Is It Better for the Environment for People to Travel By Car Instead of by Airplane?

You and your family are ready for your vacation.  You have three weeks off and you are now debating with your partner whether it would be better to travel by airplane or leave by car.  Beyond the normal concerns about traveling with your family by any method, you are now, just like everyone else on the planet, starting to consider the footprint you are leaving behind for your children.

Not too long ago, representatives from seventeen different industrialized nations got together to form what is known as the QUANTIFY project so they could sample and study transportation data from the whole continent of Europe.  Among the researchers were representatives from England and China.  This think tank crunched the available numbers so that they could give a carbon footprint size for each different transport method.  Cars and planes figured prominently as they were by far the most prolific mode of personal motorized travel.

There were many results and each of the classes of figures had to be interpreted. This resulted in a number of arguments.  This process needed the support of qualified professionals in order to produce the empirical cohesion necessary for proper statistical studies.  With nearly nine million Euros in funding, money was not a problem.  The researchers were also up to the task and produced some interesting and some shocking observations.  Since this was the first time that current climate models have been used to study the impact of modern modes of transportation on the environment, the experts knew that the field was ripe for discovery and discover they did.

During the course of their summations, the researchers found that if you were going to take a long distance trip, like taking your family across the country to California, the trip would be more environmentally friendly if you chose to take a plane.  However, later it was determined that this smaller carbon footprint was only temporary.  The researchers found out that for the three years immediately following the initial plane flight, the aircraft successfully raised the global thermometer four times as much as if you had just taken the car in the first place.

Environmentalists bounced from  happy, to angry, to happy once again because the researchers were quick to note that cars release more CO2 per mile than airplanes, and that since greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere longer, they have a longer-lasting and more powerful effect on climate change.  So in the long run, vehicles still come up lacking.

There are still some options for those of you that love your cars.  What if your vehicle is a hybrid?  You are using less than a quarter of the fuel that a regular engine uses; will that reduce the effect?  Making your vehicle more energy efficient and changing its dependence on fossil fuels can make a difference, but since no one individual can tip the scales and cause climate change, the act of reworking your car to be more environmentally friendly will only have an impact if other drivers can be convinced to do the same things you have.  Even this, however, will not guarantee success in our pursuit of environmental balance and a long-term, sustainable life on this planet.

We are rapidly using more and more of our natural resources.  This is natural in its modernity, but what it means is that although we may use less or leave less behind, there are more of us making the same messes.  Therefore the pile of garbage will just continue to grow.  There is always the electric car.  Ever since its invention early in the history of automobile manufacture, the electric car has had a bad reputation due to the technology present when the idea was first conceived.  Sheer size of the equipment necessary to store the energy needed to run the vehicle made the idea less than ideal.  Once the design kinks were worked out, great research had to be done on the longevity and power of the battery packs, so that you could travel uphill all day and still be able to drive home.

In the last ten years and more particularly in the last five years, technology regarding power storage has come forward leaps and bounds.  Now these vehicles have ranges of up to four hundred miles on a single charge.  The network of charging stations and home electrical outlets is growing so we will be able to service large regions of the United States.  However, before you begin to celebrate, there is one more thing to consider regarding electric cars and their batteries.  Sure the vehicle does not use fossil fuels to propel its frame, but it still needs a very large battery.  Batteries are difficult to process after their use.  In fact, it has been discovered that most batteries that have been returned to a depot for recycling end up in dumps.  Now, think of the rate that we go through vehicles during our lifetimes.  The batteries in these vehicles are toxic and it will take more than your life time for them to breakdown in a dump.  The end determination has yet to reach a unanimous and successful conclusion.