[abalone]

> All of the planes you ride on are going to fly anyway, get out there and get it!

This is just plain bad reasoning, for obvious reasons.

It is not “hypersensitive” to care about the CO2 impact of air travel. In fact it is a large blind spot for many otherwise progressive-minded people. These travel shows genuinely espouse progressive principles of learning from other cultures and yet almost never is there any mention of the significant CO2 impact. All the little things you might do throughout the year to lower your impact and get to where we need to be in 12 years are easily wiped out by just one plane trip. It’s good to talk about it.

[fwip]

Flying from Seattle to JFK is about 600 pounds of CO2. Driving the same trip is 2500 pounds - more than 4x.

Taking the bus instead of the car to work will "pay for" like 4 cross-continental trips a year. If you take a bike instead, it's closer to 10.

[abalone]

> Taking the bus instead of the car to work will "pay for" like 4 cross-continental trips a year.

Only if you want to maintain the same levels of unsustainable CO2 output. That's totally unacceptable. We need to get to as close to zero emissions as we can as fast as we can, which means taking mass transit to work, living closer to work, and not flying so much.

> Driving the same trip is 2500 pounds - more than 4x.

Not if you do it in an electric, sustainably powered car (or better yet train).

[paleogizmo]

Where do these numbers come from? Google gives me the car being roughly equivalent with a single passenger. If these numbers are referring to a family of 4+ in one vehicle then it passes muster, but that's a big caveat.