I am waiting on the next flight. Once again on the way to a seminar, once again arriving in the middle of the night and giving a training tomorrow in the morning. Once again explaining this or that to some people, and once again only a very few of them actually implementing what they have heard.
This all belongs to my career, just as it does for millions of other consultants worldwide. I also wouldn’t have thought much about it, had I not read something completely crazy: If you rode the 10 kilometers to work on your bicycle instead of in your car, in one year you would save approximately 350 kg of CO2 – as much as one round-trip flight between Frankfurt and Vienna for one person.
I cannot ride my bike enough to save all the CO2 I have already produced in my life. Every year I fly approximately 100 times within Europe. With this, I wouldn’t even get me to Lufthansa Senator status if it weren’t for the occasional flight to Dubai or the USA. However, whenever I pass by the Senator Lounge in the evening, it is always completely full – even on a Monday evening. We all fly far too much and accomplish nothing good in doing so. If the follow-up costs of travel in its current form would be viewed as an investment – there would only be a negative ROI.
Can something be done? I don’t know. I only know that I will buy myself an electric automobile and will ride my bike more; I can also use public transportation more often, but all of that still doesn’t change the carbon footprint I have already created.
Something is amiss here. If we really need this extreme mobility of a few people as a society, then we need to come up with more environmentally friendly options. Above all, we must know whether or not the expenditure is worth it. We cannot continue on like this.