Towards a Personal Commitment to Sustainable Travel

By Robert McGarvey

I hear the buzz – you do too – all around us now is the sound of travelers planning, packing, moving.  After 16 months of no travel (in my own case), it is plainly exciting to be again thinking about hitting the road.

But in my own case – and I am not preaching to you, just relating – I plan to travel in a much more sustainable way.  Climate change is real.  It’s nonsensical to deny it and where I live, in Phoenix, it is easy to see.  KTAR sums up the numbers: “[In 2020] Phoenix broke records for the most 95-degree days (172), 100-degree days (145), 105-degree days (102), 110-degree days (53) and 115-degree days (14) in a year with daily heat records being shattered 18 times throughout 2020 and tied another 15 times.”

Meantime, we are depleting our groundwater reservoirs and the Colorado River, which supplies much of the water that irrigates the west, just is coming up short.

In Arizona, climate change is not a parlor game word.  It’s become a matter of life or death, for many plants and animals and very possibly, in the long term, even humans.  Don’t snigger about the last. A 2019 Sierra Club Magazine headline told why: Can Phoenix Remain Habitable?  It asked.  The article is a good read and it spells out how Phoenix could dodge this bullet. But it is not optimistic that sanity will prevail because the city talks a good game…but real steps are fewer.

Which is why it comes down to me, by which I mean all of us who live in Phoenix – and since the planet is facing the same climate changes, pretty much all of us everywhere

That is why I am mulling where, how and why I travel.

Understand, I remain deeply skeptical that we will soon see a vigorous return to 2019 level business travel.  Between the frugality of CFOs and the lethal state of Covid-19 around much of the globe – to say nothing about the one in two Americans who are not yet fully vaccinated – there simply is no rational forecast that sees business travel rebounding this year and possibly not next.  Will there be more business travel in the second half of 2021 than there was in 2020? Of course there will be and that is because there were less than half as many business trips in 2020 as in 2019.  It won’t take much to log higher numbers in the second half of 2021 and that won’t prove much, either.  

Personally, my position will be that I will take business trips where and only where an in person appearance (as opposed to a virtual appearance via Zoom) is likely to produce better results.  Face it, hitherto, we took a lot of trips because, well, that’s how it always had been done. But the long travel hiatus has made it easy – necessary – to experiment with alternatives and, guess what, often they work. 

Before booking a business trip I will ask is it necessary? Is it wise?

A lot of times I probably will decide the trip simply isn’t needed. That will save money, save my time (business travel is hideously wasteful of the traveler’s time), and perhaps help save the planet.

Flying is bad for the environment. According to the BBC, “Around 2.4% of global CO2 emissions come from aviation. Together with other gases and the water vapour trails produced by aircraft, the industry is responsible for around 5% of global warming.”

That seems a small number?  Perhaps.  Indeed, buildings and cars are by far the biggest producers. 

But I already am very mindful of how much I drive (just a few thousand miles per year) and where the thermostat is set.  So I will also do my bit to cut out unnecessary business travel too.

Another target will be unnecessary leisure travel – and already there is talk of a lot more of exactly that.  I cannot tell you how many people I know who are dreaming of a trip to Antarctica and that has to count as perhaps the most unnecessary trip imaginable.  Watch the Bourdain show and if you want realer sensations, stick your head in an icebox for a few minutes and finger the ice cubes.  

In 2019-2020 about 74,000 of us traveled to Antarctica and, according to research published by Cambridge University, “The average tourist trip to Antarctica results in 5.44 t of CO2 emissions per passenger, or 0.49 t per passenger and day.”

OK, maybe some travelers in fact have good reasons for this trip. I don’t get it but that might be my failing. We each have to do our own calculations.

But the point stands: my commitment going forward is that the leisure travel I take will be done with a mindfulness of the environment and I won’t take the trip if there are other ways to gain the experience.  

That means I won’t be taking impulse weekend trips to Madrid, as I have done, or Berlin.  But travel I will…just not so much and only after I weigh the pros and cons.  

It’s the least I can do to help save the planet.