My flight is booked and I can now say with certainty that I will be in Vancouver from the 21st of December until the 2nd of January. Hopefully, that span will include a big gathering of friends in North Vancouver, akin to my pre-Oxford departure party. Saturday, December 29th is a plausible date for the event.
Already, nights in Ottawa are developing a chilly edge. By late December, I expect that it will be with the most concentrated of joy that I trade the icy windswept streets of Ontario for the rainy windswept streets of British Columbia.
PS. My planned trip to B.C. was mentioned before.
[Update: 23 October 2007] According to the NativeEnergy carbon calculator, my flights to and from Vancouver will collectively generate 1.761 tonnes of CO2. As with my thesis, I decided to offset the emissions through the capture of methane. While offsets are far from perfect, they are quite probably better than doing nothing.
I was surprised to see that travelling the same distance by train would produce 0.727 tonnes of CO2. While that is 60% lower, we generally think of trains as being really dramatically greener than flying. I suppose the difference is largely that nobody travels very long distances by train.
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Ottawa is actually best in mid-winter. It may be cold, but it is at least consistently so. And it can be quite beautiful.
At least you won’t miss Winterlude, which is in February.
Here is a cool photo of Alcatraz Island, near San Francisco.
I look forward to seeing you when you reach Vancouver in December. I shall probably be around for the entire winter break, since I feel too guilty about flying to the UK for the second time this year. Perhaps some adventures can be planned, in your doubtless very busy schedule? In any case, I’ll email you about it when my interchange email account eventually starts working again (it’s been down for 48 hours).
Perhaps some adventures can be planned, in your doubtless very busy schedule?
Most definitely. You should also be sure to attend the party I am throwing in North Vancouver.
The emissions of one passenger on the outward flight from “Ottawa – Hull” to “Vancouver – Vancouver Int’l” create the climate impact of about 950 kg CO2. Including the return trip the emissions amount to about 1900 kg CO2.
By 2009, I was taking the moral implications of flying much more seriously.
I wonder how we could work towards getting more planes grounded. Things like protests to interfere with operations of smaller airports, or lobbying to stop government subsidy of airports and airline fuel.
One welcome step would be forbidding civil servants from using short-haul flights between Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto.
Existing efforts to ‘green’ aviation are too small scale to address the problem of ever-more people flying ever farther.
Bigger scale actions would include a high and rising carbon tax, policies to prevent further expansion of airports, and the development of good low-carbon transport options such as electric trains powered by zero-carbon electricity.
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