People living in greenhouses shouldn’t throw stones, right?
I put that up front because we’re all being asked to make sacrifices to save the planet and the easiest thing in the world is to lecture everyone else.
I can’t afford to. You see, I’ve been calculating my carbon footprint. You can do it too, through a number of Web sites. I used www.climateers.org/eng/change/carbon.php.
What I learned doesn’t mean much to me. My carbon emissions for the year, on this crude calculation, amount to 61.39 tonnes. I generate 2.74 tonnes of carbon dioxide at home, a good chunk of that from using air conditioning to sleep in the dripping humidity of a Hong Kong summer.
I am a pillar of virtue when it comes to transport — just 1.52 tonnes. I don’t own a car. In Hong Kong there’s no need. Natural gas-powered taxis are plentiful and cheap, public transport safe, clean and convenient, and walking gets me to shops, favorite watering holes and to the homes of many of my friends.
That’s where the good news ends.
Nearly 90 percent of my carbon footprint, 54.31 tonnes of carbon dioxide, comes from flying.
A lot of people I know fly a lot more. Hong Kong is full of bankers, lawyers, analysts, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, managers, marketers and academics wearing a track into the carpets at Hong Kong airport. Many fly at least once a week, typically to China, Korea or Japan.
The bleak reality, though, is that I could sanctify myself with compact fluorescent light bulbs, cooler and shorter showers, fewer taxis and more bus rides, eat local produce rather than fancy imported muesli — all that stuff — and it would barely register.
I have got to stop flying.
Now, if I were serious about that, I would quit my job. Most of my flying is for CNN. I have been a reporter long enough to know that you can’t do the serious stuff by phone. The Sichuan earthquake, the violence in Iraq and the normal coverage of events across East and Southeast Asia are properly done by looking at things first-hand.
But giving up a job and a calling I like — to say nothing of the income that sustains my family — is too big a sacrifice to seriously contemplate. And someone else would simply do it instead, right? Similar rationalizations doubtless run through the minds of everyone else I bump into in the flight lounges.
But what about personal travel? In April, I took a family holiday to India. My two-year-old still talks of the Taj Mahal and seeing an elephant poo. My older daughter is about to go on a school exchange to Connecticut. In the past couple of years we have traveled together in Cambodia, Vietnam and New Zealand and taken long-distance trains in China. I want my kids to know the world, to feel its width and richness and beauty.
Later this year, I will fly the lot of us to New Zealand to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday and my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide.
Worse still, in November, I will fly to Australia for two whole days to see my older daughter dance the lead in Nutcracker. I am already bursting with pride.
For me, personal travel is about family. Which sounds great. Even noble. But I also want my kids — and yours — to grow up in a livable planet. And if you’re reading this saying, “selfish b—”, I couldn’t blame you.
To give up personal travel, one of the abiding joys of my life — you might even say one of the purposes of my life — really would be a sacrifice. But no other sacrifice is meaningful if travel is not included. Seems I’ve got some thinking to do.
So here’s my question. Have you made any real, rather than token, sacrifices in the name of global warming? What was it? And how do you feel about it now?
Post an online comment to “Sound Off” below my blog at www.cnn.com/goinggreen.
Hugh Riminton’s final entry in his “Going Green” diary appears tomorrow in the Taipei Times. CNN’s special coverage of “Going Green: Search for Solutions” continues until Sunday.
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