Winging It

Well, I've completed the first step of the Challenge: I've switched my electricity supply to Ecotricity. Even though I'd done the research weeks ago, I had not got round to making the switch till yesterday—not because it was hard to bring myself to click the button that would mean I was choosing to spend more than necessary, but simply because I assumed it would be a tedious process that would keep requiring me to find obscure figures and documents. In fact it was disturbingly simple to make the switch via a tariff comparison website: you just give them your direct debit details and they sort out everything else, including giving the bad news to your existing supplier. Good thing I wasn't drunk at the time. I'm now going to have nightmares of waking with a sore head to find that, on an inebriated whim the previous night, I have just switched my domestic supply to SatanPower Plc or The Puppy Torture Energy Co. Or just some nutter who's wired together 8,000 PP3 batteries and set himself up in business.

Anyway, it's done. Will the other steps become easier, now that I've made this start? We shall see. This month's challenge is undoubtedly one of the Big Ones: to stop flying.

There’s no getting away from it—one long-haul flight can probably make a mockery of a year’s worth of careful domestic green tweaking. There are alternative ways of getting to the US or Australia but there are two big stumbling blocks: time and money.

I was asked to be an usher at a wedding this August in Syracuse, New York, shortly after the Green Challenge started, so I seriously looked into the possibility of taking a ship there. I discovered that aren’t actually many vessels plying that route—specifically there is now just the Queen Mary 2. (Well, I suppose you could hang out round the docks and hand a fistful of grubby notes to the one-eyed captain of a rusty tramp steamer to let you bed down in the engine room, no questions asked. Or maybe it doesn’t work like that nowadays: today’s ships are probably all crewed by robots and powered by lasers.) Not only are you limited to the dates that the ship is actually setting off, but even the cheapest QM2 ticket is about £1,600, rising to a tasty £26,000 for what is effectively a duplex flat, doubtless stuffed with Old Masters and a Jacuzzi filled with champagne. (In fairness, there do seem to be various special offers, so you might actually get a berth for more like £800, though this would be a cabin with no windows; it also seems that your ticket determines which of the many restaurants you’re actually allowed to dine in, so you could forget your Captain’s Table fantasies.)

Perhaps even more significantly for most of us, it takes six days to get there and presumably another six to get back. So you’d have to take two weeks off work, and you’d still only spend two days of that in America. No wonder cruises are so popular with old people—retired folk are the only ones with the time to do it. Even the promotional material comes pretty clean about this: there are no twenty-something models in their brochures. The aspirational figures here are silver-haired captains of industry and their trophy wives. So you’d have to think pretty carefully about whether you’d actually want to spend six days going to tea dances, playing quoits and wondering what’s for supper. (Only joking: the QM2 has a discotheque. And a planetarium.)

In fact my own carbon footprint in this area looks to be pretty respectable this year. For other reasons I probably won’t be able to make the wedding in Syracuse and I have no other plans to fly. My wife Ali and I have rented a cottage in Cornwall in June and we’re planning to visit friends in Copenhagen later in the year, a trip we’ll probably make by train or boat. (In fact I’ve had some great experiences on Eurostar, and if you’re travelling around suppertime it can be worth upgrading to first class—if there’s a deal on, the meal alone can be worth the extra money.)

To be honest I don’t particularly have a travel bug. I’ve had some memorable holidays (including a trip of a lifetime to New Zealand a few years ago: just try getting there by boat. Even www.seat61.com, a website dedicated to train and ship travel, admits there is no alternative to flying) but left to my own devices I’d probably never get round to going anywhere. (I could spend my entire holiday allowance just sitting in the recording studio that I’ve assembled in the spare room. Well, I say “spare”, but in fact you can scarcely move in there nowadays for towering racks of boxes covered in flashing light. Mmm…) It’s mostly at Ali’s instigation that I travel anywhere further than Oddbins.

In fact last year, aside from flying to Guernsey from Southampton, the only flights I took were on business (Ali did fly to Thailand, so her carbon footprint is now sasquatch-like). I went to a conference in Nice and I did actually look into going by train. But the convenience of the plane won out on that occasion.

I suppose that’s what it all comes down to: we want so much these days. We expect to be able to zip to the other side of the planet without the journey inconveniencing us that much. We all expect to be able to see as much of the world as only explorers and veteran seafarers would have glimpsed in the past. Let’s hope they crack teleportation some time soon.