100,000 people flying to climate conference!

This is astonishing. Over 100,000 people are attending (and almost all flying) to the latest annual climate change conference. The numbers attending used to be 5,000 or so which was reasonable for a conference with 150+ countries represented, but now you have 100,000 people going.

You could justify the greenhouse gas emissions from those attending when it was a modest number, but with 100,000 attending the conference itself will cause more CO2 to be emitted than almost any other single event this year.

They estimate every hour of passenger flying emits 250 kgs of CO2 equivalent. Let’s assume the average flight is 12 hours each way.

250 x 24 x 100,000 = 600 million kgs of CO2 or 600,000 tonnes. That is around half the annual emissions of NZ Steel.