Starting tomorrow, I will be off to Europe for a two-week visit to my family, followed by a tour of the Tuscan countryside. If I was 100% pure, I would stay home, and use Skype to stay in touch with my loved ones. After all, air travel is one the most CO2 intensive mode of transportation:
This is where the power of emotional ties collide with my green conscience. The tragedy of my 86-year old mother slowly falling to Alzheimer’s, and the adorable pictures of my new six-month old nephew Amadeo, are stronger than all the carbon calculations. I have to go.
To ease up my footprint, I will, of course, buy carbon offsets from Terrapass. And dream of a not so distant future, when air travelling may not be such a curse on the environment.
Marguerite,
Have fun on your trip. I wish your mother well.
Please make sure to note, in passing, (in a way that doesn’t distract from your enjoyment!), the price of gasoline and electricity where you visit.
We will miss your activity back here while you are gone.
Also, just FYI, Italy is home to some of the early renewable energy efforts, e.g., geothermal power. In fact, I think the first use of geothermal steam to produce electricity is not far from where you’ll be.
Cheers, and have fun.
Jeff
Marguerite, if you were “100% pure,” you would be unbearable! We are all green sinners. (Well, maybe not the biodynamic yogis at my CSA ….)
And Jeff, honestly, do you think La Marguerite can leave La Marguerite alone while she is gone? No, she told me she will be blogging while away. So you will not need to go through La Marguerite withdrawal! 🙂 I hate to see her blogging on her vacation, but I’m hoping she’ll share some interesting anecdotes about Europe…I miss it so.
Marguerite, I wish you a very nice holiday. May it bring you energy and refreshment.
As for your carbon-guilt: I hope you can find comfort in the fact that I think that if everyone would be as concerned with the environment as you are, the world would soon be alright.
Like Lynn, I had hoped you wouldn’t be posting here. I’m still hoping you’ll be wise and keep most of the anecdotes for when you get back.
We’ll just have to fend for ourselves for a while. 🙂
Good luck with your mother – these are tough times. My father-in-law recently died after four years with Alzheimers.
Being with friends and relatives is not optional, but is part of a balanced life. You have managed to help other people change their patterns and probably are net carbon negative by your actions. At this point most of the things we do individually are not huge. Encouraging larger actions can be extremely leveraging. A few years ago I talked to a CIO about something or other and he asked about the state of remote conferencing — does it work at a human level? I had friends who studied the issued and linked them up. The last I’ve heard, they are saving about 3 million flight miles a year based on the program my friends put together… I would like to think that I helped a bit.
So enjoy your stay as much as you can and take care of your mother. There is no need for guilt.
au revoir green friend,
save the notes, photos and environmental observations for us.
make contacts, make touch, make memories. bon chemin.
Thanks all! I will continue to post while away. Took my camera with me. Will see what interesting thoughts come up, while there.
> Jeff : for the price of gasoline it is easy. in France it is on average 1.60 € for unleaded per liter and 1.50 for diesel ( roughly).
As for electricity… it depends of the subscription you got. To EDF, the national utility, it is from 0.11 to 0.13 € per kW-h.
> Marguerite : we forgot about photographs. It will be for next time. Enjoy your stay in Paris, la ville lumière ! 🙂
There is plenty of evidence to indicate that we had better pay attention here and now to the ways unbridled, private air travel is damaging the atmosphere.
At the Height of an Energy Crisis, Fat-Cat CEOs Still Litter the Skies with Private Jets
By Chuck Collins and Sarah Anderson, AlterNet. Posted June 28, 2008.
If shareholders, corporate watchdogs and consumer groups would like to know just how weak the oversight of corporate management is in America, they need to check out the abuse of corporate jets.
The private jet industry has more than doubled its sales in the past five years, and corporate executives form the backbone of its clientele. In addition to legitimate business trips, many executives and their families have access to the company jet for personal use, an expense picked up by their companies’ other stakeholders, including shareholders and employees. And the rest of us pay a price in diminished air quality as a result of these heavily polluting jets.
Private jet owners probably have noticed that wholesale fuel prices have increased 418 percent over the past five years, adding $5,000 to a Gulfstream jet flight between New York and Los Angeles. But this is small potatoes for a high-flier who shelled out 10,000 times that amount or more to buy the plane in the first place. At a time when both major-party presidential candidates are vowing to give shareholders greater influence over executive compensation, the private-jet perk deserves special attention.
Stakeholders now can get a better look at jet usage among corporate titans, because new rules require the disclosure of all perks valued at more than $10,000. Personal use of corporate jets was the most common perk among 386 of the largest companies on Standard & Poor’s 500. A Corporate Library study found that more than half of the 215 companies surveyed allowed or required executives to use company aircraft on personal trips, with a median cost to shareholders of $182,929.
The companies with the highest fliers include Abercrombie & Fitch, which gave CEO Mike Jeffries $1.4 million worth of corporate jet time over the past two years, and Starwood Hotels, which spent $866,178 in 2006 flying CEO Steven Heyer back and forth between his Atlanta home and corporate headquarters in New York.
Sometimes it’s the CEOs’ relatives who benefit. Tyson Foods Chairman John Tyson is allotted 120 hours per year of corporate jet time, which he can parcel out to friends and family whether or not he accompanies them on the trip. In 2007, Qwest Communications ponied up several hundred thousand dollars so that new CEO Edward Mueller’s wife and stepdaughter could use the corporate jet to commute between Qwest’s Denver headquarters and a home in California.
It’s the norm these days for the largest firms to require CEOs to use private jets for all travel, including personal vacations, citing concerns for their executives’ security. New York University School of Business professor David Yermack says this arrangement “is like telling the CEO: ‘We insist that you eat at a five-star restaurant for your own nutrition, and we insist that you drink $800 champagne for your health.’”
When corporate boards are approving such outrageous perks, you have to wonder what else they might be signing off on. Indeed, in virtually every recent case of corporate corruption, private jets have played a role. Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo, under investigation for his role in the subprime mortgage meltdown, threatened to resign in 2007 unless the company let his wife fly with him and cover his personal taxes for the perk.
The private-jet perk is — literally and figuratively — a high-profile sign of an executive reward system out of control. It’s time for corporate stakeholders, including institutional investors, to intervene to help CEOs break the habit.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
[…] means. Marguerite, once again, provides us with interesting data on that matter. In her article The curse of air travel, she proposes us an interesting graph […]