The New York Times publishes an annual “52 Places to Go” list (for 2018).
Here’s an idea for a high school student project: calculate the carbon footprint of a person who does travel to these 52 places (starting from New York City and returning there at least once per month) and compare that to the carbon footprint of a person who lives in a median-income country. It looks as though Costa Rica, Mexico, and Malaysia are close to the median (source).
[Don’t forget that the calculation should include the carbon footprint of living in hotels in these various destinations; assume four days per destination, some travel time (what’s the carbon footprint of being in an airport terminal changing planes?), and some time back in Manhattan taking Uber everywhere (because the subway system has collapsed).]
Readers: Who has a high school-age kid that could get credit for this somehow? I would love to know the answer!
Related:
- the NYT, in between publishing articles about the planet’s imminent destruction due to climate change, is sending one person on this climate-changing journey
This sounds like a great excercise, but I think it would be improved if you modeled it first, Phil. Be sure to include your 20+ years of gallavanting around the globe (as reflected in your photo.net travelogs), and your recently proposed 48-state tour by plane, and all the other flying you do, which I’m sure is really essential.
Oh wait… this is an exercise only for New York Times readers. As in, if you care about climate change, you should calculate your carbon footprint and examine your own hypocrisy, but if you’re like Phil and a climate change denier, then don’t bother because you don’t care in the first place. Got it.
Grumpy Cat: To be fair, climate change is a collective action problem. Action at the individual level isn’t going to solve the problem: the costs are borne by the individual, while the benefits are spread out over the entire globe. Which is why we need coordinated action, e.g. carbon pricing.
Either it’s global warming or it’s global cooling. If you can’t decide which one it is, it probably isn’t any kind of problem on a human time horizon, not even a collective action one.