The Scourge of Tourism
January 2019
Local politicians and the Chamber of Commerce love tourists, who in my town – according to the Chamber – pay thirty percent of the city's property taxes. They love them because tourists transfer money earned in another place to "our town". Tourists bring money but typically don't bring crime. They support cultural events, hotels, and restaurants in the city, but they don't burden the school budget. You can even tax them extra for being tourists (and we do), without them complaining a bit. In general, tourist money seems like free money. But somehow, even free money has its costs, and the costs often impinge on segments of the population quite different from those who benefit from the tourist trade.Abstract:
Nothing is more needlessly damaging to our fight against catastrophic climate change than the massive number of tourists traveling the world in airplanes, cruise ships, buses, and cars for pure amusement, adding literally billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide releases to the atmosphere. Tourism should be an immediate casualty of our war against climate change. So why is the United Nations still promoting tourism?
Everyone who lives in a tourist town knows how tourism changes the town. During the tourist season the visitors may far outnumber the residents. The local citizens can't avoid the throngs and jammed traffic, while the tourists wind up crowding together in a place that no longer bears much relation to the original that they came to see. They find themselves standing in long lines, jostling together with a mass of humanity in the little room where the holy man retreated for his meditation, to see his bed of nails and raise their phones to snap a shot of a hundred arms in the air with clicking phones. The lonely road where the cloistered monk walked in silence is now a crowded row of souvenir shops hawking plastic trinkets to the hubbub of debasers of the community's cultural treasures. At its worst, tourism profanes the local culture, and turns a community into a kind of theme park for visitors, changing its focus from productive work and cultural development to a servile dependence on the gratuities of strangers.
But for all the questionable effects that tourism can have on a tourist target – where there is, after all, the balancing fact of a boost to the local economy – the great negative effect of world tourism on the climate of our warming Earth carries no balancing benefit beyond the personal pleasure of the tourist. Tourism has accounted for a significant portion of the wasted conversion of fuel to CO2 and its deposition directly in the atmosphere, and tourists now need to recognize their above-average contribution to the climate problem. The time has come for the people and the national leaders of the world to declare a moratorium on travel for pleasure. It's the simplest step we can take to begin to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and attempt to save our civilization.
It may surprise the reader to know that the United Nations has a branch organization which has existed from the early days of the UN: The UN World Tourism Organization. According to its web site, the UNWTO "promotes tourism as a driver of economic growth, inclusive development and environmental sustainability". Quite apart from the question of the appropriateness of the UN spending time and money to promote particular commercial interests at the expense of others competing for the same dollars (promoted here is clearly the tourist business: hotels, restaurants, airlines, cruise lines, etc), we ought to be astounded that a UN organization is in fact encouraging flying, driving, cruising, and other major uses of fuel and consequent releases of greenhouse gases on activities that in most cases are purely for amusement. (The UNWTO reported with pride late in 2018: "International tourist arrivals ... grew 5% in the first nine months of 2018 over the same period last year...") Another agency of the UN, the International Panel on Climate Change, has in recent years released report after report documenting that anthropogenic releases of greenhouse gases are precisely the cause of what now threatens to become runaway global warming. The IPCC warns that this situation is now critical, and that humanity needs to reduce its discharges of CO2, methane and other IR-blocking gases immediately and as deeply as possible.
We can ask, how can it be that the UNWTO continues to promote flying and cruising for fun while the UN's IPCC demands the cessation of the same activities? The answer seems to be the straight-forward one: money. The UNWTO is funded by the businesses and interests it serves. Its supposed dedication to "environmental sustainability" is a sham; it is canned verbiage that can safely and hypocritically be ignored and that will not be allowed to interfere with the agency's mission of maximizing profits from tourism for its corporate clients. We can also ask, how did a business interest group manage to get the imprimatur of the United Nations? The answer is surely the same: the dominant influence of big money. The existence of this agency in the UN, with goals irreconcilable with – indeed diametrically opposed to – those identified by the UN itself as necessary to fight against global warming, makes it impossible for the world organization to campaign vigorously to reduce and eliminate needless travel, which it must do if it is to exercise leadership toward a solution to our climate crisis.
Mass tourism is today a curse on the Earth. It pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for no purpose greater than having fun. While I'm in favor of having fun, we don't need to destroy our Earth to have it. There's fun closer to home. The UN should dissociate itself from the World Tourism Organization, and so free itself for responsible leadership toward climate solutions. In the meantime, the message should be clear for all of us: When you need a vacation, take it close to home. Don't travel unless it's necessary. Don't fly or drive unless you must. Don't cruise at all. We can't beat the climate monster unless we drop all wasteful uses of fuel.
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