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

[SonnyHoney]

For instance, London Luton to Venice.
How can anyone enjoy leaving their house at 2 a.m. to fly out ridiculously early, spend a few hours somewhere walking around exhausted, and then fly back the same day?
It feels like people are just trying to collect places these days, rather than visiting somewhere because it's somewhere they've aways wanted to go.

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.

I can get to Italy quicker than London...

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

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)

Well, no.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Your message doesn’t even make sense.

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

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.

Our of interest, how many children do you have?

YABU. I haven't done it myself but I can see the appeal. Why does it matter to you what others do?

Can confirm. My dd did it. Holocaust Memorial Trust run trips from all over the UK, not sure if the plane is chartered, a few kids from lots of schools, she went to meetings and lectures beforehand. Left here at midnight for flight to Poland arrived back midnight next day.

I don't know. I've been tempted to do it for DS as he has food allergies. It would mean we could take some food, find a mcdonalds and be home safely.

Can I ask (and this is nothing not do with emissions, etc). Do you live close to an airport and do you get a taxi or are you able to rely on buses to get to the airport? Those are the bits that add would more time onto the journey for me. Is there anything in particular or anywhere, that you’d avoid?

Air travel has the potential to get massively delayed. A 2 hour flight can easily take 3 hours, plus getting to the airport 2 hours before. A 2 hour drive or train journey is not the same as a 2 hour flight.
I think it could be potentially quite pressurised to do a 2 x 2 hour flights in a day.
I have done it for work to avoid being away from home for a full night, but that was not my own money and not meant to be fun.

I think your emissions numbers are off

most people it’s about a third for food, a third for home heating/electric/transport and a third on stuff from memory - anyway it isn’t just owning a car

the only way you can get to 18 flights because you don’t own a car is to assume you buy a new car every year / most cars have a MUCH longer life and it’s normal to divide the emissions of manufacture across the expected life

anyway
0.5 tonnes co2 for a return London to Prague flight

I have a car and our household emissions are around 4 tonnes CO2

the UK average is around 9 tonnes ( think that’s per person not household )

18 flights alone is 9 tonnes. You have to also get to the airport ( walk) , not eat anything ( starve) not turn your lights or heating on and not buy anything else to support your ridiculous claim that your emissions are not high for the UK

I think it's immoral for environmental reasons, but even if I didn't the ratio of travel vs actually seeing the place is way too poor for me to enjoy it. Years ago I went to Prague for a two-night hen-do and even that felt like two days in an airport vs one day sightseeing. Not worth it.

Of course one could also argue that flights should be made too expensive for it to be an option.

I am near Dublin airport and have been to most of the places you mentioned but for weekend trips rather than just for the day. The day trips were to Bristol, York, Birmingham, London a few times etc just because we took a notion but a bit further out and I prefer a few days to really get immersed in places :)

Did a day trip to Cairo, years ago, to see the pyramids.

They were fascinating - but a day there was enough.

Same here although my trip was not too impressive as we were staying in Hurghada anyway 😂