[Greenbuilding] Not Flying // was: The Coolest Buildings Aren't Green

[Jason Holstine]

Drink organic beer, or organic gluten-free, local, small-batch artisan
vodka.


On 12/1/14 1:05 PM, "Reuben Deumling" <9watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Gennaro Brooks-Church - Eco Brooklyn
> <info at ecobrooklyn.com> wrote:
> 
>> Which basically blows all my green credits to hell in jet fuel. What to do. 
>  
> Here's one answer to that question:
> 
> Marty Nathan: One grandmother¹s carbon-based life choice
>  
>  
> <http://www.gazettenet.com/csp/mediapool/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.
> cls?STREAMOID=xSteTAWkE0ycoSVJwmz34M$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYu6Kj2mCbPoVP_wGo58DC_Y
> WCsjLu883Ygn4B49Lvm9bPe2QeMKQdVeZmXF$9l$4uCZ8QDXhaHEp3rvzXRJFdy0KqPHLoMevcTLo3
> h8xh70Y6N_U_CryOsw6FTOdKL_jpQ-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg>
> 
> Photodisc/David De Lossy
> 
> By MARTY NATHAN
> 
> Tuesday, February 4, 2014
>  (Published in print: Wednesday, February 5, 2014)
>    
> 
> NORTHAMPTON ‹ Our first granddaughter, Misha Ford, was born Dec. 1. I can¹t
> tell you the joy that filled my heart. Anyone who has become a grandparent can
> relate to the excitement and expectation that grabbed my husband and me.
> 
>  But there was a problem. My daughter Leah is living in Cambodia with her
> husband, a Navy physician.
> 
> We did the expected. We bought round-trip tickets to visit them in March. The
> flight, though certainly not cheap, was affordable for a doctor and a
> professor. I dreamed of holding 3-month-old Misha in my arms, playing with her
> fingers and toes, feeling her breathe against my chest as she slept, taking
> the burden off Leah of walking her when she cried.
> 
> And in Cambodia, a place we¹ve never visited, with beautiful beaches and rain
> forests and ancient ruins. Our family has flown many places, most recently to
> Ethiopia where my husband and I had Fulbright grants to teach. We went to
> China for a week to a conference and I flew to Bolivia and Gaza on
> fact-finding tours.
> 
> Yet now, in 2014, neither he nor I could ignore the conflicting unease
> associated with flying halfway around the world for two weeks. Over the last
> several years we have learned more and more about climate change and now we
> cannot claim ignorance at what we would be contributing to global warming just
> by that one trip.
>    
> You see, flying puts in the atmosphere 100 times the gram carbon/weight
> carried of truck travel and up to 1,000 times the carbon of rail travel.
> Furthermore, because they are emitted at high altitude, those same carbon
> molecules have two to four times the warming impact on the earth as they would
> were they spewed out closer to ground, according to calculations by the David
> Suzuki Foundation.
> <http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate-change/science/climate-change-basic
> s/air-travel-and-climate-change/>
> Here is the math: Two to four times the 2.8 million grams of carbon that the
> two of us would be burning is equivalent to 8.4 metric tons of carbon.
> 
> It gnawed at us. Was this two-week trip to see my 3-month-old granddaughter
> really a gift for her? Or was it one more small bit sealing her doom? I woke
> up one morning realizing that I had to face the real impact of our plans.
> 
> I hesitantly told my husband my thinking and, amazingly, he agreed. Then I
> told Leah. Actually, and less amazingly because she ponders the climate
> dilemma all the time, she agreed. We are not going. We are cashing in our
> tickets.
> 
> Since then many friends have asked us when we are going and we have explained
> our decision: that we will wait until Misha is 9 months old and take trains to
> visit her in Washington when her parents return. More than once those
> progressive friends have answered, ³You¹re kidding, aren¹t you?²
> 
> It seems that jet flight for vacations is one of the sacred cows that many of
> us have a hard time examining. We see it as a right, compensation for working
> hard, to leave our homes and problems far behind to visit the exotic and the
> wild. What irony that that flight itself is a major threat to many of those
> same exotic and wild beaches, tropical forests and mountaintops degraded and
> destroyed by global warming.
> 
>  I do not believe that voluntary lifestyle changes by the privileged alone
> will stop climate change and prevent the horrors that will be visited on Misha
> but even more heavily on the poor of our world.
> 
>  There must be a massive political struggle, worldwide but starting in the
> industrialized countries, to eliminate the burning of carbon ‹ stop building
> fossil fuel-burning plants; invest in lower-energy public transportation,
> conservation, efficiency and renewables; and levy a carbon tax that begins to
> reflect the real cost of our use of the energy resources that have been
> sitting in our earth for hundreds of millions of years.
> 
> If we had to pay the real price of jet travel, few of us would or could climb
> aboard. Our major task must be to engage in that struggle.
> 
> However, those who advocate for this now must ³walk the walk.² We must try to
> live the life we are working for, make decisions that reflect our ethics, no
> matter how difficult those decisions are. Otherwise, our movement lacks moral
> force and will be seen by many as hypocritical.
> 
> I hesitated for weeks to write this piece, feeling that many could read it as
> moralizing. But my heart tells me it is past time that each of us look at our
> children and grandchildren and ask ourselves if there are not things that we
> can and must do out of love for them to end our poisoning of the atmosphere.
> It is in their name that we must learn and act according to that knowledge.
> 
>  Marty Nathan, M.D., lives in Northampton.
> 
> 
> http://www.gazettenet.com/opinion/10531107-95/marty-nathan-one-grandmothers-ca
> rbon-based-life-choice
> <http://www.gazettenet.com/opinion/10531107-95/marty-nathan-one-grandmothers-c
> arbon-based-life-choice>
> 
> 
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