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Air Travel and Carbon Footprint

Jordan_Hiller

Hey SEs, happy new year all.

Since the declaration of a climate emergency by over 11,000 scientists in November, I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal carbon footprint. I’m particularly troubled by how much flying I do. To start a discussion on this topic, I’m going to share some data about JMP division air travel, and my own contribution.

In keeping with Great Demo philosophy, I’ll share the results first; “Background” and “Data Details” are appended as a reply to this post.

Results

This analysis concerns US-based employees only, because that’s the data that was available to me.

In 2019, the SAS travel department booked 1597 air trips for 171 US-based JMP Division travelers, an average of 9.3 trips per traveler. The median traveler made 4 trips, and the top 25% of travelers each made 15 trips or more. Note that employees who made no air trips at all are not considered in this dataset.

Let’s zoom in on the top 50 travelers by total air trips. I’ve highlighted my data in red.

I’m not proud of this, guys. I’m mortified. With 31 trips in 2019, I’m tied for 7^th most trips out of 171 travelers. The rest of the data is anonymized; ping me if you want to know where you stand, or if you want a copy of the dataset.

Now let’s consider different kinds of trips for the top 50 travelers:

Most of the air trips taken by the top travelers are customer visits, colored blue in the bar graph above. Department affiliation of the travelers was not available in this dataset, but it’s clear (and not surprising) that most air travel is being conducted by sales personnel. Here is the distribution of trip categories for all travelers:

Nearly half of the air trips were customer visits, followed by internal meetings and non-SAS events at about one-fifth of trips each. There’s more resolution when we break out trips by month:

The two highest peaks for internal meeting travel are in July and January – corresponding with our midyear meetings and kickoff. The two peaks for travel to SAS-hosted events are for Discovery Europe in March and Discovery US in October. The customer travel profile is jagged. The peak in September is possibly attributable to the end of summer vacation season, and months with low customer travel tend to be those months with our internal meetings and Discovery events (the exception is December, when there is not much travel across all categories).

Discussion

When I saw how much flying I did for business in 2019, I felt terrible. I still do. Flying or not is one of the few choices we can make at the individual level to affect our personal emissions, and I’ve made some poor choices. The future looks quite grim, and massive efforts are needed to change our climate trajectory. I know my personal carbon footprint is negligible compared to the scope of the problem, but I don’t want to have to tell my kids someday that we knew how bad the problem was, but I did nothing anyway.

I’m trying make some changes to fly less and still fulfill all my work obligations. Most of my flights last year were to Seattle, only 175 miles away from my home. Luckily, there are other ways I can get to Seattle: trains and buses are both reasonable options, and both have far lower emissions than flying or driving alone. I’m also working with my AE to batch our customer visits more effectively, to reduce the number of round trips for the same number of visits. I have a lot of room for improvement.

I invite you all to share your thoughts. Are you as concerned about our organizational carbon footprint as I am? What other things do you think we should be doing to reduce it?

Accepted answers

All comments

Jordan_Hiller

Background

Why should we focus on air travel? Here’s some background on this topic. While aviation itself is not the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions (one estimate is that aviation is responsible for 2.4% of global CO2 emissions), there are a number of good reasons to be concerned about flying:

Aviation is an important part of the transportation sector. Transportation accounts for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and 29% of emissions in the US. The transportation sector is now the largest source of carbon pollution in the US.
The impact of aviation is growing far more quickly than expected. One study found that aviation emissions are expected to triple by 2050. A more recent study suggests that growth is in aviation emissions is even 50% faster than that dire estimate.
In terms of personal responsibility, flying dwarfs other factors, especially for frequent fliers. “If you’re a regular flyer, odds are that your biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions each year is air travel.” (source) There is some sobering data from a 2017 survey of American adults. Most Americans fly 5 times a year or less. The remaining 12 percent of Americans who fly 6 or more times a year are responsible for 68% of the trips – and an estimated 3.1 metric tons of CO2 emissions per person.

Data Details

These data come from a travel department reporting tool (http://sww.sas.com/tas/reports/manager/#/advanced). Data is for US-based travelers only.

This dataset is far from perfect. Because the data comes from ticket purchases, trips that were paid for but not actually taken might be included here. I did some light cleaning to remove obviously rescheduled flights, but I’m sure I didn’t catch them all. That means that the air trip counts are probably slightly inflated. Also, Amtrak (train) trips are counted here as air trips. By going through my own travel records, I found that 6 of my 31 trips were by train rather than air.

Other important information related to carbon impact is not easily available: factors like direct flights vs. flights with layovers, overall distance traveled, what kind of plane was used, and first-class vs. economy seating are not considered here.

Phil_Kay

Great work. Just a quick question. Is 1 "trip" a single flight? Or would outward and return together count as 1 trip?

DonMcCormack

I think I know the data Jordan is looking (SAS Travel > Traveler Resources > Travel Reports Query Forms, then scroll to Passenger Summary by Business Unit) and the answer is "No". A trip is one travel request submission. I can have trips with no (hotel and/or train), one (one way), two (roundtrip), or many (multicity) flights. While the routing is available, I'm not sure you can extract the number of flights from it.

Jordan_Hiller

Yes, a datapoint here is a trip in the travel department sense, with one or more flights as well as hotel, rental car, etc.

I did a preliminary analysis to calculate the number of flight legs per trip, but as Don says, it’s not possible to get directly from the routing information.

Don, there are a number of different reporting tools from the travel department, and the results vary confusingly.

Peter_Hersh

Thanks for sharing Jordan. It is alarming to see how much flying we are doing as a division as well as myself (30 trips for me by my count). I know I could do a better job of grouping meetings to limit repeat visits in the future. It seems like limiting internal meetings maybe making midyear and or kick-off a virtual meeting could make a big difference. US Discovery being out of Cary seems like it leads to a lot more travel. Did you check 2018 to see the difference? Would it make sense to have US Discovery stay on campus every year?

Mark_Zwald

Interesting data set Jordan, thanks for sharing and prompting this discussion. Apparently the single best thing any individual can do to reduce carbon footprint is become vegetarian (I'm not vegetarian yet). Aside from that, driving an electric car charged by non-fossil fuel sourced electricity, and reducing air travel, the solution to make a dent in CO2 concentration will likely require innovations such as CO2 scrubbers and green algae farms on a massive, global scale as we have likely already gone past the point of runaway global warming. A surprisingly large amount of CO2 comes from concrete manufacturing, so we would need to phase that out plus convert from fossil fuel power to solar/wind/nuclear/fusion. Air travel though will likely always require jet fuel, as that is the only known power source with sufficiently large enough power density to enable high-speed flight (aside from liquid hydrogen/oxygen).

Jordan_Hiller

I agree Pete -- shifting some of our internal meetings to virtual could have a large impact, and is worth exploring.

As for Discovery, I haven't done a comparison of travel for Cary-based years vs. remote years. I'm sure you're right, we have to do less air travel as a division when hosting in Cary.

There are professional groups that work on sustainability for meetings like Discovery, here's a link to the EPA page.

Phil_Kay

Batching meetings is obviously a good idea. However, it can go too far and you end up with longer trips with lots of less useful meetings.

I made a big effort to reduce flights last year by taking the train when possible. I find it a more productive use of my time to travel by train anyway and it works for well for journeys in the UK. Maybe we could do something to make train travel more appealing - for example, first class travel in some situations. Currently there is more incentive to take a flight instead to get the frequent flyer points.

Phil_Kay

Recently I was in a committee meeting for one of the Royal Society of Chemistry interest groups and we were discussing keynote speakers for an upcoming event in London. One of the committee said we should not be flying people in on long haul flights anymore because of the carbon cost, unless we have a really good reason. And we all agreed that we should always look to find local speakers.

International collaboration is always going to be important and will probably need some face to face time. But I think more people are challenging the need to fly lots of people around the world for conferences. I expect our customers will start challenging us more on this.

martindemel

1. Travel vehicle:

For me I usually have to travel distances less than 1000km, most of the time less than 600km. Within Germany I'll take the train if I'm at the destination within 4-max 5h, which is almost every larger city. Why? I need about 1h to get to the airport, have to be there at least 30min-1h in advance, then 1-2h flight and another at least 30-60 min to the destination from the airport. Taht's for Germany and Austria.

For Switzerland it is a bit more difficult to get there from Munich because of the east-southwest direction through the Alps. I need to travel at least 4.5-6.5h to get to almost any location there by train (or bus!). If I do not have a meeting on Monday afternoon I still take the train and make best use of the travel time. If it is more appropriate to travel at the same day for an noon to afternoon meeting I have to fly to arrive in time.

Well, train is my preferred travel vehicle , however, if I can get there within 2-2.5h I'll take the car most of the times, as these companies do not site in the medium to larger cities but in the fields

2. BatchingMeetings

In Switzerland, due to the above said, we usually batch meetings, that is we specify one week where we will be at one customer and find others in CH which make sense to visit from an oportunity point of view. This can be 4-5 meetings as within Switzerland you will be almost everywhere witin 2.5h. So even 2 meetings a day is sometimes possible. However, we make sure it is worth visiting - none "just come by" events. In Germany it is more a case by case situation as it is often quite difficult and time consuming to get from one customer to the next if they are not in a larger city.

3. Travel Gadgets

In Germany we have train bonus systems which are quite nice. We can have a first class membership if the travel is enough to compensate the cost. This means 50% price reduction on your tickets. Usually this is equalized with two train rides (back and forth) from Munich to Frankfurt - so quite easy to achieve. In addition you achieve points you are allowed to use as a flight membership. If you travel frequently you gain one or two free tickets within Europe without much effort. Sorry Phil, it's not the UK

Overall I think there are plenty of possibilities to reduce the personal footprint and many are already mentioned. However I think goverment in addition needs to make research for new ways of traveling/fuel usage/fuels/energy consumption and generation much more attractive than the known big wasters from the old ways. This includes also agriculture, food, and anydigging for special materials which often need much more energy than they can produce in their lifecycle.

I agree this is a big topic, nowadays even bigger than before. Hoever I also believe one should turn on the mind and not becoming hyperactive. Just as an example what happened in Germany last year. There was a crash of a SUV and a few people walking on the footwalk, the people died. Suddenly a shit storm appeared and proclaimed SUVs have to be excluded from cities combined with the climate reason. At the same time many manufacturers have already came up with first models of electonic SUVs, which they just included in their request to throw them out. Also they didn't think about the smaller SUVs (it's still a sports utility vehicle), or compared the consumption of larger family cars which are not that far behind with their emission values. I agree one should find ways to reduce emission - especially in cities - but this example reminds me since then of the often pure "oh god we have to do something - no matter if it makes sense" behaviour which makes it harder for those who have good arguments to get through to the decision makers.

Long post, but needed to make a point now.

martindemel

I agree more meetings can be done virtually, but not all. I think especially the Kick-Of Meeting is the one meeting the whole company should be in one room to get the direction and motivation for the whole new year. All the networking and more fruitful discussions in person can lead from a companies view to much more success during the year. A virtual Kick-Off is not able to share and create the same motivation in my eyes and it does not align all employees to the same extend as it does in person. If someone now feels the content might not be good enough for such a meeting - that's maybe fair but can be changed (also by you making suggestions).

The big MS, G, A 's of this world do this for some good reason, not just for fun. It's the only time in the year you can align all to a mission (as it was the 100Mio last year). In a virtual meeting many wouldn't have got the message - if one is honest.

Also trainings like every three years in the midyear (before autumn release) is worth it, as getting presentations via Webex from developers is almost not really helpful or worth sitting together in a room - this can be done on the desk anytime - and has a totally different mood.

However, I agree the general midyear meetings can be done virtually, as it is often just a bit more the check where we are and what do we need to do to keep beeing on track (for the plan made and delivered during Kick-Off).

Jordan_Hiller

I agree @martindemel -- there is a lot of value in face-to-face meetings, and virtual meetings are an imperfect substitute. Reducing emissions is not painless, otherwise this problem would have been solved long ago.

I believe it is important to have discussions like this one, and consider the data and the tradeoffs honestly and frankly. I'm glad to hear your comments.

Jordan_Hiller

Great points, Martin. I’d like to respond to your thought about making sure that our emissions-related efforts are sensible and not rash.

For the reasons I described in the Background section above, I think it is important to focus some of our attention on aviation emissions. But all our efforts should be grounded in data. This should be approached like any improvement program – as a division, we are at the “D” in DMAIC. We should look at data on our overall carbon footprint as a division. SAS does great work in this area at the company-wide level. There is even a Visual Analytics dashboard with SAS’s overall carbon footprint, part of our Corporate Social Responsibility report.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a JMP Live dashboard tracking our emissions as a division? It would help us understand the scope of the issue, and where to focus our efforts. I think an emissions dashboard would also be valuable for our external marketing efforts, to promote both JMP Live and corporate sustainability.