A statement that is often made around those environmentally conscious is: flying is more polluting than driving, so drive if you can. I will attempt to challenge this claim and find out what the true cost carbon cost of travelling is and in which situations you may want to do what, if your goal is to minimize the carbon footprint.

Why this question sucks to answer: planes and cars don’t always fly (or drive) at maximum occupancy – they don’t always travel the same distances (planes flying longer tend to be more efficient than shorter trips, they also tend to carry more people). What disturbs the comparison even more is the fact that “emissions from a plane are not the same as the emissions from cars (Aamaas, et. al. 2013).” Planes flying at different heights have different emissions (even more complicating things). What type of plane is flying has an effect on fuel efficiency and thus emissions per person. Speculative fun fact, emissions are different if a plane is flown during the day or at night, the sun can help trap some emissions in ( https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jun/15/theairlineindustry.ethicalliving) there is no article sourced in this post which is incredibly frustrating. The lack of citation annoys me because there is a claim being made about pollution, and no citation, on a web page that many people might assume is reputable.

“According to the airline, short-haul flights, i.e. up to 800 km, have a specific fuel consumption of 7.7 L per 100 passenger-kilometers, while flights of up to 2500 km trip distance have a specific fuel consumption of 4.7 L per 100 passenger-kilometer” (Aamas et al., 2013)

3 L/100 km per passenger for the airbus (wikipedia)

“A few long trips by air are responsible for a large share of the total climate impact.” Is that because of the distance driven or distance and type?

(Aamas et al., 2013)

References:

https://davidsuzuki.org/what-you-can-do/air-travel-climate-change/

“Borgar Aamaas, Jens Borken-Kleefeld, Glen P. Peters, 2013.
The climate impact of travel behavior: A German case study with illustrative mitigation options,
Environmental Science & Policy”

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2013.06.009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901113001366?casa_token=pBcvjbdfjj0AAAAA:OI3CAGwRG-K6SHpNq0cfI5zFxunr0trc4r1ZhfhrDo9Q_9u4ppuEuGy-XUmNootWxvOF42IVQg