: Why I Gave Up Flying Over A Decade Ago And Heres Why You Should Too #IndiaNEWS #Sustainability Imagine zipping through the broad sweeping highways in the late evening dusk light, leading up to Bengaluru

Why I Gave Up Flying Over A Decade Ago And Heres Why You Should Too #IndiaNEWS #Sustainability
Imagine zipping through the broad sweeping highways in the late evening dusk light, leading up to Bengaluru airport, in a clean, comfortable, air conditioned cab. You’re basking in the warm, righteous glow of having completed a series of highly successful meetings; perhaps one with a corporate entity to work on a sustainability project or with a real-estate developer to plant trees as part of a ‘green campaign’. You feel good, you feel clean, your conscience is clear. You arrive at the airport, ready for your smooth night flight from Bengaluru’s impressive Kempegowda International Airport to head back home to Mumbai. Nothing in this ‘scene’ even hints at doing anything ‘unclean’, anything with a hint of ‘dirt’.
So imagine the cognitive dissonance that you would experience if an airline representative hands you an axe instead of your bags at the terminal, and asks you to chop off a mango tree to memorialise the damage your flight has caused.
Source: Pixabay
The chilling truth about air travel is this: an average medium-haul domestic return flight from Bengaluru to Mumbai emits Greenhouse Gasses that neutralises the benefit of 100 trees.
The massive carbon footprint behind air travel
Between 1995 and 2008, in the USA, when air travel was still a more expensive way to travel, I would spend all day sitting at the airport with binoculars, a note pad and an entire picnic basket. I would spot aircrafts, making lists of the scheduled flights and geographical maps of the landing strips. I was completely oblivious to any of the grim ecological realities that lay buried under the air travel industry.
But I had been neck-deep in environmental issues. I had gone to college to study environmental engineering, and by 2008 had been employed as an environmental engineer for 8 years. So imagine my surprise when I realised how profound my ignorance and blindness about air travel’s atmosphere-choking track record had been.
My fascination with the aviation industry continued till 2008 when my mentor and I first developed India-specific carbon footprint calculation and reduction tools at no2co2. in. I was heartbroken when I measured the carbon footprint of a flight.
I realised that one international trip from India to the US, which had been my home for 13 years, and back would triple my footprint. Since then, I have gone cold turkey on air travel.
I did not go for any family vacations that involved flying.

Source: Stay Grounded
A strong stance against flying was causing immense disruption in maintaining ‘normal’ social relations but I could see no way of closing an awakened eye.
Over a 1,000 km journey, an air traveller emits 285 kgs of CO2 kilometre while a railway passenger in even an air conditioned executive-class compartment emits 30 kgs.