Am I being unreasonable to think extreme day trips are excessive?

I think if the travel time is 2 hours or less then it’s not ridiculous.

eg from where I live Dublin, Paris, London would be 1-2 hour flights.

very doable and not even extreme.

I did one and met up with a friend there....she flew from a different part of the UK. It was a brilliant day. I'd definitely do it again

Your message doesn’t even make sense.

No it's like eating 7000 calories while trying to lose weight and saying the chocolate biscuits aren't a problem because it's only a small part of the food. It doesn't make chocolate biscuits a low calorie food!

Also, let's be clear, this is chocolate biscuit consumption by at most 20% of people (maybe 4 percent of people fly in any given year and 20 percent have ever flown). So it's like saying the people in this room have consumed 7000 calories between them at this meal and only 3.5 percent of those calories have been chocolate biscuits so chocolate biscuits are not fattening.

Some of us have more energy/resilience and are less sweaty.

I wouldn't go as far as the Canaries but neither am I 'completely exhausted' by a morning of travelling. Most of it has been spent sitting down relaxing or even asleep.

Family are I all flew to Italy for our summer holiday recently..those lovely carbon emissions!!

It contributes about 0.008°C. I’m happy to take a tiny % of that, given nothing else will change!

We do need a lot more than commercial air travel to stop. But this does not mean flying is fine or makes no difference.

Reversing climate change is very very hard, so the fact that air travel, if stopped, would cause a reversal at all is actually huge. The bulk of the effort is about slowing down and stopping the rate of increase of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. Once the CO2 is up there, there is close to buggerall we have found to effectively deal with it so we have to stop putting it up there faster than we can clear it.

It is simply untrue to say air travel makes no difference. It is one of the most carbon intensive things most individuals do.

You don’t need to “budget” your carbon though

Well, no.

It’s like eating 7,000 calories a day, cutting 3.5% and expecting to lose weight.

That is like saying chocolate biscuits are only 3.5% of the calories I've eaten today so they aren't a high calorie food.

Air travel has a high carbon cost. As do quite a few other activities such as driving cars, heating homes, rearing livestock, making concrete, making electricity if done with fossil fuels. Of those things, flying is the most discretionary activity for most people. An extreme day trip is a fairly frivolous use of a chunk of carbon, and it's really quite painful to make an equivalent carbon saving elsewhere (you're looking at many many months of vegan diet or not driving a car to replace one extreme day trip)

For me, it's the risk of total derailment if the flight is delayed. It just doesn't seem worth it.

I can get to Italy quicker than London...

It’s not.

You would need a lot more than commercial air travel to stop for the earth to cool by even 1°C. The cumulative warming rate at the moment means it would take 100 years for us to avoid adding a meagre 0.06°C.

In other words, entirely pointless. The narrative of it being things like holidays that causes global warming is pushed by the people who don’t want to change any of their own habits and instead blame people like us.

I’ll be boarding my flights without guilt because I know it makes no difference.

And every year going forward which is a significant amount.

Car mileage and plane mileage are about equal in CO2/eq emissions per mile so I don't know whether this calculation is assuming very high car mileage, has accidentally counted multiple years of car ownership against one year of flights or the calculation has massively undervalued flights somehow but these numbers are off.

A friend and I do similar. We aren't museum goers, we like to visit cities, see the architecture of buildings. We generally tend to book a hotel for 1 night but it's pretty pointless as neither of us enjoy nightlight, we walk for up to 20 miles on the 1st day, use it as a way to have a good catch up, no kids, no dogs, no distractions. The morning is spent looking forward to getting back to the airport to head home.we take very few photos, we've travelled a lot (80+ countries), nano breaks or extreme days tick boxes for us now.

I’ve seen people go all the way to Lanzarote for the day. We’ve traveled there many times on the first flight out, around 6am. By the time we arrive at our hotel around lunchtime we’re completely exhausted and desperately in need of a shower. The last thing any of us would want to do is sight see!

I really can’t imagine enjoying this myself.

So fun fact! If all commercial air travel stopped tomorrow, it would shave off a whopping 0.006°C from the global rate of warming.

Plane hop to your hearts content!

I don't think it's excessive. Each individual has their own budget.

At least the airlines are more reliable than the trains.

If you go on lots of them..good. the plane was flying anyway

Commercial air travel accounts for 3.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn’t make a difference, in other words.

I don't own a car. Which means that my carbon emissions are less than about 80% of UK households without taking anything else into account.

According to Google, it would take about 18 or 19 European return flights per year to equal the carbon emissions of having as car.

If I take into account my commute by public transport to work, it comes up with a figure of 10-14 return flights per year.

My next planned short trip is an overnighter (accommodation is reasonably priced there). But I'm contemplating squeezing a day trip in before then.

If I do, that will be three return flights this year.

I can live with that.

Not if somebody does more than one of them, though, and I doubt that many of the people doing them spend the rest of their annual leave entitlement pottering around in the garden.

I can see why they’d be fun. There are plenty of places I’ve visited as day trips when I was already in a nearby city, with the same amount of time there as I’d get on an “extreme day trip”. It would be tiring but fine as a one off.

If the city had tons I wanted to see, I’d wait to do it properly. But there are plenty of places with just one or two things I want to do that could be done in a day.