How to mitigate the carbon emissions of your flight (or avoid them altogether)
Travelling across the country in hours or across the world in a day is wonderful. However, it takes an unbelievable amount of jet fuel to get a plane up into the air. In other words, even if you do your best to live green the rest of the time, one round-trip flight on first class from Vancouver to Toronto can create the same amount of emissions as an average year of travelling by car, or nearly 20 percent of the metric tonnes that the average Canadian produces annually.
While 2 percent seems small, air travel is on the rise. The onus of saving the environment is largely on policy makers and big industry leaders to really step up their game when it comes to environmental policies , but individual decisions still do matter. If you’re thinking, “I’m just one person,” individuals making smaller lifestyle changes play a major role in setting off larger systemic changes.
Flying nonstop is better, because studies say that take-off and landing causes 25 percent of a plane’s emissions. Flying economy is also better, according to Lara Barlow, the general manager, Canada for Travelzoo. “By flying economy, each passenger’s share of a flight’s carbon emissions is relatively less because it’s spread out over more people,” she explains. It makes the plane more fuel–efficient.
Alternatively, Barlow says, “You can purchase a carbon offset for your flight through a third party such as TerraPass, often for as little as $10.” The David Suzuki Foundation explains that some offsets are more effective than others, so make sure to do your research. Note that the point of offsets isn’t to decrease carbon emissions overall, only to keep the status quo, and bear in mind that carbon emissions remain in the atmosphere for roughly a century at a time.
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