Making Reparation: Offset Your Life - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 141

Bringing this analysis home to our own lives can be quite sober-
ing. Let's say you drive a fuel-efficient car, recycle, and live responsi-
bly—except each year you take a single cross-country round-trip flight.
According to a representative carbon footprint calculator—the one at
terrapass.com—driving a car that gets forty miles per gallon 12,000 miles
a year pumps an estimated 5,869 pounds of carbon dioxide—just under
three tons—into the atmosphere. In comparison, a round-trip flight from
Boston to San Francisco, with one stop along the way each direction,
emits 2,553 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. But if you multiply
that number by 2.7 to reflect the full impact of that flight on global warm-
ing, it has a net effect of around 6,893 pounds—a half-ton more than the
carbon footprint of driving that car the entire year . 128
So would it be beter to take short-haul propeller lights? he later, it
turns out, are inefficient because they require planes to spend a greater
percentage of the fuel geting alot. It's far beter to use other forms of
transportation to reach destinations so close; Monbiot's own estimates
suggest that it's about twice as efficient to travel that distance by car
(with the British average of 1.56 passengers on board), over ten times
more efficient to take the train, and around fifteen times more efficient to
travel by bus. 129
Wouldn't it be possible for airplanes to use renewable sources of
energy? Not yet. Ethanol and other biofuels do not burn well at the
extremely cold temperatures found in the troposphere, and a hydrogen-
fueled plane would contribute thirteen times more to global warm-
ing than today's jet airplanes. 130 Amyris, a biofuel company, has created
a renewable jet fuel suitable for actual use and is currently testing it for
release in a few years. 131 But whether it can be produced cheaply enough
and at an appropriate scale without causing too great a damage to cur-
rent ecosystems is doubtful. So far, there is no available alternative to the
kinds of aircraft we fly today.
Facts like these fill a good number of us with outright dismay. Those
who live far away from family or friends, whose professions virtually
require us to get around by plane, or who simply love to explore the
world would do almost anything rather than give up air travel. We might
even regard the very thought as a kind of personal affront. But that is the
very fact that makes this example so powerful and so instructive. The