Fly Me To The Moon

Every once in a while the serenity that enfolds Pilsdon like an all-in-one pyjama suit is outrageously ruptured by the thunderous by-pass of a flying machine, its wings nearly clipping the roof of our manor, its roar jingling the cutlery and making it impossible to speak. Sometimes two will pass in quick succession to double the insult. There is a sweet arrogance about the way they roar so slowly past, ponderous in their perilously low flight above the hedgerows and spires of Dorset. They know they are interrupting whatever is going on below and they know there’s not a thing anyone can do about it. 

Yet on a cold and crystal clear afternoon the contrails of two far distant and silent airliners skirting the troposphere create a sweeping cross in the sky, or for the romantically-inclined, a kiss.  They are always up there.  On a clear starry night just a few minutes of peering into the void above will demonstrate how many passenger jets there are, blinking red and sliding quietly through the sky. 

I was once an enthusiastic consumer of air travel. It wasn’t so much for the experience of flying itself, although I have to admit I never really lost the excitement of take-off and the wonder of glimpsing strange landscapes far below, or my home city of London in miniature form.  It was more the wanderlust that drove me to seek out places far from my own country that could only be practically reached by plane. There was also the kinds of jobs I had in the arcane world of mobile phone software which often required me to fly to other countries to meet colleagues or work with clients, trips which I sometimes extended by a day or two to mosey around a bit. I loved exploring, and still do.

Eight or nine years ago I began to become aware that air travel had an impact on the environment and this made me slightly uncomfortable, to the extent that I wrote an email to someone vaguely relevant within my company (Symbian) to ask if a policy could be developed which would offset their employee’s carbon emissions when travelling on business. It couldn’t. I occasionally paid to offset a trip myself until I heard that some tree-planting companies don’t do much good, with others being downright fraudulent.  So I just shelved the unease as it seemed to be outweighed by the sheer joy of landing somewhere new, and anyway my job often demanded it.  I certainly wasn’t flying every week, but each year I would clock up between four and twelve long distance flights. Between 1998 and 2010 there wasn’t a single year I didn’t leave Europe at least once. In 2003 and 2004 I visited Japan eleven times. Good job I like sushi.

In recent years I began trying to fly less for holidays, catching the train instead. The Eurostar can take you from London to Avignon or Bruges in just a few hours. But to get to Berlin by train, for example, requires an overnight stop which makes a weekend visit impossible. And the train trip is invariably more expensive than going by plane. 

Having quit my job a year ago I obviously no longer have to make business flights, which has made it easier to make the decision not to fly at all*. It’s time to begin to whittle away at the huge carbon footprint I’ve made. I’ve even gone so far as to quantify it: 82 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted over 213 flights, covering 444,000 miles - that’s equivalent to 11 times round the world. It’s almost as far as to the Moon and back (478,000 miles). 60% of the trips were work-related. 

I figured all this out by trying to remember every flight I’ve made, along with the distance involved (provided by www.travelmath.com) and the associated CO2 emissions (taken from Wikipedia). Check out the data below.  Why not have a stab at doing your own sometime? You will almost certainly find that you’re not as dirty a jet-setter as me. 

* I reserve the right to break this rule in exceptional circumstances e.g. if stranded on a sinking boat out in open seas I'm not going to turn down a rescue helicopter