How your family holiday increases global warming.
Aviation is consuming more and more energy, as increasingly people take to the skies on cheap flights. But flying is the most detrimental form of travel in terms of aggravating global warming; on a per-capita basis, CO2 emissions from aircraft are almost seven times higher than emissions from trains and three times more than cars.
According to the website, co2balance.com, a single passenger travelling from Dublin to New York and back is responsible for 1.12 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Figures for other sample return flights from Dublin are: Tenerife, 0.88 tonnes; Dubai, 1.31 tonnes; Barbados, 1.42 tonnes; Cape Town, 2.20 tonnes; and Sydney, 3.79 tonnes. A family of four flying to Malaga for their summer holidays would rack up 2.24 tonnes of CO2 on the trip - enough to fill 5,000 wheelie bins, according to Dr Alan Drew, of the Irish Academy of Engineering. It must also be measured against the yardstick of emissions of three to four tonnes of CO2 by the average Irish family car for a whole year.
EU moves to impose a carbon tax on jet fuel - which, bizarrely, remains untaxed and outside the scope of the Kyoto Protocol - are still being resisted by airlines, as well as by the US, China and Russia, even though aviation is the fastest-growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and needs to be brought under control.
In Ireland, the Government also massively subsidises regional air services - in competition with bus and rail; a 2004 study by DKM Economic Consultants found that the average subsidy of €71 per passenger works out more than 10 times what the railways were getting and 152 times the level for buses.
