November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Trains, Planes, and Bar Cars

(Page 4 of 4)

November-December 2008
by J.B. MacKinnon, from Explore  
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You can see a train as a nostalgic return to a bucolic past or as a monstrous two-story building raging across the wilderness, about as “in touch” with the surrounding landscape as an air-conditioned office tower in Dubai.

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It may come as a surprise that I plan to travel by rail more often. I will do so because I believe, and the evidence strongly suggests, that many more people need to make this choice. My lady friend and I might soon visit the island of Andros, in Greece, which can fairly be described as a trip halfway around the world. A round-trip flight costs $990 apiece, with a total travel time, coming and going, of 30 hours. Overland and oversea on Earth’s surface, the fastest voyage to Andros alone would take 14 days. The return trip rings in at $9,238.57, and the only decent sleep we could hope for would be on our transatlantic cruise.

It would be an adventure. There would be time to sit and think. Plenty of time to wonder at the fact that we burned the planet’s oil and gas to run leaf blowers, to make throwaway plastics, to bring us strawberries in December, when we could have saved it for rare and precious uses, like the miracle of flight.

 

J.B. MacKinnon is the author of Dead Man in Paradise and the coauthor of Plenty, about eating locally. Excerpted from Explore(July-Aug. 2008), Canada’s outdoor adventure magazine; www.explore-mag.com.

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  • Gordon Shephard 12/6/2008 12:01:15 PM

    Nice to have a job for which travelling expenses can be written off. That way all of us readers can share in the reduction of the writer's carbon emissions.

  • Gábor Bánóczi 12/5/2008 3:17:16 PM

    Nicely wtitten article.
    I found the numbers presented in the article odd, however.
    Charcoal bags:
    966 kg (the supposed amount of CO2 saved in pollution taking the train ride) is about 2147 lb, so each of those 55 bags should be about 40 lb. I do not know, but would like to where those 40 lb charcoal bags can be bought. The ones that I usually come across are around 20 lb, so according to that there should be about 100 of them burnt away for one trip.

    I thought that the average American car is driven about 12,000 to 15,000 miles each year. Based on that in the first eight months the average car would be driven at least 8000 miles.
    Counting 25 mpg this would take 8000/25 = 320 G of gasoline.
    Given that each gallon produces about 8.788 kg CO2, the pollution up until September 1 is going to be 320*8.788 = 2812.16 kg, which is more than twice as much as was supposed in the article. The 1,380 kg of CO2 emissions (one person's share during a flight from Vancouver to Albuquerque and back) would be equaled in between New Years and May day. Whether it makes driving look way more polluting or flying somewhat less polluting is a different question...

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