I recently spent nearly two days trying to fly around one hour from Amsterdam to Berlin. After several cancelled flights and many hours queuing, I made it home with my family via Paris, burning double the amount of CO2 along the way. Our baggage arrived 10 days later. The moral of the story: We should have just taken the train. In the six hours we initially spent queuing at the help desk after the first cancellation, we could have travelled to the German capital by rail.We would have been dropped at a station a few stops from home and might have got some rest in a carriage that is way more comfortable than a thrombosis-inducing economy flight cabin.
Best of all, we would have saved a lot of carbon emissions, doing our little bit to put a brake on the runaway emissions in the transport sector.
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A typical rail journey between European cities emits up to 90% less CO2 than an equivalent flight. Meanwhile, the aviation industry has the fastest-growing greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, rising 29% between 2009 and 2019, according to Greenpeace.
Despite the airline business's post-pandemic crisis, flights are expected to burn up over a quarter of the allotted carbon budget for holding global heating to 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 F) by 2050. With the industry planning to return to pre-COVID capacity by 2024, air traffic is set to double worldwide by 2037.