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| Last fall, my editor on the New York City desk here at The Times took a new job running the travel section and invited me to write a story for her sometime. |
| Thanks, I said, but the only travel story I want to do is one about the moral questions around long-distance leisure travel in the age of climate change. |
| "You're on," replied the editor, Amy Virshup, to my surprise. Now, I had to write it. And I knew there was no way to do it without addressing my own complicity. |
| First, though, I had to figure out how guilty I was: a way to quantify the global damage caused by one person's travel. |
| I was bumbling around, lost in numbers, when another colleague, Brad Plumer on the climate desk, told me about a 2016 article by two climatologists that suggested a direct, linear relationship between carbon emissions and the melting of Arctic's summer ice cover. |
| Their finding: Every metric ton of carbon or its equivalent melted 3 square meters, or 32 square feet. |
| "This number is sufficiently intuitive to allow one to grasp the contribution of personal CO2 emissions to the loss of Arctic sea ice," the researchers wrote dryly. |
| Indeed. I plugged in numbers from a carbon-footprint calculator and … no, that couldn't be right. But I kept doing the math and kept getting the same answer: My family's one-week winter-break trip to Florida would melt 90 square feet. |
| By this point, we had already decided to go to Greece for summer vacation, a far more destructive journey. I felt compelled to mention this, too, at the end of the story. I could not think of anything to say about it other than that we plan to buy carbon offsets and hope for the best. |
| The response on social media was swift and unsparing. Some readers found that to be a disappointing and cowardly place to end up. One argued that, by focusing on individual travel, I was letting big companies and state actors off the hook for their huge emissions. |
| I preferred to think of myself as being painfully honest. You can read the story here. |
