by Paul Spivey
Over the past three months, I’ve been planning a much needed vacation and decided to go to Las Vegas for a few days. My selected destination had nothing to do with gambling, but luck really wasn’t on my side - I had to cancel the trip just a few hours before my departure. To cheer myself up, I ate a bucket of licorice and tried to see how NOT going could actually be a good thing. It didn’t take me long; I really don’t enjoy flying. But aside from my personal experiences with flying, I’ve also learned how significant an impact air travel has on our environment.
Every time I board a commercial passenger plane, my first thought is: what a grossly enormous vehicle, I wonder how many miles per gallon it gets? Well, the flight I reserved was scheduled for 870 miles from Seattle Washington to Las Vegas Nevada via a Boeing 737, which happens to be the most popular commercial passenger jet of all time. Even with the latest technological improvements, the best 737’s today use about 2.4 gallons of Jet-A kerosene-based refined petroleum per nautical mile. For me to fly round trip, this single flight would have consumed 4,176 gallons of jet fuel. And for this same flight to travel roundtrip just once every day of the year, that equals 1,524,240 gallons of jet fuel. Am I the only one who finds this shocking?
But when you break this down to fuel consumed per mile per passenger, it’s actually comparable to a hybrid car and yields about 35% less CO2 emissions than a sport utility vehicle.Â
Eco friendly passengers also have the choice from several airlines to purchase carbon offsets with their ticket for just a few dollars; carbon offsets for my flight to Las Vegas would have only cost $3.14. It seems most carbon offset programs are focused on planting trees or land protection in an effort to balance out the environmental pollution caused by air travel. Unfortunately, the rate of air filtration provided by forests is still absurdly disproportional to our hyper-accelerated rate of fuel consumption and pollution.Â
And therein lies the heart of the issue at hand: we all need to be more aware of our energy consumption and better understand the effects our lifestyles truly have on the environment.Â
So before you reserve your next flight, consider the following few statistics:
- Jet fuel production accounts for less than 10% of crude oil usage
- In 2008, 85,000,000 barrels of crude oil were consumed PER DAY worldwide
- Annual air travel worldwide accounts for 12% of the total CO2 emissions
- For every one gallon of gas, the average car emits roughly 19 pounds of CO2 into our atmosphere
Roughly 110 million Americans currently live in areas where the air pollution is determined by the federal government to be harmful to their health (that’s roughly one third of the entire U.S. population)
The worst part is, I still wish I went on vacation.
Sources: US Department of Transportation; GlobalWatch.org; Boeing.com; Green.sc; webecoist.com
