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On Dromomania (sophiefuji.com)
9 points by ljdk 734 days ago
6 comments

Back of the envelope, 104 flights is like ~100 metric tons of carbon per year on flights alone (guesstimated four-hour flights on average), which is equivalent to about six and a half times the average American's entire yearly carbon footprint.

I know it's fashionable to say that "personal carbon footprints" are a myth created by Big Oil, but at a certain point you're CO2 Georg[0]. 104 flights a year is not more than what some people probably do for business, so I'm not calling her the World's Greatest Monster, but still: it's an impressive number for someone who doesn't charter business jets or own a yacht.

You could probably ride trains around Europe indefinitely like this guy and have a lower carbon footprint than most Americans: https://theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/07/exp...

edit: She says she's flown 16 days and 18 hours by plane[1] last year. That's almost exactly 400 hours, ~100 metric tons if the figure of 250kg/hour Google threw out is correct. She works in crypto though, 100 tons is about 250 bitcoin transactions.

Another reference point, spending 12 months on a cruise ship instead would emit about 150 tons of CO2.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg [1] https://twitter.com/sophfuji/status/1740770070111068539

Ah, yes, best to just stay home forever, then.
I think you missed my point about trains.

Lasse Stolley has travelled >650,000 km by train in two years. A quick Google suggests it's about 35 grams per person per km, which is... 11 metric tons per year. Okay, not perfect, but he's literally living on the train, and so that probably accounts for nearly his entire carbon footprint, which puts him below an average American's CO2 footprint. If he "only" traveled between cities weekly it would be less.

One con they neglected:

Flying so frequently is unsustainable from a CO2 emissions perspective.

How much does this cost???
You’d be surprised. Flights are expensive but spending time in lower COL places offsets it. The trick is to keep going to the next place you haven’t been yet, usually a short hop, instead of going back the way you came
Working for a PE firm probably helps a lot
One quote the author left off:

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared. -George Orwell.

It is not quite that extreme, but having traveled with and without others I perceive that it is closer to the truth than not.

Have you heard about « Climate change »?
> I think that 2021 is pretty normal in terms of flying once every 9.4 days for an average person

Tell me you grew up ultra-rich without telling me you grew up ultra-rich.