In today’s era of “revenge travel,” all of Santa Barbara seems to be hitting the road (or the skies or the ocean), but getting out of Dodge isn’t what it used to be.
Once upon a time, travel was glamorous. When flying, women came aboard in heels, hose, gloves and cashmere coats. Men wore hats, ties and jackets.
When cruising they dressed for dinner aboard sleek, Art Deco-themed ocean liners, the women in long gowns, the men in tuxedos. They danced the night away to society orchestras.
At the airports there were skycaps, on the docks there were porters. To be a Pan Am stewardess was to be a goddess.
Fast forward to 2022. We travelers are wearing shorts, sneakers and baseball caps, the better to lug our carry-on duffle across endless miles of corridors, up and down escalators, on and off terminal trains.
Why, in many airports, do I feel like I’m walking to North Dakota instead of flying there?
No, this is not the carefree — never mind, glamorous — travel of yore, thanks to thousands of flight cancellations, $6-a-gallon gas, no room at the inn and stubbornly high COVID-19 counts.
Let me add one more element to this witches’ brew: our carbon footprint. I didn’t even know I had a personal carbon footprint until recently, and I bet you didn’t, either.
When Steve Martin and John Candy were roaming around the country in the 1987 comedy, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, transportation pollution was unheard of. Today, we can refer to studies on the subject and compare emissions:
Cars
If you have a combustion-engine car, you roughly double your emissions if you cancel your plane reservations and drive across the country.
Trains
If you take the train instead of a plane on the same trip, you’ll cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by half. That’s largely because the train (or a diesel bus) may be a big carbon emitter, but it’s designed to carry a lot of passengers, so the per capita emissions are a lot lower.
Airplanes
The International Council on Clean Transportation says if the aviation industry were a country, it would be the sixth top greenhouse gas emitter, most of it from passenger transport. Click here to see which planes are the greenest.
Ships
Boats are on par with planes in their greenhouse gas emissions. In some ways, watercraft can be even more polluting.
Friends of the Earth regularly creates “cruise ship report cards” in which all the major cruise operators are given a grade based on air pollution reduction, sewage treatment, water quality compliance and other factors.
The average cruise ship produces seven tons of solid waste every day, which leads to a reported 15 billion pounds of trash being dumped into oceans (as ash, mostly) per year.
If you’re concerned about your carbon footprint while traveling, know that you can offset it through donations to specific nonprofit organizations that work to protect the environment, such as Terrapass, Carbonfund.org or Sustainable Travel International.
Many commercial airlines also now offer carbon offsets to travelers for a small service charge. Or, if you fly private — which is ever more prevalent at our busy Santa Barbara Airport — you can ask yourself the same question Americans did in the oil, gas and rubber-saving days of World War II: “Is this trip necessary?”
Happy — and minimally carbon — trails to you!
— Barbara Greenleaf is the author of This Old Body: And 99 Other Reasons to Laugh at Life. She can be reached at barbara@barbaragreenleaf.com. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.