A weekend trip to Darwin by Jetstar. Travelling by plane is my only vice when it comes to the
climate emergency.
I commute to work usually by bus and train, I don't eat meat and I consume very little dairy - usually only when travelling and even then only when it is part of some vegetarian meal (being 100% vegan is hard), solar panels on the roof of my house produce 50% more electricity than our family uses.
Going by train from Gold Coast to Darwin (Gold Coast to Brisbane, Brisbane to Sydney, Sydney to Adelaide, Adelaide to Darwin) would take minimum 4 days, and it would be a 5400 km trip on mostly diesel powered trains, including
The Ghan from Adelaide to Darwin which costs minimum $2349 per person, one way, in low season.
It is about 2900 km by plane. I'm looking forward to the day when we have commercial electric planes. Meanwhile, to offset this trip I used
https://co2.myclimate.org to calculate CO2 amount: 5900 km, two people: 2.0t. Then, using the most conservative calculation - one year of carbon abatement: 22 kg of CO2 per tree (
Quora - How many trees do I need to plant to offset the carbon dioxide released in a flight?) gives the number of 91 trees. Now, for somebody to plant them you can go to:
https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/donate-trees where prices start from 0.10 USD per tree for the Eden Reforestation Projects. Tree survival rate for this project is 80%, so we need to plant 114 trees, which is only $11.40 USD. This is probably the cheapest you can find nowadays.
Darwin is a city of 145 thousand people.
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| The airport and the RAAF base dominate Darwin. The Darwin City is the small area in the lower left part of this map. |
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| Parap was the site of the original Darwin airport. The new, much bigger one was built on swamps east-north of Parap. |
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| Approaching Darwin CBD by car |
