Two quotes from an article I saw linked on FB recently:
"It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed."
"It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich."
As a side note, I'm always kind of surprised at how little attention is paid to reducing the amount of fuel we burn with non-essential air travel. This table from the Bureau of Transportation Services appears to show that (in 2005 at least) we burned about ten times as many gallons of gas/diesel in highway driving as we burned gallons of aviation fuel (domestically -- international travel is not included). I don't know how the two compare in terms of emissions per mile of human travel, or emissions per mile per ton of cargo carried; but surely airplanes burn a not-insignificant fraction of the total. And what percentage of that goes for inessentials or luxuries, compared to the percentage of fuel burned by cars and trucks (including shipping)? You just don't hear about it much...
I have a friend of a friend who is very "green" (for lack of a better short hand term) who got a real wake-up call about air travel last year. He and his wife have decided to take a year to travel around the world without using any air travel in order to explore travel alternatives and to talk to people about this issue. They (of course) have a blog about it and just posted a great entry about traveling across the Pacific on a container ship. Anyways, I thought you might be interested in what they are doing - I've been talking about it with my kids too and they are finding it fascinating too.
Here's the link: http://www.yearofnoflying.com/ The first post on the blog explains the motivation in a bit more depth.
Posted by: Amber | 02 October 2009 at 05:20 PM