Holidays be damned 28 August 06

It seems pretty obvious to me that those of us who presume to lecture others about the urgency of climate change have a duty to be - as Mahatma Gandhi put it - "the change you want to see in the world". Not just because of the emissions themselves, but because we need to be able to demonstrate that what we demand of everyone, we already apply to ourselves. I'd like to be able to report that our climate-concerned political leaders are doing just this, but I'm afraid I again bear bad news.

I’d be the first to admit that no one’s perfect. Well, one man is – the veteran climate campaigner Mayer Hillman. In his book How We Can Save the Planet, Hillman draws up a table with which each reader can calculate his or her carbon footprint. Skip down to the section on air travel, and the conclusion is sobering. A round-trip flight from London to New York costs the climate about four tonnes of CO2, four times the entire annual carbon budget he considers sustainable for a single person. Hillman, now 74, has taken this message to heart and completely given up flying. He recently refused, albeit after much soul-searching, to visit New York to attend his son’s wedding, and is reconciled to perhaps never meeting his new grandchild. Such is the true price of protecting a stable climate.

The CarbonNeutral Company, on the other hand, offers a more reasonable price for a clear conscience: £8.90. If you sign up with its offset scheme, you can buy a “natural woodland portfolio” whose trees will, in theory, soak up the carbon emitted during your flight, allowing you to have your carbon cake and eat it. I say in theory, because there is no guarantee that the trees in question will not release the carbon again one day when they rot or burn. The CarbonNeutral Company is one of several private firms selling offsets for climate-damaging activities. Not all the projects involve forestry; some focus on installing energy-efficient cooking stoves, for example, in places like Bangladesh and Honduras. Though unarguably beneficial for the recipient communities, it is far from clear that these projects really neutralise the impact of flying – for one thing, it is almost impossible, by definition, to quantify their net emissions impact.

I should make clear that some air travel is almost certainly necessary in the all-important cause of building up the climate-change movement. I don’t begrudge Al Gore a single plane trip if he is armed with his powerful slide show. It’s leisure travel I’m after.

So which of our saintly environmental preachers can cast the first stone? Not Tony Blair, this summer’s most egregious climate criminal. Blair’s round trip to Barbados pumped greenhouse gases equivalent to 4.3 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, and his strange obsession with speedboats bumps up this shameful total even more. Not exactly responsible behaviour for a man who once warned that “there will be no genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change”. The Prime Minister claims to be setting an example by installing low-energy light bulbs in Downing Street, but, by my cal culations, he will need to put in nearly 200 to make up for his Barbados jaunt.

Nor is David Cameron’s environmental record – like his colourful summer shorts – whiter than white. The Tory leader’s holiday in Corfu would have racked up the warming equivalent of two tonnes of CO2. That’s a lot of cycling to work (even without an official car trailing behind). The Environment Secretary, David Miliband, performed somewhat better – he flew to Ireland, and insists on his blog that the flight’s impact has been “offset”, though he does not acknowledge the drawbacks of this approach.

Leaders of environmental groups fare better still. Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper went to Cornwall, while Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, according to his press office, “hasn’t been abroad in years”. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot strayed only as far as Wales.

I know what you’re thinking. Where did I go on my holidays? True, if I’d been to Barbados or Corfu I wouldn’t be in any position to write this diatribe. That’s why I only went to Cornwall. By train. So there.

“How We Can Save the Planet” is published by Penguin (£8.99)

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)