Howard Hanson
The admonition to “take nothing but memories; leave nothing but footprints,” attributed to Chief Seattle (after whom the city was named) some two centuries ago, is often cited as a core principle of responsible travel into the backcountry. I first heard it many years ago in connection with backpacking, and over time its meaning has escalated from being sure to pack out everything you pack in to minimizing any sign that you’ve visited a particular place. Purists now scorn even footprints.
These days, however, we speak of carbon footprints, and it’s not only the backcountry that’s in the mix but everywhere else as well. The responsible thing to do is to minimize your carbon footprint anywhere you go. However, as I’ve noted previously, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to carbon footprints. What, then, is responsible in the way of motorized travel in this day and age?
It’s interesting that a calculation comparing (passenger-jet) air travel and travel by (internal-combustion-engine) automobile yields approximately the same carbon footprints, in terms of carbon-dioxide emissions per traveler-mile, assuming two people in the car and long trips. For short trips, cars eke out a win due to the greater overhead of air travel (taxiways, take-offs, climbing to cruising altitude, etc.). With more passengers, cars take a strong lead – four people in the car cuts the per-person footprint to half that of air travel. Such a calculation cannot be truly precise, of course, due to uncertainties such as car mileage and aircraft load factor, but reasonable assumptions of 25 mpg and 65% of seats full on a 600-mile flight give identical footprints to within better than one percent, per passenger-mile. (Three people in the car and a full flight gives a similar result.)
This may seem counterintuitive, because airplane fuel consumption is more reasonably discussed as gallons-per-mile rather than mpg. But, as here, using miles-per-gallon-per-seat actually puts airplanes on par with – and, in many cases, well ahead of – automobiles.
But this equivalence is valid only for emissions per unit distance. Important here are the total emissions, meaning that the per-passenger-mile footprint numbers have to be multiplied by the distance involved. And it’s almost always the case that travel by air involves longer distances, often much longer distances.
For example, a road trip from Estes Park to Kansas City is about 600 miles farther than a trip to the Denver airport, so for two people, driving or flying to see the Broncos tilt at that particular windmill is about even, footprint-wise. Flying to Honolulu and back is ten times that, meaning, for two people, ten times the per-person emissions as a trip to KC. Anchorage is over eleven times the emissions. Europe is even more.
As responsible travel goes, then, one- or two-day road trips around Colorado and neighboring states, about which I wrote extensively in these pages last year, do well compared to vacations in Europe, in terms of direct emissions from fossil fuel combustion. If you can figure out how to keep a battery-electric vehicle charged up out there in the sticks, such road trips do quite well indeed. As I’ve said before, the widespread availability of quick-charge stations can’t come soon enough, emphasis on both “widespread” and “quick-charge.” It appears that the Tesla Supercharger technology is on its way to becoming the industry standard, so maybe there’s hope.
If every gas station had such chargers, the owners could both make money and help the environment by encouraging greater market penetration of BEVs. They would also have a jump on long-term sustainability from a business perspective, because “gas” stations will no doubt transition to “energy” stations over the next few decades. Owners who drag their feet on replacing petroleum pumps with chargers will eventually go the way of the dodo.
Vacation or other pleasure travel, the focus here, is only a small part of the overall problem, of course. Commuting to work and other business travel are also problematic from a carbon footprint perspective; these lend themselves to incentives rather than altruism as paths toward footprint reduction. And large-scale transport associated with commerce in general has a huge carbon footprint, the full cost of which is generally ignored. Building that cost into pricing schedules, whether in the form of a carbon tax or other mechanism, represents a political hurdle of daunting proportions but one that needs to be implemented.
There may be no free lunch when it comes to carbon footprints, but perhaps we can figure out how to keep the cost as low as possible.
Howard Hanson, Ph.D., is a member of the Trail-Gazette’s editorial board.
