I agree with the commenters who point out the inherent absurdity of most vacation / luxury travel. Each of us can make our own decisions about airplane travel, but glorifying it in these pages underscores what a commodity it really is. The current trend valuing "experiences" over "things" is just another commodification process.
1
I just shared Andy's article internally at work and asked my (Fortune 50) organization to do more, to do better. No one blinks an eye to travel for work that could easily be done over teleconferencing. My company focuses on how we can improve the health of our clients yet they are silent on climate change. We employ technologies to make work more efficient, but yet we don't employ them when it comes to working at home (rather than commuting) or trips all over the country. There is no conversation surrounding accountability and steps we can take as an organization or as individuals. It's time for big businesses to step up and do their part. I'm going to keep pushing from the inside and use my wallet to push external actors as well.
1
You can do one more thing: Retire the '52 Places Traveler' feature. Racing about the planet is entirely the wrong thing to do.
2
I agree. I find the article fascinating; but believe it does more harm than good. My advice is to continue to drive the point that airline travel is causing a lot of damage. No one wants to hear this. But soon we are going to be loosing more and more people to disasters of climate change and eventually it will sink in. The Times Travel section should take a lead in this discussion. We have reached a point where it is now mandatory.
1
@Caro
In the same way the Washington Post responded to the disaster of the election with a new masthead: Democracy Dies in Darkness, why doesn't the Times react to climate change in these three ways:
--Come up with a similar masthead addition to appropriately reflect the near-end-times crisis we're in?
--Call it Climate Emergency, not "change"--which is too soft to convey the reality.
--Address class and consumption, including them as KEY perspective, in nearly every story you publish. This reflects inequality and resources, the whole gamut of what drives most of what news is about.
3
On June 3rd you were brave enough to open an important debate with the publication of Andy Newman's piece, "If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay at Home?" Not bad for a Travel editor - bravo!
Then barely a month later on July 9th you published a follow-up piece - "The Times's Travel Desk Takes a Step to Offset its Contribution to Climate Change." So the answer it seems is not to stay at home but rather buy a few carbon offsets to plant trees that presumably would otherwise not get planted.
I don't think I can be alone in wondering why having started this discussion you chose to close it down again quite so quickly. Why this unseemly haste to reach a conclusion, even a preliminary one? You acknowledge in the article that staff members on the travel desk offsetting their airplane travel through offsets is "a small gesture." But it's a start you say.
I disagree. It's not a start. It's a backward move. In the overall scheme of things, the travel desk should be contributing to the overall reflection in the entire New York Times institutional structure about how to adapt operations to the climate emergency. Let's not close down this debate in just four weeks - let us please have a plan to reduce the carbon footprint of all the operations of such an important and leading international newspaper group. Offsets fall a long way short of what is needed and what we expect from you.
3
Tourism is not the great boon to mankind that some people think.
Check out the damage that airbnbs are doing in this video.
Watch "Locals ‘kicked out of their homes for tourists' - BBC News" on YouTube
At the end of the Wednesday briefing was the p.s. below:
The travel editor for The New York Times, Amy Virshup, announced that her desk would buy carbon offsets for airplane travel by staff members on assignment, including our 52 Places Traveler.
From whom does one buy carbon offsets? Which conglomerate is profitting and what do they do with the money?
Why do we think it is an alternative?
"It (travel) provides economic resources and jobs for people, often in places where there are few other prospects."
Ms. Virshup's quote above is rather privileged. If there are "few other prospects", isn't it unjust to force people to be dependent on prostituting thier country so others can gawk at it?
Rome is trying to halt the damage being created by the tourists.
Perhaps your traveler should stay on his continent, which has some spectacular corners.
How does buying carbon offsets actually reduce carbon emissions?
1
@DailyReader a good question, especially considering sometimes the projects that are supposedly funded by these credits are often demolished or reversed just a few years after completion. A good example is the credits purchased to mitigate construction impacts following the Rio olympics -- already the rainforests they sought to protect and reforest have been destroyed. There's a ProPublica piece on the subject that's pretty telling: https://bit.ly/2OTWCJA
The question is: is something better than nothing? And if purchasing credits becomes more mainstream, can we hope that the credits themselves become more reliable, transparent, and enduring?
1
Why do you not promote videoconferencing more for business travel. With good Skype type or similar capabilities shouldn’t most business travel be unnecessary?
1
I appreciate you thinking about this, but the fact remains: This is another example of us wanting to hold on to habits and pleasures (luxuries) that have to be given up if we're going to save the planet. Giving up flying is actually one of the easier changes we have to make; there are many other climate-killing practices that are deeply embedded in our daily lives. (And btw, while it's true that tourism is a key source of income for some of the world's most popular tourist destinations, it's also true that the crowds are ruining many of those same places.)
9
I'm really glad the NYT is thinking about this. One thing I wonder about the "52 Places" series is whether there's any effort made to minimize the amount of flying that the writer does in terms of the order of destinations? I.e., why have the writer travel from Puerto Rico to India to California to Panama to Germany to Israel to Japan--instead, why not Panama to PR to Germany to Israel to India to Japan to California? That seems like it would at least cut down on the distances.
7
One comment noted that offsets are better than nothing. Generally they are worse than nothing based on the decade+ of experience with the Kyoto Protocol experience. There are inherent flaws in this approach particularly in countries with weak institutions and serious corruption. The European Commission evaluation found:
"Overall, our results suggest that 85% of the projects covered in this analysis and 73% of the potential 2013-2020 Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) supply have a low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated."
A guilt trip on travel is misdirected on a symptom. The cause is fossil fuels and their cheapness due to the massive market failure of not charging for their emissions (pointed out by Economist Arthur Pigou in 1920).
Put in place a gradually rising carbon fee and distribute the revenue in a household dividend to every household to make it progressive and protect the bottom two-thirds of households (as in the House Bill 763 The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act). The surge of innovation will find alternatives including for flight.
8
One very thoughtful comment suggests what is at least a partial solution. Perhaps the Times should cancel its current project of using one writer to visit many different and far off destinations, and instead hire local writers to cover places which are not so far from their homes. One could get perhaps a more knowledgeable and local perspective, and save immensely on the environmental costs of seeing the wonderful places visited.
8
@Wan
I fully agree! I had the same idea. This series is promoting the concept of traveling as a way of consuming new places, go somewhere fast, stay for a short time, take in as much as possible. That is not traveling at all, to savour a place, to get to know a taste of its rhythm and its feel just takes more time than this mad schedule can provide. I'd love for the New York Times to show how a more sustainable and a more healthy way of traveling can be done!
3
@Verena
I agree, slow travel options should be examined first. Walk, use local transport, ride share, trains, ferries ect. allow you to immerse yourself in the local culture and at least try to minimize the use of carbon.
1
Yes, do what you can to offset, reduce, reuse, etc. But you, the NYT, have the ability to do more to combat climate change by using your platform—the paper—to push back against anyone who isn’t supporting urgent efforts to combat it. Push back harder and harder and harder every single day. Push back so that there is no room for anything other than moving forward. Leave the naysayers behind. Don’t listen to them. Don’t publish what they say. Only publish what’s important to helping reverse the change. Put out a huge headline “Climate Change is Real and EVERYONE knows it.” We are so stupid for allowing stupid people to control the narrative. Organize a department to publish on a daily basis scientific facts and results of efforts. Start a scoreboard to keep track. (Like the Open Book Management movement in business start a competition to outdo each other’s efforts, not to make money, but to save resources and reverse the change.) There is so much a paper like yours can do besides buying an offset. Let’s get going on a BIG plan to do much more than that. Anything less is just talk and we don’t need any more talking. We need action and big action.
6
@Caro
In the same way the Washington Post responded to the disaster of the election with a new masthead: Democracy Dies in Darkness, why doesn't the Times react to climate change in these two ways:
--Come up with a similar masthead addition to appropriately reflect the near-end-times crisis we're in?
--Call it Climate Emergency, not "change"--which is too soft to convey the reality.
--Challenge class and consumption, including them as key perspective, in nearly every story you publish. This reflects inequality and resources, the whole gamut that drives most of what news is about.
It's a nice gesture but, really, a very small gesture. Almost absurdly small, and absurdly late. Plus, there's a lot of traveling that takes place throughout the organization∏—will that be offset too?
1
Nice of you to consider offsets in foreign countries. However, offsets are really only a modern version of plenary indulgences. Its time to imagine re-designing travel to use much less carbon intensive means. Why isn't there a train from Boston to Miami and a nice sleep in ferries to Caribean resorts? Yes time needs to be spent lowering our carbon demands, not monetary offsets that pretend to do something, but are a fiction.
5
Um ... nice sentiment, but ...
So the NYT Travel Desk will do carbon offsets for flights. Only for the Travel Desk (not the travel of the many people that work for a global news organization.) Only for flights, not other kinds of travel, and not things like oh, for instance, the roughly half million print editions of the NYT that are published daily. On paper. From trees.
Hate to say it, but this seems like the very definition of "virtue-signaling".
6
How have you chosen Cool Effect as the organisation for your offsets? What are you offsetting? Flights only? How aren’t you calculating how much to offset?
4
Only the wealthy travel and pay off their guilt with more money.
Just read how contrails are a big problem, aiding climate change.
Dumping fuel is also common, that can't be good.
Flying is not fun anymore. Too busy!
I did enjoy flying deadhead runs in the 70's. Especially on Christmas day where one year 6 Flight Attendants served free drinks and we all sang carols. Not First Class, this was better!
I also believe smoking flights HAD BETTER AIR as they compensated.
I stay close to home now.
I dream of a Queen Mary 2 Transatlantic Crossing, but that is not going to happen...sadly...
1
With warming feed-back loops and run-a-way Climate Change now a fact, offsets are a start, a minimum. The fact is we need heroic efforts. Less than ten years until we all feel the catastrophic effects.
ONLY by planting over 2 trillion trees in the next 10 years ( very feasible in terms of cost and land available) will the planet have a chance of stopping and then reversing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Cleaner air, cleaner water, less erosion AND you can save the planet.
8
Excellent beginning effort to staunch the effects of sending hoards of people to isolated venues which are, frankly, damaged by your promotion.
Unfortunately, I know from experience that the majority of visitors to unique places have little to no appreciation of the history, cultural, and ecological attributes of what they see.
Selfies are what these folks desire, not insights, reverence, or deeper understanding of what they see.
8
Assuage your guilt for attacking the environment with a token fee?
8
Backpack bike trips on back country roads? Train travel? Hiking trips?
Just a few "greener" travel thoughts...
13
Go by train!
Would love more on destinations accessible by low carbon modes.
15
Travel offsets are a fiction designed to ease guilt. If the Times cared about Climate Change, they would change the Travel Section to the Don’t Travel Section and the Automobile Section to the Public Transit Section. Travel can be a way of connecting with other people and cultures, but the kind of travel encouraged here mostly involves luxury hotels and restaurants in tourist apartheid and selfies.
15
I investigated carbon offsets and found that many were not really offsetting carbon as they claimed. While leisure travel seems to be enjoyed by those who do it, I would like to suggest some alternatives to frequent long-distance flights.
First, explore natural beauty locally.
Second, explore the cultural riches of a diverse city. Meet immigrants and learn about their cultures, foods, celebrations, and customs. Ask them about life in their home country. You'll get a different story from what you hear from tour guides and hotel workers in those countries.
Third, consider lengthy travel years, once or twice in a lifetime, rather than jetting off for weekends in faraway places. A working relocation, a year abroad, or a year in the Peace Corps can increase understanding far better than a tour of the sights and museums.
Fourth, find alternate ways to do business or volunteer work that involve less travel. Act locally. When you are required to travel for business, take extra time to explore and learn about the place you are visiting and its surroundings, in place of taking leisure travel trips.
Finally, yes, plant trees. Trees are an especially good way to suck up all the carbon your airplanes spewed out over the last decades, but they are not sufficient to counter ongoing emissions.
I stopped flying around about 25 years ago.
15
Perhaps the era of air travel is coming to a close. It is hard to imagine that, even packed into a plane tighter than sardines in a can, the climate impact is so great.
But I don't want to just stay home and only learn about the world through a screen. Perhaps the Times can explore more unconventional and perhaps unglamorous ways to get outside the bubble and engage with something different.
Of course, it would be a big help to American travelers if transit and long distance train travel were an option here in the US as they are in other parts of the world. The efficiency, cleanliness, comfort, and reliability of a German train is an absolute wonder for an American to behold. I also love the smooth, vista creating, and minimal impact transport of the Gondola, and the ease and total freedom of riding an e-bike.
The travel industry can support changes in transportation so that we can both save the world and still enjoy a bit wider piece of it.
8
It is better than nothing, I suppose. But I wish that the greater NY Times did more as well. A huge part of an individual's carbon footprint is the resources he or she uses when buying STUFF. It galls me every time I see yet another article written to encourage readers to buy yet more stuff (NYT Magazine in particular). Look at the constant articles about dinner plates that cost a hundred dollars each or cosmetics with pseudoscientific claims, the million-dollar houses with the expensively furnished interiors in the real estate section. No-one needs their keeping-up-with-the-Smiths insecurities to be stoked. Reduce, reuse, and recycle...and the first step is REDUCE!
18
@DK Amen, amen. This whole vital subject is actually about class. Travel is important and enriching and those precious and questionable gulps of fossil fuel should probably be spent sending underprivileged kids for an intensive experience of another culture and language. Not upper-class folks who can afford to "consume" faraway experiences and already have.
If you've been there and done that, maybe it's time to Think Globally, Act Locally. (Preaching, not always successfully, to myself.)
Something of far greater economic and educational value for NYTimes Inc and the Sunday Times Travel section would be to have climate offsets included in the price of all the high end travel excursions the Times sponsors and advertises almost every week at the back of the Travel section. These trips often cost $1000 a day per person. The people who go on these trips could both afford the climate offset surcharge and learn about the consequences of their activities. No doubt there are lots of reasons for NYTimes Inc. to not do such a program for all NYT travel tour participants, included in the price, but it all comes down to business = money. Good luck to the planet.
7
Expending fuel and expelling CO2, and then papering it over with carbon offsets to make you feel good does not unring the pollution bell. The CO2 is out there; it doesn't get magically sucked back in.
But, if it feels good, keep doing it.
5
Problem: far too many people all over the planet now have the means of following your travel advice, and do it. And far too few people have asked themselves the questions you do.
Simple ethical test: what would be the costs of everyone following your advice?
For each of your travel articles, please compute the costs, not just in Arctic ice decline, but the costs of sea level rise, droughts and floods, crop failures, starvation and pandemics.
To paraphrase Gandhi, the earth can support everyone's needs but not everyone's greed.
Ain't no way the earth can keep supporting the American Way, becoming the global way, of living big on a small planet.
How many more flights will the airlines add to enable the Time's endorsements?
Nobody is going to take away our freedom to suck from these oil pipelines. Not from our cold, dead hands!
10
I worry more about the carbon footprint of our globalized trade than airplane trips for pleasure or business.
The area where I live has some of the highest quality water from the Memphis Sand Aquifer to be found anywhere, yet the store shelves are full of water shipped from Fiji, Iceland, Italy, France and elsewhere. Imagine the cost in atmospheric carbon of your imported water.
Over at the electronics store are iPhones and other devices shipped from China on jets. Apple likes to push its green credibility, but they could ship iToys by the slow boat and have a much smaller carbon footprint.
8
There are many negative replies here, mostly accusations of greenwashing. I would challenge this cynicism with a positive view of offsets as necessary taxation. Any trend where citizens take responsibility by paying taxes toward the public sphere is a good one (even indirectly through non-profits). We are already living in a hybrid future of climate destruction, and our shared focus should be a balance between personal responsibility and public action. In the US context, increasing luxury taxes is almost invariably helpful.
3
@ Brian H.
Please correct me if I’ve misunderstood your comment, but scientific observations and forecasts are not cynicism - they are fact.
Thank you for any reply you may offer.
4
@Kevin G. Since when was a forecast ever considered a fact? Is that the new science? The computer model ueber alles? The concept of “carbon credits” trains the human to feel bad about breathing! This article laid down that guilt pretty smooth with the phrase, “It’s a start.”
Well, how’s it going to end? Are we all going to be wearing Draeger Masks in the evenings of the future to scrub CO2 during our favorite TV shows? Is that the future? I can see the advertisement during commercials all ready: “Making love creates more C02, so avoid it all together!”
I’m sure others have mentioned it, but spend next year focusing on making climate change real. Travel to Australia and learn about and report on bleaching coral reefs. Go to Indonesian islands where rising seas are eliminating fresh water supplies and describe the efforts to get drinking water. Go to Alaska in the summer and show us how the environment is changing from the unprecedented high temperatures.
Make it real. I appreciate the effort of you buying offsets now.
6
Thank you for buying offsets. I think it is a good step in the right direction. Maybe you could also start to combine visiting different destinations in the same region, if possible, and thereby reduce CO2 emissions, because you would then need less flights and could travel e. g. by train in the region.
4
We also have to start thinking and writing about travel in new ways that are appropriate for the 21st century. It's not just about CO2. It's about finding a sustainable way to live on the planet, and that's a huge challenge for travel.
5
The decision to offset is naive at best and a clear sign of a lack of understanding of the big picture. If we are actually going to drive down emissions globally, there are not nearly enough offsets to go around to make that a reality. The math doesn't add up if everyone chooses to offset rather than take real, meaningful action. Also, most offsets are not additional, meaning the money you spent on offsets most likely didn't have any climate impact. Long story short, offsets may reduce guilt, but they don't actually reduce emissions.
8
I agree this is too little too late. Yes, travel can be enriching, but people are rushing off on a new trip before they've had time to savor the last one. And it's insupportable.
Why not include a carbon-emissions estimate for each trip, based on roundtrip travel from New York City? You could convert this number into melted sea ice and into hours of human misery for vulnerable people.
Then rate each journey green (go ahead), amber (one every year or two) or red (one or two in a lifetime).
8
Thank you for making this article part of the "Reader Center" where it doesn't count toward the article limit. Is all climate coverage exempt from the paywall? It might be worth considering.
Ditto previous comments - the whole situation we're in is "too little, too late." A "carbon offsets" guide would help with several reputable options as well as recommendations for traveling without flying. Could you compare flying to cruises, RVs, electric vehicle road trips...? I think a lot of us want more information about this stuff and need help navigating it!
4
Carbon offsets are often just a scam to assuage guilt. Often enough they involve the displacement and land theft from indigenous people.
I often hear it said that travel allows one to gain a broader understanding of people in other places. When living abroad I've noticed travelers usually stay within their English speaking cocoon, never learning the language or interacting with those who live there beyond a superficial level unless the locals happen to be just like them, educated, English speaking, etc.
Vacation locally. Get to know the people who live in the Adirondacks or Maine. Drive to your vacation. If urban and rural interacted more it would bridge the horrid divide of tribalism we are experiencing.
10
@somsai Amen.
3
The Cool Effect website does not describe how it calculates the travel impacts on climate described in this article, nor how it arrives at the costs of carbon offsets and credits.
The site says its relies on some scientific advisory committees and an independent research subsidiary, but says nothing about who serves on these bodies and how exactly they calculate the cost of carbon offsets and credits. Cool Effect does suggest that there is no single accepted standard for evaluating and calculating costs of carbon offsets and credits.
According to Cool Effect’s IRS Form 990, its 2018 revenue was $12 million, of which $5 million was spent on marketing and outreach, which seems unusually high for a non-profit organization; this also seems to contradict Cool Effect’s on-line claim that more than 90% of its donations go directly to support its projects.
Carbon offsets and credits are complicated scientific subjects; perhaps a companion article in the NYT science section would help clarify a murky topic and explain why there are varying ways to calculate these figures.
For example, given that the area and thickness of summer Arctic sea ice varies from month to month and year to year, how is the volume of ice melt calculated? Or, given that airplanes’ engine emissions per passenger vary depending on the age, efficiency and number of engines, and the number of passengers carried per flight, how are the amount and impact of airplane engine emissions calculated?
7
Thanks for this thinking and for taking steps to neutralize emissions. Two suggestions.
First, in your writings you might consider encouraging folks to limit their leisure travel to one round-trip flight per year. For those who are not appropriately alarmed about climate change, cutting back (in some cases, way back) is a lot more persuasive than asking for total abstention.
Second, it feels like the right time to return to exploring the regions around our homes, deep-diving into the natural world that literally surrounds us. My family took two or three trips each year, and some of those those trips were formative...but I couldn't tell you much about the history or landscape of where I grew up. That's both sad and wasteful. Perhaps there's a Transit Travel, or "small travel" theme to explore -- not as a concession, but as a liberation from always feeling like far away is better.
5
Greenwashing! In our hubris and egocentricity, we still insisit we can have it all. We cannot. Time is short, peeps, and pretending we can "offset" our gross overconsumption is ridiculous. Stay home.
24
I would have assumed you would have been doing this for years now. Why the delay?
20
Thank you for doing this; yes, it's too little, too late, but it's always been too late on this issue, and action is better than inaction. Keep going!
7
I think it is a step in the right direction. I don't think people should stop traveling - - the knowledge and understanding people gain when seeing other places and cultures, meeting new people and learning other languages, is irreplaceable and can't be duplicated by looking at a screen or reading a NYT travel article.
I don't really understand how buying carbon offsets works. An article on that would be helpful. Meanwhile, let's all go out and plant trees, wherever we are.
"I believe that planting trees is the longest lasting, unequivocal good most of us will ever do with our very own hands. However much we recycle or bicycle, weigh the carbon footprints of paper or plastic, whatever food choices or travel choices we make — all of these decisions and actions only hope to mitigate our personal drop in the ocean of environmental responsibility.
Planting trees actively makes the climate better, and long after you & I are gone, the trees we plant will be cooling and filtering the atmosphere, holding water in the soil and the topsoil to the earth, providing habitat and food to wildlife, and sequestering carbon." http://useful-delicious.com/2019/06/10/sunset-over-the-apocalypse/
9
Several hundred thousand trees are chopped down each year to print the paper version of this newspaper and the fleets of trucks that deliver the paper burn a million gallons of fuel each year. Where is the carbon offset for that?
3
@Rick -- (I'm a forester, so feel as if I can speak to this with some authority) Paper is not a primary product for most forests; it's essentially a byproduct of lumber production, in the same way that dog-food is a byproduct of the meat industry. With few exceptions, forests are not cut down for paper, they're cut for lumber. The scraps and sawdust, or lowest quality logs become paper.
The sad fact is that planting trees at this stage is of dubious benefit, as even established forests are now becoming carbon sources rather than sinks. We've already destabilized the jet stream to the point that many are dying or burning in the persistent dry periods that regularly sweep the globe from the tropics to the poles. Our situation is far more advanced than most realize.
1
I enjoy train travel but rarely encounter a full train except on the northeast corridor. So I wonder if anyone has done a study to determine the co2 output per person/per mile on a crowded flight (when are they not crowded these days?) vs the co2 output per person/per mile on a half empty train or bus, or in a passenger car carrying two people and getting whatever the average mileage is for cars in this country.
8
You are doing five important things I don't see a lot of. Here are three: being candid about the problem, including your role in it; talking among yourself, an important part of learning and office culture change (which is usually invisible to outsiders); and you say you will be "reading" the "comments" (something I've wondered if journalists do). Offsets, at their best, are a decent solution, much better than doing nothing, other than the possible "Don't Go" conversation-to-come, still lurking outside the mainstream. It's hard to conceive of breakthroughs, which are obviously needed, but perhaps some of your readers will have one.
For now: (a) try to ensure the offsets are as legitimate as possible, including long-lasting (are newly planted trees maintained), are they using the best thinking between mixing biodiversity and plantations); (b) perhaps some of the funding should go to particularly promising research or pilots, such as fully legitimate biomass-fueled planes that truly close the carbon cycle, and/or projects with a solid plan to become carbon positive; and (c) using your purchasing clout and visibility to pressure airlines to first make offsets a more visible option to non-Times staff travelers, and then make them the default option.
Thanks for the mainstream extension of climate change beyond its usual beats, and helping get what will be a difficult transition going. As with other needed transitions, business-as-usual thinking and practice won't work.
23
Trave regionally. Encourage regional travel. There are far too many humans on the planet for us to travel distantly.
Another alternative is to go vegan for a month for every round-trip airplane trip you take. If you're already vegan, you get a free pass.
12
@JustInsideBeltway
Um, how many passes would you award a 50-year vegetarian? Seriously curious here.
1
Great idea! Thanks for doing so. Next up: rate/assess the companies you come across. Would be great if others new of reputable sources!
1
I appreciate the nod to mitigating your travel impact, but you may wish to delve a little deeper to get a clearer picture of your choices and travel’s impact.
Please consider reading Jem Bendell’s paper on Deep Adaptation, https://iflas.blogspot.com/2018/07/new-paper-on-deep-adaptation-to-climate.html
The author’s synopsis:
"The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war," he writes in the paper. "Our norms of behaviour – that we call our 'civilisation' – may also degrade."
"It is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today."
Another source to consider, Dahr Jamail’s “The End of Ice”. A well-written source of first-hand experience of where our world is and scientist-led forecasts of our probable future. In short, the biosphere is in hospice.
Consider listening to a few speeches by climate activist Greta Thunberg - she has forsaken most of not all air travel to highlight its massive negative impact on climate.
Continuing to justify air travel on the basis of buying carbon offsets being “a start” tells me the article written here is way out of touch with the scale of the existential problem of runaway climate disruption.
For the NYT to implicitly give license to its readers to continue to travel without guilt, if only they buy offsets, is wrong.
16
Take the train.
@Teddi -- even trains are still quite carbon intensive; with roughly 80% the emissions of air travel.
Even so, I think that perhaps the greatest value in train travel is the increased time cost. Increased cost greatly reduces demand, thus dramatically reducing emissions. It's for this reason that I've asked my distant family members not to visit me except by train or other lower carbon travel modes.
Thank you for buying carbon offsets!
3
Why not plant trees youeselves?
7
Cool Effect reports a $10m operating budget - but the 2016 Form 990 shows $8m spent on advertising and marketing?
Carbon Offset is an important strategy. I hope the NYT has chosen the right nonprofit as many will follow your lead
12
@S thank you for checking out Cool Effect. Can you provide a link and tips on researching other companies that claim to be offsetting carbon?
@Rachel
https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/
1
@Rachel
See article below that was published by ecosystemmarketplace.com which has a lot of good info
https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/green-old-deal-carbon-offsets-matter-ever/
https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/
1
"If seeing the world helps ruin it, should we stay home?"
Yes.
15
I think that buying carbon offsets is a lovely initiative and sets a great standard for the rest of the media industry to reckon with.
Two persons' intensive travel for the sake of writing new, positively-inclined, high-caliber content for a respected news source, can certainly be construed as a "luxury" and pointed to as a factor to the current state of the climate and environment, but I (and likely others) don't feel that's necessarily fair... However, I do see how that could be an easy high-vis target for frustrated activists, and appreciate their efforts in trying to improve the world one small step at a time. In this case, it might be quite a very very very small step.
What I think could be a greater positive would be for the travel writers to consciously emphasize seeking out & highlighting the most exciting and sustainable (which does not necessarily, but most often does, mean vegetarian, fair trade, renewable energy sourced, eco-touristic, etc) meals, destinations and initiatives, especially in the popular 52 Places and the 36 Hours In _____ series (the latter which btw is already one of my favorite & most consulted sets of articles ever published on the web.)
Then again the same suggestion could be said about the Food and Style sections as well.
Overall y'all doing a great job, please don't beat youself up too much about this (but thank you for doing so anyway.)
ML
6
This is powerful, Amy. I love that NYT will continue to cover travel, but from here on, the Travel desk is going to offset airplane travel by staff members on assignment by using Cool Effect, "which helps travelers fund carbon-mitigation projects across the globe, like planting trees in Africa and India, putting up wind turbines in Costa Rica and creating cleaner cookstoves for use in China."
Also, it was great meeting you at PRSA's Travel & Tourism Conference this year!
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I love this! Way to set an example.
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Travelers are simply not paying the true cost of their travels. (Ice melted, residents displaced, entire economies upended to serve weekend visitors) Frankly I cant believe these small token offsets would be better than just not going at all. By visiting these places, you are almost certainly destroying them for someone else. But just like suburban sprawler with the gas guzzling suv and A/C on full blast, its all about me me me.
Traveling should be the provenance of the extremely wealthy who can actually pay for what they’re doing. Cue the pitch fork army. Spare me pleas about the loss of cultural experiences - your ‘cultural’ experience is an act of cultural destruction. Amusingly they have to document every moment of their cultural experience on Instagram, because let’s be honest it’s just about showing off.
We all see the 52 places column, but few have the arrogance to go destroy a piece of it for themselves.
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Where do you buy carbon credits?
Who does the money go to?
Who determines the cost? Don't different planes and destinations pollute more?
Where and to whom does the money you pay go?
This could easily be scammed, with costs going to middlemen who spend your money on polluting things. Charities kept maillng things to my dead Uncle for donations two years after his death. I tried to call someone, but despite addresses in multiple cities most had no no contact
info.
.Save the animals, Save the children, Save the planet, all no le ideas but many acting like Vultures.
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Good points. I'd like to see an article about how it works.
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Bravo. Can you take the next step and no longer cover or accept advertising from airlines and cruise ships that don't do the same?
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A part of your considerations when exploring travel destinations should be the effect of the tourism industry on the places you recommend. American tourists especially are comfort hogs, insisting on air conditioning and cheeseburgers no matter where they are. The negative effects of tourism on a destination's environment, micro as well as macro, are in many ways proportional to its desirability as a destination. In other words, the more novel and appealing a place you discover, the greater its likelihood of becoming corrupted by becoming a tourist destination. There’s a reason such places are referred to as “unspoiled.”
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I love and applaud this decision! I sent an email just last night to my older relatives, trying to convince them to purchase offsets when they fly.
I also appreciate that you acknowledge that offsetting your reporters’ emissions is just a start.
Here’s a suggestion. Why not choose four 52 Places Travelers next year, each from a different part of the globe? For example, one reporter could cover 13 places in the Americas, one could cover 13 places in Europe and Asia, one could cover 13 places in Africa, and one could cover 13 places in the Pacific. This would make it significantly easier for these reporters to use alternative forms of transportation (bus, train, etc.) to get from place to place. It would ensure that each major region experiences roughly equal coverage, and it would even give a platform to a diverse group of journalists who wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to cover travel for the New York Times.
It’s something you might want to think about! Keep up the fantastic reporting!
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@Whitney Thanks for the suggestion, it's an interesting thought.
@Whitney
Love the idea! Also, '52 Places' must be grueling for the 1 journalist. GO LOCAL - and promote sustainable hotels/restaurants/initiatives.
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A next positive step to consider is ask the credit card companies and airlines and others who provide “points” to allow the the user to have carbon offsets applied when “points” are utilized for travel. The “point” provider would make the donation at the direction of the user.
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I applaud your efforts, it certainly is a good first step. So when can we expect the entirety of the NYT team to follow suit? Many reports right regularly about the dangers of Climate Change and how we need to act quickly. Show the world it's possible to be a successful business while being good climate stewards.
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I’m curious about a good resource for carbon offsets. I’ve seen a few articles about how the companies might not be doing as much as promised. How did you choose this particular company and are there others you recommend?
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Any possible future where humanity survives the next 50 years does not include much of a future for the travel industry. Purchasing carbon offsets for your own travel while promoting the industry is not a start, it's greenwashing.
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Like buying indulgences, offsets do more to absolve the guilt of polluters than they do to deescalate our climate crisis. Even the most preliminary research will point out the untidy truths about offsetting in the real world. But also, a quick glance at the Keeling curve will reveal how impossibly fast our emissions need to fall to avert catastrophe, and, crucially, that curve requires ADDITIONAL negative emissions/carbon removal/natural sinks that have not even been activated yet. In other words, to stay on the curve and have any chance at a stable climate, we need every negative emissions technology (including natural sinks) we have at our disposal, and then some. That means when you dump those tons of CO2 for your pleasure vacation, you are digging the world's carbon budget deeper into an already impossibly deep hole. Put more simply: we're already in (carbon) debt and we're heading for (climate) bankruptcy. WE MUST STOP SPENDING. Offsetting also poses ethical problems: it often means paying other people (often in the Global South) to reduce their footprints so we don't have to reduce ours. Meanwhile, is it we, the world's wealthiest, who have created the crisis because we can't fathom cutting back on flying or sacrificing our vacations. I applaud the Times Travel Desk for doing this, and it's a step in the right direction. But it's one step out of a thousand more that you need to take--starting tomorrow.
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I believe that the cultural exchange benefits of travel-- exposing yourself to different cultures and different societies --outweighs the carbon impact. Not traveling will lead to a more closed-minded society.
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To quote: “According to scientists’ calculations, a person’s share of the emissions on a one-way, cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles shrinks the Arctic’s summer sea ice cover by three square meters, or 32 square feet.”
However, the Arctic sea ice cover varies substantially over the summer in thickness and area. Ice doesn’t melt in square feet, but in a volume (area times thickness); a thick portion of ice will produce more melted water than a thin portion.
To understand how much carbon offset is required to make up for one person’s one-way flight JFK to LAX we must know:
What is the volume of Arctic sea ice melted due to a specified distance of air travel?
What are the variables and formula(s) used to calculate the amount of Arctic sea ice melt and the impact of the plane’s engines’ emissions?
How does the volume of ice melted vary with the number of plane engines, their efficiency and the number of passengers per plane?
What are the average area and volume of Arctic summer ice cover and how is that measured?
What % of Arctic summer ice cover is melted by 1 person’s share of 1 airplane flight? (Minuscule, I’d bet.)
What is the cost of the carbon offset, and how is it calculated?
The science and math underlying this article are not disclosed, so it would be helpful to have a link to the article(s) and author(s) whose scientific calculations are mentioned.
Virtue-signaling is more persuasive if based on transparent criteria and calculations.
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Although I am a committed homebody, I understand why people like to go to new places and to see new things. However, in this time of climate crisis, it is time to stop flying except in rare cases. It is time to stop taking road trips. It is time to consider how much carbon each individual is responsible for. In fact, as our world burns and the glaciers shrink, it is past time. I choose to stay home, or travel by train, bus, or bike.
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A good start. I have asked myself the same question + am ok to donate - but is that not just buying myself a good conscience - akin to the "Ablass" buying for sins that sparked Luther's Protestant movement?
A suggestion for your '52' places reporting: string them together in small sequences instead of zigzagging in multiple round trips. You can include the CO2 + offset in each report to raise awareness on the issue - much like listing calories at bakeries keeps me from buying high-caloric products.
And please, do not promote visiting remote wilderness areas as a 'secret hideaway'. Once millions read it, it is not secret anymore - some lands should stay untouched.
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This is a great gesture. More companies need to start acknowledging their contributions global warming. I'd also like to suggest that investment in carbon capture is important because paying for other people to not pollute (offsets) doesn't equate to actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
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Thanks for involving readers in your thoughts on travel and climate change.
In addition to your decision on carbon credits, you could also feature trips and travel options that involve lower-carbon ways to travel, such as by train, ferry, bus, cycling, or walking.
Expressing CO2 emissions in terms or area of the Antarctic that melts (as you did in this article) is very helpful too, as it's easier to grasp than "tons of CO2."
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I’m a 22 year old currently on my gap year having finished my undergraduate degree last year. I’ve just spent three months backpacking around SE Asia and the Himalayas. Having now seen first hand the effects of human consumption (plastic pollution on beaches, melting glaciers), I feel a far greater sense of responsibility to the environment.
Since my return a few weeks ago, I’ve gone pescatarian (with a view to going vegetarian and maybe vegan), I always carry my Thermos instead of buying plastic bottles and I’m trying to only buy sustainable/second hand clothing. Would I have made these changes to my lifestyle if not for my 3 months backpacking? Probably not. (Or at least not for a few more years until these issues become bigger and bigger).
Do these lifestyle changes compensate for my contribution to climate change when I was taking the 7 flights around Asia? No. But the trip undoubtedly opened my eyes to my responsibility to the environment, led to me making those changes and ultimately to reading this article. I will be buying carbon offsets in the future and will continue to educate myself on climate change.
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Sounds like a costly idea from a business standout, but props to all of you for doing it. Setting a great example that we can all pitch in to help protect our planet. I love traveling and will continue to do so, but I'll take a look at buying carbon offsets for my travels as well.
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I am an enthusiastic traveler. Across nearly six decades, I have frequented three continents and made trips to two more. My professional and personal life has been transformed in consequence. But I am now cutting way back. I have only driven about 100,000 miles across the course of my life, and I will continue to anywhere that public ground transportation -- bus and train -- will take me, without feeling at all guilty. But flying is another matter entirely. We need to structure our jobs and our personal lives to fly a lot, lot less until air travel does not require such a high output of carbon. The NYTimes can help lead the way in instructing us on how to do so. I can remember when flying was a real luxury; I do not want to return to that elitist moment, but I do want better public transport and new technology that makes flying more sustainable.
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So grateful. Thank you! We're volunteering with a community here in Valle de Angeles, FM, Honduras, to find ways to compensate it for protecting our town's watershed. As you noted, tourism, especially eco-friendly efforts, are critical. If our pilot effort is successful, we hope to encourage similar initiatives in many of the other communities which surround La Tigra National Park, the source of clean water for more than a million Tegucigalpa residents.
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