Making Reparation: Offset Your Life - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 145

our sense of multicultural contact, will have to evolve as we do so. We
may thus end up in this case as in the compromises above, accepting
occasional journeys for truly urgent purposes but otherwise giving pride
of place to the planet's survival.
How do things look so far? On the broadest scale, we could pressure
governments to adopt a greenhouse gas untax of the sort I described ear-
lier in this topic. An increase in the price of fossil fuels would raise the
price of air travel and could prompt us all, whatever our sense of the cli-
mate crisis, to change our ordinary practices. If necessary, we should also
ponder how to change the atitudes that our professions take for granted.
Workers could insist that their employers allow them to travel visually
rather than in person or to find other workable alternatives to flying.
We could all begin to think creatively about how we can meet, exchange
information, socialize with professional peers, and forge workable bonds.
All these changes will be necessary if our societies take real action; we
might as well get a start on that massive cultural shift before it is too late.
Moreover, if the compromises I outlined above sound plausible, we
could then commit ourselves to flying only on specific occasions, nar-
rowing the number of flights over a year to one or less, and over a lifetime
to a few: to study abroad, to return to an ancestral homeland, or to make
a few visits to specific, long-desired destinations. This severe reduction
in the number of flights might rightly inspire us to do the most with each
one, to make those air miles count as much as possible. If our lives allow
us, we might for example stay at our destination for several weeks if not
months, substantially reducing the climate impact per day of the visit.
Wherever we fly, we could take into consideration research that sug-
gests we could reduce the environmental impact of air travel if we fly
when a plane's vapor trail can reflect sunlight back into space—that is, in
the daytime and in the relatively bright seasons of the year. (One study
suggests that travel from December through February, only one-fourth of
the total number of annual flights in southeast Britain, caused one-half of
a year's warming effect from contrails; travel at night, around one-fifth of
the total there, caused 60 to 80 percent of the effect.) However, because
contrails may constitute only a portion of flying's overall impact on the
atmosphere, taking this step may have no more than a partial benefit.132 132