I always feel a spark of excitement when I book a flight. I’ve loved airplanes and airports for as long as I can remember. Luckily, my partner feels the same way… It’s one of the many reasons we work so well together. We love planes, we love travel, and as a result, we fly a lot.
To put it in perspective, one of the New Year’s resolutions we made in 2024 was to take only one round-trip flight a month. It’s a ridiculous resolution to have set. Limiting ourselves to 12 trips a year is still an absurd amount of travel. But when the opportunity arises, whether it’s to see friends, family, or chase a new adventure, we almost always say yes. Travel is an obsession the two of us (now three, with our son) just can’t shake.
But for the last 8 years, intermixed with my excitement of flying is also this uneasy guilt every time I book a flight. I know that flying has an impact on the environment. And considering how much I try to live sustainably in other aspects of my life, flying the amount that I do feels hypocritical.
Air travel has become the ultimate symbol of environmental irresponsibility because it’s one of the most carbon-intensive activities an individual can partake in. The aviation industry is responsible for approximately 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions. That’s a lot. If global aviation were a country, it would rank among the top 10 largest emitters in the world.
My partner, son, and I just got back from a trip to New Zealand and Australia. And while I should have been dreading 30 hours on a plane with a 16-month-old, all I felt was excitement!
But then the guilt hits.
A roundtrip flight from Salt Lake City to Auckland emits nearly 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide. For comparison, the average American’s annual carbon footprint is about 16 metric tons. That means this one trip puts me halfway to reaching the average American's total yearly carbon emissions. And Americans already have high carbon footprints compared to the rest of the world.
That’s pretty awful, if I do say so myself. Our flying habits skyrocket our carbon footprint. I work so hard to minimize our environmental impact in other areas of our life, yet here we are, absolutely demolishing all our sustainability aspirations in one trip.
There’s no way around it: my flying habits are a direct contradiction to my efforts to live sustainably. Insert my resigned sigh here.
The problem is that cutting out flying severely affects my happiness and mental health. This got put to the test during the pandemic in 2020. I found other ways to explore (like road trips), but there’s nothing that matches the joy of flying to a new place for me.
I firmly believe that to save our planet, we all need to find ways to live sustainably. But I also firmly believe that we all need to find ways to live sustainably—in a sustainable way.
What I mean by that is that we need to create habits that we can repeat over and over without it affecting our mental health. And cutting out visits to see our friends, family, and new places is not a sustainable way for my partner and me to live.
Travel has opened my eyes to new cultures, perspectives, and ways of living. I want my son, Lukas, to grow up experiencing the world’s incredible diversity. Travel has even deepened my understanding of sustainability; seeing how different communities interact with their environments has reshaped how I think about conservation.
So, I need to find a way to make travel a little more environmentally friendly. Offsetting flights isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s one way we’re trying to balance our love for travel with my desire to minimize our carbon footprint.
For years, we’ve used Wren to offset our household’s carbon emissions. It’s automated, and it gives me peace of mind for our day-to-day lives. I’ve even set it to automatically offset our carbon footprint for a monthly national flight. So, it automatically covers some of our flying carbon footprint.
But international flights like this one are different. These long flights come with a far larger carbon footprint than the average national trip. So, for this international trip to New Zealand, we’ve invested in additional offsets through Wren. It’s a tangible way to acknowledge the environmental impact of this journey and contribute to carbon-minimizing solutions like reforestation and methane capture initiatives.
For our trip to New Zealand and Australia, I paid an extra $255 total to Wren to offset the carbon footprint of both my partner's and my flights.
Does it undo the emissions of our trip? No. But it’s an intentional way to take responsibility for the footprint we’re creating. Navigating this discomfort is the complicated reality of trying to live sustainably. It’s not about ignoring the truth; it’s about making intentional choices in the mess of it all.