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| Winter break: Bettina Brandt and her son, Joel, are among hundreds of thousands of Swedes who seek a reprieve in the sun each
winter. BOB RIVES |
Swedes weigh global warming versus a better tan
Eco-minded Scandinavians crave winter vacations. Yet the long flights add to greenhouse gases. Should they hit the beach or save the planet?
from the April 23, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
The travel fever comes as the European Union looks for ways to curb emissions from the airline industry, the region's fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases. The European Commission is in a desperate race to meet its Kyoto Protocol obligations, and officials believe it can only happen with an overhaul in aviation.
But even the most environmentally conscious will find excuses for behavior that aggravates the climate crisis. Try convincing Americans to give up their SUVs, or Indians their cows. They will present compelling arguments for keeping up habits that generate greenhouse gases. The Swedes are no different. It shows just how difficult it can be to act locally – even when the Earth's future is at stake.
"Living in Sweden, suffering through those long, dark falls and long winters, we need to have a few weeks of hot weather to look forward to – to pull us through," says Bettina Brandt, seated in a chair next to her mother. Bettina, a retail manager, gets up to wade into the lukewarm waves with her 6-year-old son, Joel. "Especially after the rainy summer we had last year."
For light-deprived Scandinavians, escaping for a few weeks during the winter is considered a matter of mental survival – an entitlement fueled by rising incomes and a strong economy. The flights Swedes and other Europeans take to developing countries currently generate half of all aviation-based greenhouse-gas emissions in such nations, according to the European Federation for Transport and Environment. This winter, 300,000 Swedes booked flights to Thailand alone.
"We're talking enormous travel distances, so even if the flight is full, the total emission per passenger will be fairly high," says Kjell Andersson, head of energy and transport at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. "One Sweden-Thailand round trip is equivalent to putting 15,000 kilometers [9,300 miles] on your car for several years."
Such facts jolt Katarina Eriksson. The hardware store employee just returned from a three-week trip to northeastern Brazil and says she knows "we're destroying the world." She and her husband travel abroad every fall and spring – usually to Greece – and plan eventually to retire away from the cold climate of Mora, their home town in the middle of Sweden.
After trying a winter trip to the tropics this year, they're contemplating adding India to their 2009 itinerary. "You think of your kids and grandchildren – what will life be like for them?" Ms. Eriksson says. "But I live for these trips. I used to get depressed every fall and winter, and I think our trips really helped me overcome that."
The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency recently asked the government to curb airport construction and to impose stricter emissions caps on existing airports to make flying more difficult and expensive. Mr. Andersson also hopes that a future European aviation emissions trading scheme, which uses economic incentives to curb pollution, will slow the travel frenzy – especially in a weakening economy. "We don't tell people to stay home, but we can apply financial pressures," he says.
Like many people in the industrialized world being asked to sacrifice to cool the planet, Swedes hope technology will preserve their tan lines. Eric Persson is a young Swedish-Brazilian entrepreneur who built the hotel where Eriksson and her husband stayed in South America. He's proud of Sweden's environmental reputation. He's considering installing solar panels on his hotel property, and uses a green ionization technology to clean his pool instead of chlorine.
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