laratheescapeartist

We had another summer of no flying, and so we did a round trip in the car from Brussels to the south of England to Jersey to France and back home again using the Eurotunnel and two ferries to cross the English Channel.

We had a really nice time on our trip (even if Isabel did decide she didn’t like any restaurant food except Pizza Express and Sarah decided she hated sand) and saw lots of family and got to explore Jersey and Carantec, both of which are beautiful.

In total I’ve calculated we did about 2,000km of driving (this includes all the excursions we did in the car during our three week holiday and not just the point to point driving), which in our Touran creates emissions of 0.29tonnes C02. The emissions from the ferries I calculated using this site and they came out to be 0.06 tonnes C02. The Eurotunnel carbon emissions are 0.009 tonnes. This is a total of 0.359 tonnes C02 or 0.09 tonnes Co2 per person as there are four of us. Compare this to if we’d flown return from Brussels to Cannes in France (a 1,700km round trip), that would be 0.482 tonnes CO2 PER PERSON. More than 5 times the emissions for the flights alone, doesn’t include any driving we do whilst there and we’d only have gone to one destination. (It’s very difficult to create a fictional like for like holiday as probably if we were flying we’d be more likely to travel further- e.g. a round trip from Brussels to Athens is 0.81 tonnes Co2/person)

Given we need to get down to annual C02 emissions of 2.5 tonnes/year/person by 2030 to have any chance of keeping to only 1.5 degrees of heating, when even a typical vegan diet has annual emissions of 0.78 tonnes/year/person, you can quickly see how even one short-haul flight can blow any chance of this being possible.

I know I’m not a travel writer or photographer and I can’t sell this trip the way they could but all I can say is we saw some beautiful things, swam in the sea and tried new food (well most of us) and learnt some of the history of Jersey and practised our French in Brittany and we had all the holiday experiences without the need to fly. We made a huge saving in our carbon emissions just by going in a car which is very easy to plan and do. Yes, obviously we still need to do more and go by train or use an electric car, but flying is just such a high carbon activity that the biggest savings come from just staying grounded.