Summer travel season is upon us, with all the joys and travails that come with spending a perfectly fine vacation day stuck in an airport somewhere. Nevertheless, travel is fun and has plenty of positive sides to it. They range from increased cultural understanding to helping otherwise marginalized regions of the world get a slice of the global vacationer’s (or business traveler’s) pie.
Yet the current way we do things simply isn’t working. Going to Costa Rica on an “eco-vacation” is but a cruel joke, if getting there requires pushing the very real costs of pollution and noise onto everyone else.
Part of the solution is a shift in the way we look at air travel. Flying from New York to London for a three-hour meeting is absurd, to put it mildly. The cost of one roundtrip business-class ticket could pay for a professional-grade video conferencing system — on both ends.
Voluntarily giving up your seat won’t do, either. Even if you don’t board a plane for that meeting, someone else will be waiting to cross the Atlantic to make the sale. As long as showing up in person is expected practice, a handful of environmentally aware dissenters won’t make a difference on a global scale.
Continue reading at The Globalist.
