<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Gennaro Brooks-Church - Eco Brooklyn <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:info@ecobrooklyn.com" target="_blank">info@ecobrooklyn.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Which basically blows all my green credits to hell in jet fuel. What to do. </blockquote><div> <br></div><div>Here's one answer to that question:<br></div><div><br><h1>Marty Nathan: One <span class="">grandmother</span>’s carbon-based life choice
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<a href="http://www.gazettenet.com/csp/mediapool/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=xSteTAWkE0ycoSVJwmz34M$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYu6Kj2mCbPoVP_wGo58DC_YWCsjLu883Ygn4B49Lvm9bPe2QeMKQdVeZmXF$9l$4uCZ8QDXhaHEp3rvzXRJFdy0KqPHLoMevcTLo3h8xh70Y6N_U_CryOsw6FTOdKL_jpQ-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg" rel="lightbox" title="Photodisc/David De Lossy" target="_blank">
<img class="" title="Photodisc/David De Lossy" alt="Photodisc/David De Lossy" src="http://www.gazettenet.com/csp/mediapool/sites/dt.common.streams.StreamServer.cls?STREAMOID=3Z9CVwzS44wyhiayhnvI_8$daE2N3K4ZzOUsqbU5sYt6GJmI$doUqzofM7NkhCiuWCsjLu883Ygn4B49Lvm9bPe2QeMKQdVeZmXF$9l$4uCZ8QDXhaHEp3rvzXRJFdy0KqPHLoMevcTLo3h8xh70Y6N_U_CryOsw6FTOdKL_jpQ-&CONTENTTYPE=image/jpeg">
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Photodisc/David De Lossy
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<p>By MARTY NATHAN</p>
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Tuesday, February 4, 2014
<br> (Published in print: Wednesday, February 5, 2014)
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<p>NORTHAMPTON — Our
first granddaughter, Misha Ford, was born Dec. 1. I can’t 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.</p>
<p> But there was a problem. My daughter Leah is living in Cambodia with her husband, a Navy physician.</p>
<p>We did the expected. We
bought round-trip tickets to visit them in March. The <span class="">flight</span>, 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. </p>
<p>And in Cambodia, a place
we’ve 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.</p>
<p>Yet now, in 2014,
neither he nor I could ignore the conflicting unease associated with
<span class="">flying</span> 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.</p>
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You see, <span class="">flying</span> 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, <a href="http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate-change/science/climate-change-basics/air-travel-and-climate-change/" target="_blank">according to calculations by the David Suzuki Foundation.</a>
</div><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” </p>
<p>It seems that jet <span class="">flight</span>
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 <span class="">flight</span> itself is a major threat to many of
those same exotic and wild beaches, tropical forests and mountaintops
degraded and destroyed by global warming.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>However, those who
advocate for this now must “walk the walk.” 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.
</p><p>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.</p>
<p> Marty Nathan, M.D., lives in Northampton.</p></div><br><br><a href="http://www.gazettenet.com/opinion/10531107-95/marty-nathan-one-grandmothers-carbon-based-life-choice" target="_blank">http://www.gazettenet.com/opinion/10531107-95/marty-nathan-one-<span class="">grandmothers</span>-carbon-based-life-choice</a><br></div></div></div></div>