Tourism may have accounted for about 5 percent of the world’s human-produced carbon emissions in 2016. From 2009 to 2013, it accounted for 8 percent and the industry was growing fast enough to outstrip its meager efforts to decarbonize. Your share of the emissions from a single round-trip trans-Atlantic flight are almost enough to wipe out the gains from living car-free for a year. A midsize cruise ship can emit as much particulate as one million cars. Many airlines now offer passengers the chance to pay for emissions offsets. That’s voluntary and won’t solve the problem. There are myriad partial solutions like environmentally friendly jet fuel and cruise ships with sails. I’ve posted about some of them. We need to find and support more since apart from pandemics, I don’t think people are going to give up the urge to travel.
www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/opinion/travel-covid-climate-change.html