I read recently that one can be environmentally
friendly to the extreme in recycling and energy savings, but that a single
short commercial jet flight wipes out anything green you have done over an
entire year. It’s all owing to the fact
that jet engines are terribly inefficient and it takes a humongous amount of
fossil fuel to keep the plane and its passengers aloft.
George Flynn, Georgetown
George has impaled himself on
the horns of a dilemma. In modern times,
we have the luxury of doing things that were completely impossible before the
age of fossil fuels. A few hundred years
ago, the only sources of useful power were human muscle, animal muscle, and
fire. The Founding Fathers had large
numbers of servants, both voluntary and involuntary, for the express purpose of
doing hard physical labor, such as plowing fields and chopping wood. Today, most of us can’t afford a retinue of
servants to do our work for us. Instead
we use fossil fuels, in the form of gasoline or coal-generated
electricity. We have “energy slaves” to
cook our food, wash our clothes, light our houses, and push our cars around
town. If you assume that a human worker
can sustain a work output of about 80 watts, the average American has 147 “energy
slaves” working around the clock to maintain his regal lifestyle, cooling our
offices and harvesting our food while we post cat pictures on Facebook.
A Boeing 747 uses about 80
megawatts of power to take off, the equivalent of one million “energy slaves”
pedaling like crazy. You just can’t do
that without jet fuel.
On a round trip flight from
New York to San Francisco, the combustion of that jet fuel produces 2 to 3 tons
of carbon dioxide emissions per passenger.
Since most of us (in the States) generate about 19 tons of carbon
dioxide every year, air travel is a significant part of our carbon
footprint. You would be absolutely
correct to point out that Al Gore, jetting around the world to discuss climate
change, has a much bigger carbon footprint than some unfortunate soul who
doesn’t really care about carbon emissions but can’t afford to go anywhere.
So here is the dilemma: We love to fly. Who doesn’t adore a vacation in the
Caribbean? We also are hooked on air
conditioning, the biggest electricity hog in our Texas homes. Are we to give up flying and cooling for the
sake of being “green”? There are some
who say that if the earth becomes uninhabitable for human beings our
grandchildren will wish we had taken this question a bit more seriously, and
they have a valid point. On the other
hand, if I personally give up jet travel and air conditioning, staying home to
sweat miserably this summer, all my sacrifice accomplishes in the short term is
to take the pressure off ERCOT, allowing some less virtuous person to crank his
thermostat down to 68 degrees and have friends over to see his pictures from
Aruba.
I can’t single-handedly save
the planet, but that doesn’t mean I’m off the hook. I can make a multitude of “green” decisions
that actually improve my overall well-being.
Using energy efficient light bulbs saves money on my electric bill. Eating less meat reduces my carbon footprint
and is healthier for my heart. Locally
grown foods are delicious. A small car
is easy to park. Bicycling tones my
bum. Recycling is completely painless. Take a train somewhere, or vote to build a
train somewhere.
The famous architect and
inventor Buckminster Fuller said this about the power of the individual: “Something hit me very hard once, thinking
about what one little man could do.
Think of the Queen Mary – the whole ship goes by and then comes the
rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the
edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It’s a miniature rudder. Just
moving the little trimtab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder
around. Takes almost no effort at
all. So I said that the little
individual can be a trimtab. Society
thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally
the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big
ship of state is going to go.”
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