The best way to be nice to the environment is of course not to use motorized travel in any form, like riding a bicycle or going by foot. The more common approach for holidays is flying though. Or going by car.

If have been 83 days on the road burning approximately 1150 liters of Diesel costing almost 2000€. That sounds a lot.

How about flying to Australia instead? According to Lufthansa their average fuel consumption per Customer per 100km is 4 liters of kerosene (which actually is the main ingredient of diesel). They have to stop for fuel in Bangkok, so the distance is about 16000km one way leading to 1280 liters of kerosene. The price right now is 2150€ (which is probably off season).

So flying Lufthansa is a little more expensive and you don’t have to care about wear and tear on the jet and such. But you also don’t get a place to stay for the whole time… Surely there are less expensive airlines than Lufthansa but I guess their fuel economy isn’t better (less free seats on the plane but older planes as well). And there are plenty of countries where diesel is cheaper than in Scandinavia…

Lufthansa says about 25% of their costs is fuel, for cheap airlines it’s about 40%. Jet fuel is at about 160USD / Barrel (118EUR / 159L) so 0,74EUR / liter leading to 950€ for the flight which is 45% of the total price for us. That seems alright since I used the average consumption on a long distance flight. Planes burn most fuel during take-off, for short distances their average consumption is more like eight liters / 100km or much more. And operating airports also uses up some energy as well..

So there’s still the difference that the plane covers three times to distance to Sydney than I did. But the plane puts it’s fumes in the sky where they basically stay since there are no plants to convert CO2 back to Oxygen and Biomass.

Archive pic. Note the total lack of trees at an altitude of 10km…

But in Scandinavia there are quite some plants… Most sources say that the the impact on the climate of plane exhausts is three times higher than for cars exhausts.

Typical road in Lapland. Vegetation on both sides, occasionally even reindeer on the road..

So here we are: My old van has the same climate economy as an airplane while I’m traveling alone (!). If let’s say we were traveling with four people it would be almost four times better since a couple of persons more do not change the fuel economy of the van too much…

http://www.robinwood.de/german/verkehr/fg/Die%20Legende%20vom%203-Liter-Flieger.pdf

With the given Mallorca example (one ton of CO2 equivalent per trip, 2600km), my trip equals three trips to Mallorca and I did even more distance than the plane…