Why I’m trying not to fly this year

At the start of 2010, I decided I was going to try not to fly this year, for the whole year. Now six months in, I’ve finally got round to blogging about it to explain why.

(I actually published this post briefly about a month ago but I realised I’d miscalculated the figures in the second part of this post. Apologies to people who read the first version as the figures and graphs have now been fixed, and I’ve re-written most of the article based on more up-to-date information.)

The main reason I’m trying to avoid flying as much as possible is because of the disproportionate impact that flying has on climate change compared with other forms of transport like trains or cars. Planes, like cars and most UK trains, emit carbon dioxide (CO2) which can be measured in metric tonnes. The combustion of aeroplane fuel, however, emits other gases too: nitrogen oxides and water vapour. At high altitudes (which is where most aeroplane emissions are made), these gases have an increased impact on the climate compared with at ground level¹.

Travelling by plane can produce the same emissions per person as travelling the same distance by car but you typically travel further in an aeroplane than you would by car or train so the amount of carbon dioxide emitted is greater before you even start to include the effect of the other emissions at altitude.

How flying compares with other activities

Currently, each person in the UK, on average, is responsible for about 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide (and the CO2 equivalent in other greenhouse gases) per year². For the sake of comparison with other countries, the USA emits about 19 tonnes, France emits about 6 tonnes, China about 4.5 tonnes, and India about 1 tonne per person³.

Although the UK looks quite virtuous in comparison with the USA (see the graph in ³), now compare the UK with China and India. And remember that the 9 tonnes doesn’t include all the stuff we import to the UK that is manufactured in other countries, such as China and, therefore, is included in China’s accounts.

When you include the things we import, plus flying (currently not included in national environmental accounts), the UK’s average person emits nearly 14 tonnes of CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases (collectively known as CO2e)⁴. However,  this being an average means, of course, that some people emit more than that and some people less than that. Typically, the more money we have, the more greenhouse gases we cause to be emitted.

Aeroplane emissions account for about 1.2 tonnes of CO2e per person⁴ but are rapidly increasing¹. For the sake of comparison, home heating and car travel each account for about 1.2 tonnes of CO2e per person per year. Also, only about half the population of the UK takes 1 or more return flights every year.

Although some effects of human-induced climate change are too late to reverse (and we’ll have to adapt to those changes), we can avoid more significant increases in global temperature (2-4 degrees Celsius) if we significantly reduce our CO2e emissions. In the UK, this means reducing our emissions by about 75-80%^4,5. This sounds a lot but it’s possible if we reduce to almost zero our use of fossil fuels, such as by reducing the amount of energy we use to heat our homes, changing to using electric instead of petrol/diesel cars, and changing our electricity sources from coal and gas to mostly renewable energy sources (potentially including nuclear energy)⁸.

Which brings us back to aeroplanes, which run on kerosene, which is a fossil fuel. Although there is research into alternative fuels for flight, there’s no alternative at the moment. And even if there were already, planes have long lifespans and so would be unlikely to be replaced with newer more efficient versions very quickly.

So, aeroplanes are running on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, aeroplane journeys tend to be over longer distances than typical car journeys (one return flight from London to New York is nearly 7000 miles⁶, compared with the UK average of 9,000 miles that a car would travel in a whole year), aeroplane emissions have a greater impact because they are at high altitude (one return flight from London to New York emits about 1.5 tonnes CO2e per person⁶ over 7000 miles, compared with 1.2 tonnes CO2e for 9000 miles of car travel per year), and even the emissions from short-haul flights cause about twice as much impact on the climate as the same emissions would on the ground.

So, the single most significant thing an individual can do to reduce their impact on climate change is to stop flying.

All my flights in my life…ever

When I started learning about the human impact on climate change in terms of numbers, I wondered about the impact of flights I’ve made. Last year, although I didn’t really think about it in any detail, I was vaguely aware that I’d taken quite a few short-haul flights throughout the year. And I knew that the previous year, I’d flown to the U.S. for a conference as well as some flights within Europe. Through a combination of saved emails (flight booking confirmations) and memory, I constructed a list of all the flights I’ve ever made since my first in 1999.

The following graph shows the 37 flights I’ve taken, by year, since 1999 (click the image to see a larger version):

And the next graph shows my carbon dioxide (including equivalent greenhouse gas) emissions for those flights:

The four years with large spikes were the years I took return long-haul flights to the USA (twice for work, once for a wedding, and once for a non-work conference). Other than that, the flights have all been within Europe, including six within the UK (between Southampton and Scotland).

So why has the number of flights I’ve taken increased so much in the past few years (specifically, since 2003)? Mainly, it’s a result of getting a job (I was a student until 2001) so I could now afford to fly. Also, post-university, friends started getting married and inviting us to weddings. Two of the long-haul flights, and four of the six internal UK flights, are wedding-related. There was also the christening of my godson which I’m counting as a wedding-type of event here and involved a return-flight to Europe.

Here’s a breakdown of the CO2 emissions by the primary reasons for taking the flights (the number in parentheses in the legend shows the number of actual flights per reason):

The greatest proportion of emissions was due to flights for work, that’s not too surprising as I work for an US company but only four of the eight flights making up that large segment were actually long-haul. Two were short-hauls within the US, and two were short-hauls to Europe, which just goes to show how big an impact transatlantic flights alone have on greenhouse gas emissions. The two next largest categories of CO2 emissions are Conferences (non-work-related) and Weddings, both of which include one return flight to the US. In contrast, although the greatest number of flights is down to holidays, they’ve all been in Europe so the CO2 emissions per flight, and overall, are lower.

Bearing that in mind, my 2005 and 2008 flights produced nearly 2.5-3.0 tonnes of CO2e per year, which is twice as much as the average UK person. And that’s before I even start counting home energy usage, car travel, and so on.

In conclusion…

The lesson at the crudest (and probably most obvious) level, is to avoid going to destinations that require long-haul flights. That would imply that short-haul flights are mostly okay then? Well, not really. The key thing with short-haul flights is that there are almost always alternative ways to travel that same distance that have a much smaller impact on climate change, making it often unnecessary to fly. Even when the amount of CO2 per person works out the same by car as for flying (you can fit more people in a plane than in a car, for instance), the effect of that CO2 and other emissions at high altitude is worse than at ground level. It’s possible, for example, to get from the UK to the South of France by train – which is especially good for the CO2e accounts when you consider that France’s high-speed train (TGV) is almost carbon neutral as it runs on electricity mostly from nuclear sources (not fossil fuels like UK electricity)⁵, and the Eurostar is carbon neutral through an active project to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as possible and to offset the rest⁷.

I can’t swear I’ll never go to the US (or other long-haul destinations) again, and there’s not really an alternative way to get there other than flying. I wouldn’t take that decision lightly though. For this year though, during which I’m not flying at all, that means the US and other destinations for which there is no alternative are out, and I can only go to places to which I can find an alternative mode of transport.

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If you’re interested in knowing how I calculated my flight emissions for the graphs above, and the exact figures used, I’ll be showing my workings in a separate blog post soon.

References

¹ Calculating the Environmental Impact of Aviation Emissions 2nd Edition, Dr Christian N. Jardine. Published by Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, for Climate Care, 2008.

² CO2 Emissions Per Captia, UK. Google Public Data. Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2007. Accessed on 4th July 2010.

³ CO2 Emissions Per Capita, US, UK, France, China, India. Google Public Data. Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2007. Accessed on 4th July 2010.

⁴ How To Live A Low-carbon Life, 2nd Edition. Chris Goodall. Published by Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2010.

⁵ The Hot Topic. Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK, 2007.

⁶ Mileage for a return journey between London Heathrow and New York’s JFK airports calculated using Climate Care’s online calculator at http://www.jpmorganclimatecare.com/ on 4th July 2010.

⁷Eurostar’s Tread Lightly project: http://www.eurostar.com/UK/uk/leisure/about_eurostar/environment/tread_lightly.jsp. Accessed on 4th July 2010.

⁸ Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, David MacKay. Published by UIT Cambridge, 2008.

Well, we’re just two weeks away from OggCamp10. It’s all happening in Liverpool on May Bank Holiday weekend. And it’s all looking very exciting!

I went to visit OggCamp10 venue The Black-e this afternoon with Dan and it’s really cool! It’s right in the centre of Liverpool and right next to the massive and brightly coloured Chinatown arch, the entrance to the oldest Chinatown in Europe. The Main Stage is a lovely big room on the upstairs, Stage 2 and 3 are in the basement, and the exhibition/chillout area is on the ground floor by the entrance. We’re planning to have conference wifi too, supplied by one of our sponsors, The Linux Emporium.

After spending longer than planned roaming The Black-e and trying to imagine it filled with people, we walked 5 minutes down the way to Studio 2, the bar for Saturday night. Studio 2 is the “studio where Coldplay, Barry Manilow, Take That, Spice Girls & Diana Ross recorded” but is now converted into a rather unique-looking bar with food. The building is still a proper recording studio though and, in Studio 2, the padded doors remain, as does the glass window between rooms, and separate recording booths. The bar will be available from 6pm until 2am and the chef will stay on in the early part of the evening so that we can buy food there.

And finally, there’s Liverpool itself. I’ve had various slightly doubtful enquiries about whether it’s worth going to Liverpool (especially if it’s quite a way to travel). I’ve been to Liverpool a few times in my life and I think it’s a really cool city nowadays.

As the 2008 City of Culture, Liverpool has been much regenerated over the past few years and is a really interesting place to be. Lots to see as a visitor, like the big wheel down by the docks, Albert Docks themselves, the Merseyside Maritime Museum, food at the old Bluecoat School…

…and not forgetting the rather random SuperLambBanana, an “unusual artwork [that] was created to warn of the dangers of genetically modified food, whilst being appropriate to the city of Liverpool due to the port’s rich history in the trade of lambs and the import of bananas”,  and the 125 mini SLBs that have been sponsored by local (and not-so-local) businesses and are mostly located around the city just waiting to be found–including near the OggCamp10 venue:

And of course there’s loads of good food (including good Chinese restaurants right by the venue), lots of shopping down the road, and, if today’s anything to go by, lots of sunshine too.

p.s. Thanks to Dan Lynch for the first photo, and to my Mum for the last three.

About this time last year, I finally got round to buying some yarn and a pattern to try re-learning to crochet. Last time I crocheted, I was about 12 and my efforts were limited to creating hair bun nets (as in the kind of things little girls wear – and indeed I wore – to ballet lessons). I think the last one was bright red for wearing to school on No Uniform Day for Red Nose Day. After that, I got bored of it and lost interest.

So after completing a smaller practice project last Spring, I decided to tackle something I’d actually wear. And as it was July, I figured it would be timely to make a jumper for the Winter (or even the Autumn, in my more optimistic moments). So I chose the Unseamly Sweater from a book I have called Stitch ‘n’ Bitch: The Happy Hooker. This weekend (8 months later, and on the verge of Spring),  I finished it.

Here’s a photo of me modelling it, catalogue-style (photo courtesy of Tony Whitmore):

I’m really pleased with how it came out. There was a moment last weekend when it seemed I wouldn’t be able to complete the second sleeve because I’d run out of yarn, and my original supplier was permanently out of stock. The combined wonders of Google and Ebay saved the day.

So, being a good little IBMer, I now turn to Lessons Learned:

• Hold the crochet hook; don’t grip it. I struggled for the first two-thirds of the body (crocheted as a tube – front and back at the same time) to get my ‘guage’ right. Guage is the number of stitches to the inch, and is determined by a combination of weight of yarn, size of hook, and how tightly you hold the hook and yarn.
• Use the right size of hook. Related to the point above, I started the jumper about 5 times before it was neither fit for a child nor fit for two of me at once. I actually used the right-sized hook for the arms (a size bigger than the pattern suggests) but, for the body, I used a size smaller and I ended up having to increase the wrong number of stitches to make it the right size of jumper. This also meant that I ended up buying more yarn than I should’ve needed.
• Buy enough yarn first time. Every book tells you that this is the only way to ensure a consistent shade throughout – something only guaranteed by all the balls of yarn being dyed in the same batch. Because of the previous two points, I ran out of yarn not once but twice. Consequently, the body and the first quarter of one of the arms is a teeny bit darker shade than the rest of the arms.
• I enjoy the decorative bit more than the…um…mundane bit. This is the same as for the sunflower pots I made two years ago. Being crochet, it was actually quite quick to get through the mundane bits and I enjoyed it more than I expected. I do, however, much prefer making the fun frilly bits and changing stitches. So while I really like the finished effect of this particular pattern, it did get rather repetitive along the way.

Incidentally, the yarn I used (for both this jumper and my previous project) is Anchor Bamboolo, which is actually made from bamboo mixed with some cotton making a lovely soft, light, shiny yarn – similar I think to mercerized cotton, which is what I’d looked for originally. Bamboo is probably better for the environment than cotton, which is usually really bad for the environment because of the phenomenal amounts of pesticides that have to be used to grow it (though this article and its comments ponder the pros and cons of bamboo as a material from a furniture design perspective).

So, bearing those lessons in mind, I’m now keen to find my next crochet project. I seem to have acquired a few patterns already and they might make more sense now that I’ve done a relatively easy one!

Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first computer program in 1843. The computer on which the program would have run, Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine, was never built, though Babbage continued with his designs until his death and is remembered as the father of computers. The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day is to sing the achievements of women in technology and science – often their contributions go unnoticed.

On Ada Lovelace Day, today, anyone and everyone is encouraged to blog, podcast, videocast, tweet about the achievements of a woman in technology and science.

Laura Czajkowski

I met Laura Czajkowski last September when part of the Ubuntu UK Podcast team shipped off to Dublin to attend her OssBarCamp conference, have a weekend of geekery, and an evening of BBQ and cocktails. Since then, I’ve seen Laura working passionately to help kickstart the Ubuntu Women Project and I’m aware that she is also on the Ubuntu NGO project which looks at how to make it as easy as possible for charities, not-for-profits, and other NGOs to benefit from Ubuntu and Open Source Software.

After I tweeted a few weeks back that I was working on OggCamp10 planning stuff, she replied, offering her help. I wasn’t sure how serious she was but as we had a load of large tasks that needed doing around that time, I figured it was worth asking. Within a week, she was a fully signed-up member of the OggCamp planning team (ie she gets all the emails and can edit the wiki), despite having her own conference to organise as well. OMG Ubuntu published a great interview with her today.

Ana Nelson

Another ace woman I met in Dublin that weekend was Ana Nelson, who Laura had finally convinced to present about her documentation automation work. I swear (as a former technical writer), the stuff she develops on should be used by corporations everywhere to maintain their vast documentation libraries and to save their skillful writers from spending hours manually updating screenshots and code snippets. Her talk at OssBarCamp was fascinating and understated – she sat on a chair, speaking her way round a printed, illustrated mindmap, punctuating it all with physical props like wooden toys and knitting needles. Her tweets are no less insightful, witty, and slightly off-beat.

 

So they’re just two of the women in the Open Source world (in particular, the Irish Open Source world) who’ve inspired me recently. Go check out their blogs to find out more.

N.B. I updated the bit about dash/bash on 23rd March after feedback from Gavin and Dom (see below).

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This week, I decided to install Rational Software Architect so that I could try out (again) the User Interface Generator which comes with IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server–and other products too, I believe. You can find out more about what user modelling is and how you can use the UIG in RSA (lovin’ the IBM TLAs yet? ) in this series of articles on developerWorks. The rest of this post is not about the UIG but about how to install and configure Rational Software Architect for WebSphere, which is relevant to anyone wanting to do this, regardless of whether they’re wanting to use the UIG.

So I wanted to install Rational Software Architect (RSA; an Eclipse-based piece of software) on to Ubuntu, which is what I run on my work machine, a Thinkpad T61p. Not only that, but I wanted to install RSA for WebSphere, which includes WebSphere Application Server Test Environment (WAS). This meant that I was installing not one but two pieces of software that are not officially supported for Ubuntu Karmic (or indeed for Ubuntu/Debian as far as I know). But as the Linux binaries are .bin files rather than .rpm, life should be easy.

And indeed installing it is. It’s when you want to create a WAS profile that the fun starts. And that’s where it had all fallen apart for me when I tried much the same exercise this time last year. That time, I gave up.

This time, I tweeted my predicament, knowing there were people who might know the answer. Unfortunately, the person I thought might know the answer had failed in much the same way as me only 6 months ago and was now relegated to using Windows. Still, others came back to me, including Gavin Willingham, who I’d not met before but who works possibly 10 minutes walk from my desk, and Jay Limburn, who I’ve known for a year through Twitter and internal instant messaging but, though he also works max 10 minutes walk from my desk, never met in person until yesterday (he’s shorter and blonder in real life).

So, if you’re trying to install RSA for WebSphere 7.5.4 with WAS Test Environment 7.0 (other versions probably work the same way), I’ll end the suspense and start here:

Running the installer

1. Download the many parts of RSA for WebSPhere 7.5.4 and WAS Test Environment 7.0 with licence/activation bits and pieces. (NB this isn’t free software; you have to buy it from IBM so I’m assuming you’ve got that far by now.)
2. Extract all the zip files. If you do a right-click > ‘Extract All’ on the zip file in Ubuntu, the extraction tool doesn’t like to overwrite directories of the same name, so you end up with directories called ‘RSA4WS’, ‘RSA4WS (2)’, ‘RSA4WS (3)’, and so on when actually, you want the contents of each of those directories to be in the same place. So move the directories around so that you have just 3 directories:
   • RSA4WS (contains 7 directories called ‘disk1′, ‘disk2′, ‘disk3′, etc)
   • RSA4WS_SETUP (don’t do anything with the contents of this one)
   • WAS70 (contains 4 directories called ‘disk1′, ‘disk2′, etc)
3. In the RSA4WS_SETUP directory, as sudo, run launchpad.sh to start the installation process.
4. Follow the installer through but when it asks you for a user name and password to create a WAS profile, select that you will create a profile later and that you don’t want to create one now. The installation should run cleanly (if you let it try to create a profile, it will fail part-way through the installation).

You should now have a nice installation of RSA with WAS on your Ubuntu box. Next, you need to create a WAS profile so that you can use the in-built WAS server for development and testing (or in my case, to run the user interface generator).

Creating a WAS profile in RSA

There are a few things that prevent this just happening (some are generic Linux things and some are specific to Ubuntu):

• On Ubuntu, /bin/sh uses dash, not bash, but WAS scripts seem to use bash specifically, so the profile creation scripts fail.
• Something extra that I have no understanding of is required in the eclipse.ini file (which is key in starting the Eclipse-based RSA environment).
• The default location in WAS’s profile creation wizards is in the /opt part of the main file system which you typically won’t have write-access to as a normal user.

So here’s what you need to do (at least, this is what I did and hopefully will work for you to to get a running WAS server in RSA):

1. Change Ubuntu’s /bin/sh to use bash instead of dash.
   In a terminal (sorry it’s the command line but you’re changing some system settings here that you would very very rarely have to do normally, or just if WAS didn’t specify bash specifically), run the following command and select the bash option as the default for /bin/sh:

   sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

   (As pointed out by @oldmanuk (Dom Evans), this is the proper way to reconfigure where /bin/sh points to (though I used Gavin’s method). )

   After you’ve created your WAS profile and everything’s up and running nicely, run the command again to change back to using dash. The benefit of using dash is speedier boot time, which is lost if you leave the setting as bash (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh – thanks Dom).

   Now you’ve sorted out the bash/dash problem. One down; two to go.

2. Check that you have a version of xulrunner installed (I have no idea what xulrunner is for but, looking in Synaptic Package Manager, my Ubuntu installation included xulrunner-1.9l.1-gnome-support, but not the xulrunner package itself, which seems to be fine for RSA purposes).
3. In your RSA installation, find the eclipse.ini file. I installed RSA to the default location so mine was in /opt/IBM/SDP. In a terminal change to that directory:
   

   cd /opt/IBM/SDP

4. Open the eclipse.ini file in a text editor, such as gedit:

   sudo gedit eclipse.ini

5. Add to the end of the file the following line:

   -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner

   (From an Ubuntu forum post.)

   Now you’ve sorted out the ‘xulrunner’ problem and you can actually start RSA. Two down; one to go.

6. Start RSA from the Applications menu: Applications > IBM Software Delivery Platform > IBM Rational Software Architect for WebSphere 7.5.4.

7. RSA should suggest a directory in your home directory in which to put the RSA workspace. That’s fine; I just accepted the suggested location.

8. When RSA has opened (NB, my Welcome view doesn’t load – I don’t think that’s a problem), give it a moment to think, then it’ll pop up a wizard to create a WAS profile.

9. In the profile wizard, clear the option about security unless you know what you’re doing with WAS security and have a need to use it in a development environment.

10. You’ll also notice that there’s a warning about the currently selected location for creating the profile. This is the third problem I listed above. The default location shown is for creating the profile in the installation directory of RSA. Change the location to a directory in your home directory. For instance, I told it to use /home/laura/IBM/profiles.

11. When the wizard has created the profile (which will take a few moments – you can see the activity in the bottom-right of the RSA window), the default server for the profile is listed in the Servers view on the right-hand-side of the RSA window.
    The server is listed as ‘stopped’.

12. Right-click the server then click Profile. This opens a dialog box about the profile; I just accepted the defaults then it failed to start the server (the error said it had failed to start within 300 seconds). But when I repeated this step, the server started.

And that’s as far as I’ve got but it’s further than ever before. If I come across any more gotchas, or take some screenshots, I’ll update this post.

Yes, it is a pain to have to do all this but remember that WAS isn’t supported (as far as I know) on Ubuntu Karmic. If you want it easier, install it on something that is supported. If you want it on Ubuntu, I hope this post (and the others I cribbed information from) helps.