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48. - GLOBAL WARMING IS HOPELESS 3: AIR TRAVEL - NEW OCTOBER 2007
...coal...air travel...
I like to explore foreign cities, even the teeming 3rd World cities, on my own,
but my first day in Istanbul I decided to take a van tour to orient myself. As I
stood outside my hotel in the morning, the guide with another outfit tried to
interest me in his tour. I declined, but he was friendly, and as I waited we
talked, and eventually, with real pride, he informed this ignorant Westerner of
a great and overlooked fact of human history: "We Turks were the first to fly!"
(And indeed, later doing research, I discovered reports of a wing-ed Turk or two
actually leaping off towers and plummeting or even sort of flying down.)
I was reminded again of this hunger to fly, eternally insistent as the hunger to
get laid, when I recently revisited Washington's Air and Space Museum, and
watched film from a hundred years ago of quaintly mustachioed men, who looked
like they belonged in Keystone Cop movies, as their ludicrous contraptions,
seemingly as primitive as chariots with engines, stuttered along grass-- and
lifted. The pride!-- then cocky, self-satisfied pride!-- you can see it on their
long-dead faces. Men, women, ex-Presidents (Teddy Roosevelt), then Lindbergh,
stuntmen, Nazis, Italians, Japanese, astronauts with the "right stuff"-- all
lofted. An inch toward the stars. We landed on the Moon. Two inches. And finally
the average man in his many millions, with reflexes that can't even control the
family car, he boards too.
Air travel, as is increasingly understood, is devastating to the Earth. It heats
it. The contrails from jets form man-made cirrus clouds that mimic the
greenhouse effect of natural cirrus clouds. If it grows too great, as it will,
air travel is going to make the Warm World inevitable. Currently, airlines are
responsible for 1.6% of global warming. (But another source blamed all planes
for 3.5% of human-induced global warming.) In some places it's much more. For
instance, by 2020 aviation may account for 26% of the U.K.'s CO2 emissions. By
2050 it could be 75%. (There's private planes and military too, of course.) Air
travel from 2007 to 2025 is supposed to double. 200 million tons of carbon
released by the aviation industry in 1990. An estimated 1,500 million tons by
2050 if air traffic only increases 4.7% a year. But in fact it's increasing
faster. In one year alone, January 2006 to January 2007, air travel in the
Middle East was up almost 20%. Domestic air travel in India up almost 50%
2005-2006. World-wide passenger traffic up 6.3% in the first 6 months of 2007
alone. As always, the U.S., China, and India are...But why go on with it? So,
so, so many words, and that's all they are.
I know you. Wildly flapping your awkward, cranky wings in the seconds before death, or injury, or a lucky landing. I know, I know, you dreamt you'd be a god. But if you had to indeed die-- mortal or not, at least you'd fly before you did.
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