Interesting LIE

Environmental aspects of political flights.

Added by GordonAten on Apr 30, 2009 | Visited by 5384 | Voted by 52 persons

The amount of harmful emissions produced by an airplane during one long-haul flight equals CO₂ emissions produced by one car in three years!

This is the truth, which somehow is ignored during disputes about environment and global warming.

How many airplanes are flying out there on the Globe? According to some estimates there are between 210,000 and 220,000 operating aircrafts.

Obviously, not all of them are long-haul, but it would be realistic enough to assume that at least one-third (70,000) is long-haul, while the other two-thirds would aggregate for another, say, 30,000 long-haul flights.

To stay conservative, we shall assume that two long-haul flights are done in 24 hours, and that not all of them are flying every day, but every other day. Let's put aside military planes, information about which is probably not available at all. Then, we come to (a quite conservative) number of 100,000 long-haul flights per day globally. (Only in the US there might be about 5,500 planes at one time in the sky on a busy day!)

One tree compensates CO₂ emissions produced by a car for 500 miles. An average driver makes 20,000 miles a year, i.e. 60,000 miles in three years. It means every driver needs to have his own 120 trees three years permanently working for him to compensate for the clean air spoiled by his car only. It also means that for processing emissions produced daily by all planes on the globe, we need 12,000,000 trees dedicated only to this cleaning every day!

What about deforestation, guys? How many trees are cut out daily on our Earth? All these sad calculations may be continued endlessly.

The point is that while we are becoming more and more concerned about our cars and try to improve our drivers' tastes and driving patterns in order to feel ourselves right about "protecting environment", not very much is being said about the devastating role of the aircrafts. Especially taking into account that they spoil the air exactly where it is most destructive for ozone layer in sense of creating the "greenhouse effect".

Obviously, I am not calling for grounding of all air flights, as that would practically halt human civilization. Instead, those who are in power to make decisions, should start an urgent assessment of measures in the air-flight industry. And first and foremost, put in place some strict regulations (including financial) on use of luxury private jets and flights for state and international officials.

Otherwise, look what happens. On one side, for example, politicians are "fighting" with climate warming and pollution, adopt not only strict regulations on population and on vehicle production and use, but also allocate billions of our money budgets for different green programs. At the same time, these officials and their teams are flying planes like there is no day tomorrow and they do not have children, whose future to take care of.

Look what has been going on in a month time in Europe: G20 meeting in London, to which dozens of huge planes flew, then most of them flew to France and Germany, then to Prague. Dozens of really huge planes carrying the same people all over Europe, without any hints of willingness for "traffic optimization". And they did it for what? For show-off and some group photos and nice declarations, which most probably have been prepared in advance? As we wouldn't like them doing all the same in one place? And those hundreds of people accompanying them, what did they do?

Every week hundreds of thousands of politicians are flying in Europe to and back from Brussels and Strasbourg, one of their main prerogatives being adopting measures for combatting climate change and preventing global warming. Most of them are doing a good job for this purpose, but they would do a much better job by giving more concern to optimizing those trips. Are they all really necessary? Can some events be combined in one place? Can those vanity stuff accompanying the Big Shots be reduced to a minimum?

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I am sure with all assessment and accounting assets available to them, those politicians can produce a truly environment friendly travel directive for themselves and for the rest of us.