost of fuel (and aircraft) for cost of accommodations for the duration of the voyage. Add in that most people who can afford international travel cannot afford to take off 2-4 weeks from work just for the travel. Satellite internet might be able to obviate this for some employees, but even novel smallsat-based approaches have bandwidth limitations and latency that is too high for useful video calls.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoThe kind of fossil fuels used by modern ships still aren't great from a climate change perspective though, which is usually the motivation for not flying. Having said that I expect it'd still be better in terms of grams of CO2 per person!
- mc32 5y agoAlso for cargo ships, adding one person to the cargo load really adds very little to the margins. the ship was going to "sail" regardless of whether you were getting on or not.
- rhn_mk1 5y agoAren't margins the only thing that matters, per passenger? It's not free, after all.
- adrianN 5y agoIf you're burning fossil fuels for travel anyway, burning bunker fuel is actually pretty good from a global warming point of view. Because it contains so much sulphur, which has a cooling effect, it contributes a little less to warming that the CO2 tonnage suggests. Compare this with flying where the warming effect is magnified by a factor of two or three, because the emissions happen high up in the atmosphere. Of course acid rain is a concern, so the picture is more complex than my two sentence comment makes it seem.
- pnut 5y agoIt takes like 3 weeks on average to make a one-way Atlantic transit by sail, only retired people / gap year / independently wealthy can swing that.
- chana_masala 5y agoThe above isn't suggesting that it remain that way, but instead become more available.
- yardie 5y agoYou can do it in less than a week but it's going to be a terrible uncomfortable and fast ride as you skim across the top of the Atlantic at 20-30kts.
- glitchcrab 5y agoAs someone who has been sailing for 25 years since the age of 10, this sounds like an incredible way to travel.
- Freak_NL 5y agoYou do have some measure of control as a conscientious traveller (apart from voting, obviously). Not (or rarely) flying is one part of the equation; using your money to support more sustainable travel alternatives is the other. In Europe a slow but gradual resurgence of sleeper trains is happening in part because a sizeable group of people is willing to use them (me included). I would argue that doing this (i.e., increasing market demand for more sustainable modes of travel) helps pave the way for more structural solutions that require a lot of political will-power (such as taxing air travel much more heavily), where the availability of alternatives forms part of the decision making process.
- snowwrestler 5y agoCommitting to being present and engaged with wherever you are seems to me to be the secret to happiness. The happiest, most stable people I have known were happy and stable no matter where they were. This showed up most obviously as grace under pressure in not-great situations, whether traveling or on an adventure. But it also showed up in their willingness and happiness to bop around locally. They didn’t look down on, or disengage from, a day hike they’d done a dozen times just because it wasn’t a grand adventure. Same level of enthusiasm and fun. I don’t have a secret for how to be this way. But once I noticed it, it seemed like something I wanted to try to work toward.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y agoA vanilla article, about a vanilla photographer with vanilla journalistic photography. Seriously - these photos don't bring anything new to the conversation. Might as well be inspirational OS wallpapers. None of the insights on 'making it' are anything new either - saving half of your income, living cheap, committing to a nomadic lifestyle. Blagh. I'll take the downvotes as well on this one.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Taylor_OD 5y agoIf you are expecting every article you read to have new insightful information you're going to be pretty disappointed with the internet friend. They may not be new to you but they may be new to someone who just got interested in this field. Clearly they are interesting enough that someone felt they were worth publishing.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y agoI guess my gripe is less so with the quality of the article itself, and more with it’s presence right here on the front page of the orange site. There might be places online where all sorts of people find all sorts of content worth spending their time on, but I like to think that the rules by which this place operates, and the kind of crowd it attracts, should generally weed out this kind of content.
- cblconfederate 5y agoif that is weighing you down, there are people who live and travel around the world on sailboats.
- Taylor_OD 5y agoI care a lot about the environment. I'm a Bernie hippie grew up in the middle of no where guy. But the plane is taking that trip with or without you. The world you want to see might not be there or look remotely like it did when you wanted to see it. I'm all for helping the environment but continuing to fly and instead campaigning for a local/state/national politician who supports helping the environment by investing in renewable energy might actually accomplish something. The plane is taking off with or without you.
- wepple 5y ago> But the plane is taking that trip with or without you. Really? You think airlines will fly half-empty planes long term?
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoMore like, 1/300 empty... (At least in a world where it's 2019). I agree with grandparent poster, individual action won't save the planet, governments should increase CO2 taxes (extremely, if they're serious about saving the planet) and apply it to things like fossil fuels or meat. But then they'd get voted out of office, ah, God bless democracy! /s
- Taylor_OD 5y agoYes. Unless airlines fail the planes will continue to fly. They fly empty if no one if on them. Airlines have to continue to fly routes or risk giving up that route to another airline. We've seen that the government will prop up airlines.
- unethical_ban 5y agoI think you have some kind of strange internal experience to lead you to think that flying and travel is the cause of most of the world's social and cultural problems. Surely flying contributes a fair amount to greenhouse emissions. I'm sure recreational flying is the cause of cultural oppression in China and the middle east, the cause of ISIS, of the rise of authoritarian regimes in eastern Europe and the US, etc. And if you are going to try to tie that back to environmental, you'd have to make a big stretch on some of those issues.
- entropicgravity 5y agoOr just buy the commensurate offsetting carbon credits, just like Larry Page does for his 747, and you're good to go.