To fly or not to fly...

and if you fly:

To compensate, or not to compensate...

...that is the question!

Apologies to Shakespeare for misusing the brilliant Hamlet monologue, but to a certain extent, the questions on flying and compensation has almost become existential.

When I set up my company last year, I already decided to endeavor to travel with public transportation, and in the cases when this is not feasible, to compensate any flights I make.

Since then we have been hit by both "Greta Effect" and the new Swedish word "Flygskam", or "Flight Shame" in English. Acknowledging that the best flights are the avoided ones, I stand by my pledge to compensate the travel I do for my company, and hence I have compensated for the 3 trips I did to a client in the Middle East in May. I was asked to perform an independent 3rd Party Quality Audit during an on-going Major Overhaul of a Gas Turbine, and because of how things developed during this Outage, I ended up travelling 3 times back and forth.

Compensation was done through myclimate, and I chose to support the project of supplying high efficiency cooking stoves, which reduces the amount of wood burned for cooking a meal. I am aware that I'm not compensating the CO2 in the correct life cycle, since the kerosene used from flying comes from a fossil source, and the wood not being burned is included in the natural cycle. However, the improved cooking stove has a much wider benefit than just the decrease in CO2 emissions. It leaves women and children more time as they can reduce the time searching for firewood, but above all, it creates a much better indoor environment which reduces respiratory sickness and premature deaths caused by fumes from inefficient stoves or open fires.

In addition to compensating my flights, I'm proud to say that in conjunction with my current assignment, I'm biking 30+km almost every workday since April, this corresponds to 144 kg CO2 not emitted, still counting! The company is a Swiss Tech company with about 70 employees, and I much enjoy the small company environment after so many years with multi-nationals.