Last year was the first time my wife brought up the consideration that flying was contributing to our carbon footprint. While over the past few years we had been actively trying to reduce our footprint by buying local, using less packaging, and cutting out meat from our diet, I struggled with imagining a world in which we flew less. I was especially concerned with how this would be feasible in a business context. How would we attend conferences? Would we lose our business to competitors who continued to meet clients face-to-face? All these questions and many more were rushing through my head that day.
The decision to not fly was not left to us. With Covid-19 hitting Canada and the U.S. in early March, in the span of five days, our company went from a policy of only essential flying, to no flying at all. Four months later, I have had the opportunity to reflect on our previous corporate travel policy and consider more carefully how it might be modified going forward. To help with this, we reached out to TripActions, our travel booking company, that shared some enlightening statistics about our flying in 2020.
In the first 12 weeks of 2020, StackAdapt’s team took over 400 flights and flew 650,000 km. It is hard to understand how much flying that is, so here are a few other ways to think about these numbers. It is a distance equivalent of flying around the Earth 16 times (or almost flying to the moon and back). If you used these flights to travel on vacation twice a year, you could travel for 100 years. It took us 73 days.
Now for the most interesting/terrifying statistic. How much carbon dioxide (CO2) did we produce flying?
The answer is 75 tons of CO2 (that’s 150,000 lbs)!
I had no idea how to conceptualize a ton of CO2 until I started writing this article. Here is a visualization that I found that shows just how much a ton is:
Is CO2 bad?
CO2, methane and other gases produced during the combustion of fossil fuels are naturally occurring, so they are not inherently bad. The problem is the volume and rate at which we emit these gases into the atmosphere. Globally, we emit around 36,000,000,000 (36 billion!) tons of CO2 per year, and this number continues to increase. We are seeing a record spike in the amount of CO2 gas in the last 100 years, unlike anything our planet has seen in the last 800,000 years:
Because CO2 molecules in the atmosphere trap the sun’s heat, an increase in CO2 molecules in the atmosphere causes our planet to warm up. Increased temperature is not the only consequence of high concentrations of CO2. Because our planet it a delicate, complex environment with deeply interconnected ecosystems, changes in one ecosystem trigger many unexpected and potentially devastating effects – from floods due to melting ice, to acidification of the oceans that destroy coral reefs and drive down marine wildlife populations. It is very likely that we don’t know all the consequences of these dramatically elevated CO2 levels yet.
What role does flying play in CO2 emission?
Transport is one of the leading causes of increased CO2 in the atmosphere (and while transport includes other modes of transportation, flying accounts for about 12% of that):
We are flying more and more every year. In the context of businesses travel, we perceive the value of meeting customers in-person as being very high. Conferences, new customer onboarding meetings, quarterly business reviews – these in-person meetings help companies form strong relationships with their clients, facilitate knowledge sharing, and build trust.
What about carbon offsets?
If you aren’t familiar with carbon offsets, they are a scheme that allows individuals and companies to invest in environmental projects around the world in order to – in principle – balance out their own carbon footprints. When you fly you have an option to “offset” your CO2 emissions by helping fund reforestation or clean energy projects. Whether carbon offsets are a viable strategy to truly balance out our carbon emissions, or just a way for us to feel better about our pollution is beyond the scope of this article.
A typical fee is around $12 per ton of CO2, and is usually optional. Because it is optional I did not even realize we weren’t doing it by default when booking our flights. Retroactively, on July 1, I went back and used Less.ca (operated by Bullfrog, one of Canada’s green energy providers) to purchase $1,500 in carbon offsets (75 tons at $20 per ton, as suggested by the website) for those flights in an attempt at making StackAdapt flights this year “carbon neutral”. Whether they truly are, I doubt it.
Where do we go from here?
We are in July 2020 when there is virtually no corporate travel. No corporate travel obviously means a devastating impact on the travel, restaurant, and entertainment industries. But what about other industries – what impact does not travelling have on their business?
For our part, working remotely has taught us that we can effectively meet and onboard new clients entirely virtually, and we can support existing customers well. This forced experiment has pushed us to think harder about whether we are overestimating the real value of face-to-face business. Perhaps our clients don’t want to see us as often as we think they do. Perhaps, the fact that our team spends so much time in transit detracts from their ability to support our clients in a timely manner. There are many unanswered questions. The “new norm” is being formed right now.
With many companies being forced to work remotely, everyone is in the same boat: there is no other way to do business other than what we do now – via email, via Slack, or Hangout. But what will it mean for our business when businesses can start traveling again? I think cutting out flying entirely feels risky because we don’t know long-term implications of never seeing our clients face-to-face (specifically, we don’t know the implications of a scenario where other companies resume corporate travel, but StackAdapt does not).
I admit, before Covid-19 we pushed our customer-facing team to travel as much as possible. Inevitably, in time, we will start flying again. But, the question is, will we do it like we did it before? My answer: unlikely. We will be working to implement stricter policies around corporate travel, including setting a minimum number of meetings needed to justify a flight, and initiating more transparent conversation with clients about ways they prefer to interact with us, encourage video calls, and implement a permanent carbon offset program.
Moving forward, I hope we can build a model that works for our customers – one where we may see them in-person less often, but instead invest in building efficient and seamless communication through virtual channels to offer potentially even better service. I feel confident that together we can redefine the “new norm” in a way that helps our respective businesses grow faster while reducing our carbon footprint.
To be continued.