My Flight History

• 2002: Boston to Atlanta to visit my first girlfriend. (Once I returned home, she dumped me)
• 2006: Boston to Indianapolis to visit my girlfriend's family.
• 2007: Boston to Dallas for PyCon.
• 2007: Boston to San Francisco for an absurd Facebook conference.
• 2008: Boston to Chicago for PyCon.
• 2010: Boston to Atlanta for PyCon. This was after I had quit my programming job but wanted to stay connected with my coworkers.
• 2012: Boston to Los Angeles for my girlfriend's friends' wedding.

I've flown about 21,000 miles for work or for a girl. I've never felt motivated enough to fly anywhere for my own enjoyment, though I've taken lots of car road trips. Looking back, none of these flights were justifiable. I could at least plead ignorance until the last flight, which did bother me.

It's highly unlikely that I'll ever fly again, given what I now know about how destructive it is. Even if I met a wonderful girl who might want to convince me to fly somewhere, I'd think that such a suggestion would disqualify her from committment...

The total carbon footprint from my flying experience equals about 6 metric tons CO2e, about the same as the lifetime emissions of someone living in Sub-Saharan Africa.

As far as I know, my grandparents only took one flight trip in their lives -- to Europe. We saw slideshows of the vacation for years afterwards. Today, it seems common for many middle class people to fly at least once per year, and they're encouraged to travel internationally for "cultural enrichment".

The era of commercial flight will soon come to an end, but not soon enough to avoid exacerbating the climate crisis which is hastening our demise.