I’m still catching up on blog posts which are overdue. I’m an unsatisfied customer of Eneco, a large Dutch energy company. Their customer support is incompetent and their welcome gift arrived many weeks later than promised. Their gift, a Philips vacuum cleaner, turned out to have the suction power of a chain smoker with terminal lung cancer.
So when they ran an ad last year on 29 July in the free Dutch newspaper Metro, I naturally was suspicious of them. In this advert, it was claimed that a one-way flight to Southern Europe would cause CO2 emissions equal to the CO2 emitted to produce electricity for an average household for one year.
The advert didn’t quote any figures, but according to data compiled in 2015 by he Dutch environmental organization Milieu Centraal 1,6 (metric) tonnes of CO2 was emitted to produce electricity for an average household of 2,2 persons. It should be noted the total CO2 emissions for this household, including indirect emissions, are calculated to be much higher at 23 tonnes.
Milieu Centraal also calculated CO2 emissions for several example flights, including one from Amsterdam to Malaga in southern Spain. They give a figure of 655 kilos CO2, not much more than the 500 kilos for using a car with two persons. The bus and the train have much lower emissions for this journey, respectively 100 and 200 kilos of CO2. While Milieu Centraal notes that high-altitude emissions are extra damaging, 655 kilos doesn’t approach 1.600 kilos by a long shot. A return flight is closer at 1.310 kilos.
While Eneco is wrong on the math, they have a point that aircraft are extremely polluting and that we need to avoid them as much as much as possible. More on that later in another post.