Worried about the climate? Don’t be. This writer is no longer flying:
You may or may not know Carlton Reid for his travel writing, but he also writes extensively about cycling, and in addition to his books on the subject he’s written often about it in Forbes.
I respect Reid’s work, as well as his personal choices. However, in order to respect people you must also be prepared to laugh at those choices from time to time, which is an old adage I just fabricated. See, we’re in a funny place with flying, in that people who are most concerned about the environment are increasingly refusing to do it, while the people who are supposedly working on fixing everything are flying to climate conferences on private jets:
While I provided a link to the above-mentioned article, there’s really no reason to click on it or read it, because we all know why they do it:
They don’t believe any of this stuff.
I mean of course they don’t. If they did they’d be holding these climate conferences on Zoom. Instead they burn shitloads of fuel while telling everybody else that they shouldn’t, like the preacher with a diamond pinky ring the size of a golf ball telling you that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the spoke hole of a road rim than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Of course, if you were to accuse the preacher of being a hypocrite, he would probably explain that the Lord wants him to live well, and that by doing to he is able to spread the word more effectively, and bring more people to salvation. Similarly, by flying around in private jets, our betters can win the battle between good and evil:
And of course he’s offsetting his carbon. So how does someone like him (very rich) do that? The same way very rich people somehow make money even when stock prices go down–derivatives:
See, the beauty of humanity is that we can turn anything into money, even smugness and guilt. Turning carbon into a financial instrument is like, oh, I dunno, turning computer processing into a currency:
[The law says you have to use a nonsensical image of a physical Bitcoin whenever you mention it in an article. Hey, look, I don’t make the rules.]
Oh, and yes, you can generate cryptocurrency while cycling:
Well, okay, not anymore:
No wonder it never took off–they missed an enormous opportunity by not calling it FredCoin. And there’s still time to buy the dip, because at current rates one Bitcoin will by you approximately 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 WattCoin:
So at this point you may be tempted to note that if Kerry is going to offset his crabon, then wouldn’t it be more straightforward to not fly private at all, thereby OFFSETTING the crabon all those regular schmucks are forced to burn when they must travel by air to visit family or do business or go to Mexico for cheap dentistry or whatever? Well, the answer to that is clearly you’re just not smart enough to understand how crabon offsets work. Not only that, but you’re probably a denier of some kind, or worse, maybe even a truther! Away with you, heretic! Shame, shame!
Anyway, unlike John Kerry, Carlton Reid is at least standing by his convictions by not flying at all, let alone on a private jet, and he deserves (carbon) credit for that. But is his decision any more logically sound than John Kerry’s shell game with the offsets? Or does not flying simply sound good? For example, he notes that he can still get to North America without flying if he goes by boat:
Is going to North America on the Queen Mary 2 somehow cleaner than going by plane? Well, Cunard would probably like you to think so–or at least they’re not going to go out of their way to disabuse you of that notion–which is why the only information on their website about how much fuel their ship burns is written in vague environmental Newspeak:
Though most people seem to agree flying is in fact more efficient. Here’s one comparison, which you can take for what it’s worth, which may or may not be very much, but still:
And on top of that there’s a week of like two thousand people eating and shitting and burning their garbage and discharging their waste into the sea. When it comes to crossing the Atlantic, flying is in fact both convenient and smug, though if you really want to be efficient you should go by dirigible:
[Those ads provide unwanted insight into my consumer habits.]
Dirigibles are absolutely the future of long-distance travel, and the ads practically write themselves:
In any case, until now when someone said “big boats” you thought of obscene luxury, slave ships, Legionnaires’ disease, and the Exxon Valdez. So you’ve got to hand it to the cruise industry for somehow getting politically correct people like Carlton Reid to automatically assume that ocean liners are more efficient and ethical than planes.
As for his decision not to fly, unsurprisingly it has not affected his life all that much, since his job is based on going places nobody needs to go and doing things nobody needs to do, leaving him with plenty of plane-free options:
By the way, the Guardian really knows its readership:
They are indeed nervous about 2024 and just about everything else, and I’m guessing a heft majority of them believe the world is going to end if people don’t stop flying.
So is it petty to tease someone for making an earnest choice that they believe is helping to make the world a better place? Perhaps. And yes, by focusing on the boat thing I’m arguably burying his lede, which is that trains are good, and certainly over on this side of the ocean we could do with more and better choo-choos:
But I agree that waste is bad, and I believe just as earnestly that we are wasting tremendous amounts of nervous energy worrying about the wrong things. Yes, it’s both unreasonable and unfair to think that people should be willing to shrink their travel horizons in 2023, and crazy or not it’s why certain people think there’s a global conspiracy to imprison them in 15-minute cities and force them to eat bugs. A travel writer with a guilty conscience over using an airplane? That’s like a bike blogger who feels conflicted about having too many bikes.
People really are funny.