Travel emissions

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Antony Lewis
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Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » January 14 2007

Many academics travels many times year, often large distances. I would guess they typically cause CO2 emissions tens of times over the sustainable limit per person. What measures, if any, are in place, and what ideas are there, to ensure academic travel does not contribute disproportionately to carbon emissions? I suspect any initial reduction would actually be uniformly beneficial - I'm sure many people travel more than is actually optimal for the science.

Here's a few suggestions:
  • Make better use of web resources for the useful aspects of academic discussion (CosmoCoffee!)
  • Travel grants at the moment seem to actively encourage excess travel, e.g. by paying all costs and per-diem so that it is personally cheaper for people to travel than stay at home. Some obvious suggestions:
    • Make people pay (say \$50) out of their own pocket per flight. This could be compensated by a personal payment of \$200 a year to cover reasonable travel.
    • Grant travel in terms of emissions rather than money, or some combination.
    • Give people greater flexibility to spend money on e.g. videoconferencing hardware rather than travel if they wish.
  • Synchronize conferences for close times and nearby locations; calculate locations based on minimizing average air-miles per attendee.
  • I suspect many observers decide to be physically present when this is not really necessary. Put incentives in place to encourage people to do other people's observations, make full use of facility staff, etc.
  • Many departments and people benefit from use of free software (CMBFAST/CAMB, Healpix, etc) and free datasets (WMAP, millennium run, etc). The licence for these could be changed to allow free use only to departments with an active and useful environmental sustainability policy, or to individuals who take less than four flights a year. I'm seriously considering something like this for most of my software. A charge of, say, $1000 per copy should be enough to concentrate some minds... this is the only idea I can come up with for trying to enforce responsible behaviour.
At least in Europe, the mood seems to have now shifted sufficiently that it should be possible to get some things changed. Comments and ideas?

Ben Gold
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Travel emissions

Post by Ben Gold » January 14 2007

I don't know what the "sustainable limit per person" is, but according to terrapass.com a cross-country (US) roundtrip flight emits less CO2 (per person) than the energy use of a typical home over one month. I suspect a department could probably cut CO2 emissions far more by running the AC less during the summer than by clamping down on travel. Organizing employee carpools would also be a great idea (some places already do this). I'm also unconvinced that "many people travel more than is optimal for the science"; it seems if that were really true than those who travelled less would get more done and get more grants/better jobs and the problem would be self-correcting (this assumes those who do more science get better jobs, though).

Besides, my attitude towards travel has always been that I'm trying to squeeze the most out of the travel grant anyway, so I already try to avoid excess. Am I really the only one who does this?

Antony Lewis
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » January 14 2007

I completely agree that the AC and heating should be turned down (as well more radical local changes), but given the relatively high density of people in departments, the average emission per person are probably much lower than travel.

The current global average emission is about 1 tonne CO2 per year per person, which is about one long return flight - and this needs to be significantly reduced. So the sustainable limit is less than 1/3 tonne each per year. However efficient you make the department, you still need to radically reduce flights. The main thing is to stop the currently very fast growth in aviation - if it continues all other efforts will be vain. Dramatically reducing plane use by some of the heaviest users (us) would be a good start.

Incidentally you have to be very careful with offsetting schemes such as terrapass - for example see chapter 24 of MacKay's draft book on Carbon Credits.

Apparently the IoA is about to have videoconferencing facilities in place, so hopefully soon we can give and receive talks remotely without travel. How widespread are these facilities?

Hans Kristian Eriksen
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Hans Kristian Eriksen » January 15 2007

Antony Lewis wrote:Apparently the IoA is about to have videoconferencing facilities in place, so hopefully soon we can give and receive talks remotely without travel. How widespread are these facilities?
We don't have anything like this in Oslo yet, I think, but I'll ask Per Lilje (head of the department) tomorrow about getting it. CO2 is one thing, but travelling in general is becoming more and more a pain. For those of us who are members of two or three or more Planck working groups (and now the core teams are picking up speed as well), there's effectively one meeting every single month. And that's a major problem, in my opinion.

So the more we can move over to telecons and video-conferences, the better, I think.

Simon DeDeo
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Travel emissions

Post by Simon DeDeo » January 15 2007

So, OK, to fly from Chicago to Tucson and back (my next conference) requires 1,200 lbs of CO2 (according to Terrapass.)

Now of course we all drive 2007-model Honda Civics (don't worry Olivier I won't tell): according to Terrapass again, the average American (sorry folks) drives 12,000 miles per year, which works out to 6,700 lbs of CO2, or about five or six domestic conferences.

I don't drive, though, so if Anthony starts charging people for flying too much, I would like to request a five-flight credit please. Alternatively, someone who drives but feels guilty about conference travel can pay me some money to continue not to drive.

I glanced at the chapter referred to that supposedly tells you why Terrapass is bad, but the example was sufficiently convoluted as to not make very much sense to me. As far as I can tell Terrapass uses most of the money to subsidize wind farm energy production, which seems like a reasonable way to reduce CO2 emission (in fact the chapter explicitly states that this is one way an "offset" program can work.)

Antony Lewis
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » January 15 2007

Fair point about car use, but do many people drive that much on academic business? I'd have though most academic travel was by air - certainly by people in the UK. Counting flights is much easier than counting miles, so this is the only obvious crude proxy for emissions I could think of that is 'easily' checkable (by looking at conference programs and departmental talks).

I totally agree with Hans Kristian about meetings - Planck meetings should be a prime target. There's also a private Planck group forum set up on CosmoCoffee, but didn't get people to use it yet.

Terrapass may not be bad, you just need to be careful... I didn't look into it. The main thing is that the cost per tonne for most of these schemes suspiciously low, they tend to prevent extra emission by other people (rather than saving what you emitted), invest in non-proved schemes (like tree planting that may be counterproductive), and that they cause complacency. Another reference. If it checks out as OK, can people charge offsets to their travel grants?

Simon DeDeo
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Travel emissions

Post by Simon DeDeo » January 15 2007

Well I was definitely surprised to see how much CO2 came from plane travel -- I just assumed that flying was like taking a bus, and usually feel rather smug about my enviromental burden because I don't own and drive a car regularly.

Ben Gold
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Travel emissions

Post by Ben Gold » January 16 2007

Yeah, I was a little surprised at how bad airplanes are too; I'll definitely keep that mind in the future. I only had one flight last year, though, and it was a short one, so I don't know how much I can cut back.

I think one issue with things like Terrapass is that they're at best only partial solutions - people using it aren't actually reducing any emissions, they're just paying into a fund that (hopefully) pays someone else to reduce emissions. If everybody did that it'd be a disaster! If CO2 emissions are going to go down people actually have to emit less.

Nathan Lewis gave a rather nice colloquium here last fall about energy use and emissions... the whole thing left me feeling rather fatalistic about it, though.

Antony Lewis
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » January 23 2007

There are some videos of the sort of thing you can do with web conferencing at

http://www.agsc.ja.net/index.php

- some of it looks pretty cool and quite adequate for e.g. Planck meetings, and available in many places already.

Not sure many places are yet set up for remote talks though; something to work on, and a good way to get very distant speakers you'd never get otherwise.

Jochen Weller
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Travel emissions

Post by Jochen Weller » March 02 2007

This might sound not serious but I really mean this. For me one of the most important parts of a conference is to discuss with colleagues in an informal setting about work, issues which arose during talks etc.
I agree the formal talk can probably be done by web conferencing,
but I think it requires a more imaginative setting to encourage
the informal discussion in a virtual environment.
Of course cosmocoffee is such a forum, but if something like cosmocoffee would exist as audio visual media that would be useful as well, with some feedback. Maybe a cosmobar ?
Although a youtube style page which allows audiovisial ranting about colleagues and papers might be useful.
However the problem there might be that everybody can see it.


On another note, has anybody compared carbon emission from train travel vs air travel. I could easily imagine that train travel is better. Maybe a way to encourage train use is that funding bodies will only fund train journeys if they are possible for certain trips.
For example we had a meeting last year in Newcastle and some people were flying from London instead of taking the train because it was cheaper.

Antony Lewis
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » March 03 2007

Yes, I agree it's tricky to get the informal part working remotely. But I think as you say this should be regarded as a challenge rather than a reason for not trying.. anyone like to try to set up a virtual meeting place?

Trains are around 10 times better than planes if they are quite full (depending on loads of things like how far, what time of day, which train, etc). Perhaps flight travel expenses should generally only be claimable if there is no viable alternative - start telling your invited speakers!

btw, my CAMB sources package is only available to people with 6 or fewer flights per year. 6 is still too many of course...

David Parkinson
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Travel emissions

Post by David Parkinson » March 05 2007

btw, my CAMB sources package is only available to people with 6 or fewer flights per year. 6 is still too many of course...
Is that 6 flights including connections (so for example a return flight to Hawaii via LA would count as four flights in total)?

Antony Lewis
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » March 05 2007

yes, I think a trip half way round the world should count as at least four flights!

Alessandro Melchiorri
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Travel emissions

Post by Alessandro Melchiorri » March 06 2007

Hi all,

very interesting discussion !
from this website:

http://www.nef.org.uk/energyadvice/co2emissionsctry.htm

it does'nt appear to exist much correlation between number of flights and CO2 emission par person. England (and Italy) are much worse than France and Sweden and I don't think this can be related to travel emission.
USA, Australia and Norway (Oystein!!!) are the worst: you should stop any download of CAMB from there !!!
:-)

Cheers
Alessandro

Antony Lewis
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Re: Travel emissions

Post by Antony Lewis » March 06 2007

It's true flights are currently responsible for a small fraction of the total. But aviation is expanding rapidly, aviation fuel is untaxed, and emissions are not included in any carbon trading schemes. For the small fraction of the population who fly far more than the average (I think about two flights per person per year in the UK), flights are a major component of their carbon footprint. That's many of us (myself included!).

And unlike most other things there's basically no way to make flying much more environmentally friendly on a realistic timescale - you have to cut flights [I recommend this book]. The UK government currently has an inconsistent plan to make significant cuts is all other emissions but let aviation grow massively.

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