In the hallway, suitcases are packed, backpacks are fastened. After months of thinking, debating and preparing, the family Jacinovic is finally getting ready to fly to Canada. A big three-week trip that the parents had long promised their two children. The certainty of seeing moose in the boreal forests, and perhaps even encountering whales in the Lower St. Lawrence region, is already arousing excitement in the family. However, on the eve of departure, our four ecologists are feeling guilty. Because when you look closely, it will be impossible for them to offset the environmental cost of their trip.
The family has tried to minimize the environmental impact of this trip. First, the flight will be non-stop. The ticket price is a little higher, but the emissions are much lower. To avoid worsening their balance sheet, the choice was made to adopt a more virtuous tourism: once in the country, the family will favor soft mobility. No road trip in an SUV, but the use of public transport to get to the most beautiful natural parks. The activities will also be oriented in this direction. On the program: hiking, kayaking or cycling activities. And even the overnight stays are supervised, with priority given to collective accommodation and campsites.
Despite these precautions, the calculators of the Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) are going crazy. According to the platform’s calculations, a round-trip flight from Paris to Montreal is equivalent to approximately 1.6 tonnes of CO2 per passenger, or nearly 6.5 tonnes emitted by our family. “A round trip is approximately 1,013 meals with chicken,” worries the youngest. The father, a big fan of red meat, notes that his Paris-Montreal flight represents the equivalent of 138 meals with beef. The brain is racing to balance the round trip. The father will therefore have to go without steak for the next 276 meals… In other words, more than two years without meat. “Impossible overnight,” he sighs.
To afford a long-haul flight, another solution would be to agree to never fly in Europe again. “Easy!” says the second: night trains are experiencing a new development and several high-speed lines allow you to reach neighboring countries. On the energy side, however, the room for maneuver seems limited. In their 90 m2 apartment running on gas, the Jacinovics could spend a whole year without heating. But that would only save them half the CO2 used for their round trip to Montreal, or 3,500 kg of greenhouse gases. Worse still, to compensate for a one-way trip, the mother would have to completely give up using the car for a year and three months.
The step is so high that the family has even considered resorting to tree plantations to absorb the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the engines of their Airbus. “No way!” replied the father. Articles from the British daily The Guardianas well as the German weekly The Time revealed in 2023 that the vast majority of carbon credits certified by the reference standard, Verra, used by large companies including EasyJet, were in reality “ghost credits”.
Stuck by the carbon budget
After searching a bit on the Internet, the eldest came across an enticing solution: the French company EcoTree offers a turnkey solution to take care of our excess tons of carbon. This time, the trees are planted in France and Europe, the calculation of CO2 absorption is clear — “a tree absorbs about 25 kilos of CO2 per year” indicates the site —, and all forestry operations are validated by a certification body. With more than 6 tons of CO2 emitted for their Paris-Montreal round trip in Economy class, our family would therefore have to buy at least six carbon credits from Ecotree to balance their balance sheet.
A good solution? Not really, replies Jérôme du Bouchet, an aviation specialist at the NGO Transport and Environment. “Despite what may be promised, these certificates pose numerous monitoring problems, and these tonnes of CO2 emitted now will take years to be absorbed by the trees. But we need to reduce our emissions now.” So no more recourse to CO2 credits. Especially since all of this is expensive. At around 75 euros per credit sold by EcoTree, the bill would have weighed down the family budget by around 450 euros.
In fact, the Jacinovics They may look for a solution, but they are stuck by their carbon budget, which is the maximum amount of greenhouse gas emissions that each individual can emit annually, to slow climate change. Year after year, this theoretical threshold continues to be reduced due to the accumulation of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. “This carbon budget thinking is a simplified version of the Paris Agreements. We know how to calculate the maximum amount of emissions that will allow the world to keep global warming below 1.5°C since 1900. By dividing this figure by the number of inhabitants on Earth, we obtain this target of around 2 tonnes per person in 2050,” explains Martin Régner of Ademe. A Paris-Montreal flight would therefore consume almost all of an individual’s carbon capital.
The expert himself admits that, in reality, the target of 2 tonnes of CO2 per year and per person is currently impossible to achieve. Because beyond our actions, a good part of the public services that we consume daily are still very carbon-intensive. The operation of hospitals, the heating of classrooms, and even the greenhouse gases emitted by the army as part of its missions represent a significant part of our individual carbon footprint. In its calculator, Ademe estimates this “shared” share of emissions at 1.3 tonnes per individual. “It is important to be aware of this, to understand that not all efforts rest on the citizen. The State, communities, businesses, must play their part in reducing emissions to also reduce this share”, explains Martin Régner.
“Certainly these individual changes must happen as quickly as possible, but we are first and foremost addressing the collective and the State in the first place,” adds Béatrice Jarrige, economist and “long-distance mobility” project manager at The Shift Project. As intimidating as it may be, the objective of 2 tonnes of CO2 per year and per person should not make us forget that it is above all a trajectory. Taking into account the emissions of an average French person, this reduction should be around 6% per year. “This is a gradual path, we are not yet in 2050, there are 25 years left to move forward. But we must now resolutely take this path,” emphasizes the Ademe specialist.
This speech will probably relieve some families of their guilt. But not the Jacinovics, for whom the trip also marks the adoption of a greener lifestyle. The father has thus committed to reducing meat to two meals a week, but this will only allow him to reduce his carbon footprint by 7%. As for the children, who are big consumers of new clothes, choosing second-hand clothes brings little comfort: barely 1% of their footprint would be reduced… On the other hand, they all note that if they decided to stop traveling by plane, their annual greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by almost 15%. The argument hits the mark… A few hours before flying, the family makes a new promise to themselves: to take the train on their next trips.
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