If You Love Traveling and You Love the Earth, You Need to Read This.

If you LOVE to go someplace new and you live in Hawaii, traveling can be a challenge. With summer vacation coming up, what can we do to have a memorable season while being mindful of our impact?

I spoke with aviation and climate specialist Katie Thompson recently who explained why if we care about the environment, we should take a hard look at how much we travel and make serious efforts to minimize it.

Thompson’s love of traveling started early. She was an ex-pat kid who grew up in Kenya and spent high school in New York. She was used to traveling and loved it.

“I just loved the world of flying. I wanted to be a flight attendant,” she says.

During her college years she learned that men got higher paid aviation jobs while women were often in service roles. This would change her career course deciding then that she would be a pilot. She led an exciting life as a pilot for several years until she left the role to become Head of Flight Safety for a private jet company called NetJets.

In another turn of events that would change the trajectory of her career, Thompson whose new role involved assessing risk, was affected by a visit from an environmental consultant. She said as their way of mitigating the impact of flying, they would plant trees. Thompson quickly realized planting trees wasn’t a viable solution to account for the amount of carbon emitted in flight.

Why Aviation is a Problem

“The more I read the more I realized aviation was the biggest problems in the industry,” she says. She returned to school getting a degree in sustainable transport management assuming she would work for an airline to help solve the problem. However, she says, “I couldn’t work for any of the airlines because none of them were doing the right thing. The solutions weren’t credible or effective. Aviation emissions were going up and up and no one was really controlling this. I didn’t want to be their mouthpiece saying that they were planting trees and taking away plastic cups when everyday they were burning fuel and what they were doing was harmful.”

Flying is a luxury for a few while the poorest among us suffer from its impact. Thompson explains, “In the UK in England they just published a report that in 2040 aviation would be the highest emitting sector in the UK and be responsible for 27% of total emissions. Right now it’s 9%.”

While other industries have limitations and regulations on what they can do, she says, airlines right now don’t. But the impact its having on the environment is clearly evident. Airlines need to increase cost by taking into account carbon emissions, getting rid of large first class seats that create unnecessary weight which uses more fuel and reduces the number of total passengers that can fit on an airplane, and find alternative routes to minimize air pollution.

What You Can Do

Thompson says that people who care about the environment can do their part by:

Checking Google flights and filtering travel by emissions.
Travel less often. She says, “Every flight we don’t take is meaningful. If you’re going to connect somewhere, connect in a straight line.”
Pack lightly. The more weight you carry on a plane, the more fuel it uses.

There are things that can be done and there are people like Thompson who are enacting positive change. But she cannot do this alone. She says that this an emergency and calls upon all people who love the earth to make a change. Not to do so she says is, “crazy and irresponsible. We have to take a stand.”

Thompson is working on a website for consumers called Bumprints.org set to go live on June 15th.