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Carbon calculations posted 05/14/2008 02:47 am by Jim Hu

Last update:05/14/2008 02:55 am

Megan McArdle has made points similar to this before:

An academic or journalist who flies for work five or six times a year spews more carbon than an SUV loving Texan who vacations at Grandma's.

There are a couple of factors in this. One is the relative carbon consumption of air travel vs driving per passenger mile. This is very dependent on how many people are in the car, but it's actually pretty close if there are two people in the car. Driving alone, the plane wins... based on the observation that most planes these days are flying full. Planes in the MD-80 series get around 45-50 miles per gallon per passenger; newer planes are much better. SUVs in Consumer Reports testing do half that well.. if they're small hybrids. The more typical ones are maybe a third as efficient.

The second is the actual distance traveled. The average American drives about 15K miles per year, and a lot of that is commuting alone. I suspect that many of these academics and journalists, however, drive less than the average American. Some of them live in cities where they actually use transit or they live close to work. I drive a 16 year-old car with less than 90K miles on it, so I figure that the SUV-loving Texan, if he lives in the Houston or Dallas burbs and commutes to work is probably outdriving me by about 10K miles per year. Maybe more; I suspect that Texans drive more, on average, than people in many other states.

If that's driving alone, I have to fly about 30K miles per year for us to break even. And there are years when I do. So I'm not saying my carbon footprint is better or that I should be congratulated or anything. But:

There are a lot of variables involved. I doubt that the statement Megan made is true for all pairwise comparisons of flying academics and SUV-loving Texans who don't fly. There are academics who commute as much as an average American and still fly. There are academics with SUVs. I know I'm leaving out a correction for jet fuel vs gasoline, but it's well within the error of everything else.
The carbon hypocrisy for the glitterati isn't about flying... it's about private jets
It isn't the vacation taking the whole family to grandma's that makes the SUV bad for fuel consumption and carbon emissions. It's the daily commute. Which means that things that drive people to have longer commutes are bad. Like the restrictive zoning that probably also contributed to the housing bubble.

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