"Seems like this advice, which will provide essentially no meaningful benefits to the world, is designed to achieve an exquisite balance..."

"... keep travelling but feel more virtuous by tweaking your usual routines with tiny sacrifices, while retaining some of the guilt and shame that appears necessary to be a genuine 'woke' person."

That's the top-rated comment on "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?/And what can you do about it?" by Seth Kugel (in the NYT).

First, I highly recommend clicking through so you can see the fantastic illustration by Tim Enthoven (I see I recommended him before, here).

Now, to the text. Kugel is a travel writer. And the NYT makes money selling travel to its readers. The problem of air travel and carbon emissions is a huge conflict of interest for them, and it's painful or humorous to watch them try to writhe into a nonridiculous position.

So, O.K. How bad should we really feel? Well, first of all, no self-flagellation required for that week in Italy. It is true that your round-trip flight is probably the biggest single contributor to your carbon footprint this year (unless you moved from a studio apartment to a mansion or quit your job for the Nature Conservancy to become a coal lobbyist). But shame is the wrong emotion....

Why is shame the "wrong" emotion? And why does the text switch from "guilt" to "shame"? I thought the distinction was important! It's not even discussed. And the text goes on to suggest that the reason "shame" is "wrong" is because shaming isn't an effective way to get people to change what they are doing. It's not? Why not? Is that scientifically proven fact? You know, where you have the problem of people not wanting to believe the science about climate change, you ought to adhere closely to science, and yet you have nothing scientific about shaming (or guilt, which you unscientifically merge)!

It seems to me that shaming is often quite effective.
I was just talking about litter: When I was growing up in the 1950s in Delaware, the roadsides were full of trash that people routinely threw out the car window. But there was a big public campaign to make us all feel bad about it, and the practice — except for a few outliers — ended. It totally worked. Don't just say shaming doesn't work. I can think of other examples of effective shaming I've seen in my lifetime. People didn't use to pick up dog poop. People used to openly ridicule transgenders. Sexually harassing a woman in the office was a peccadillo. Ethnic slurs were part of the rough and tumble of social life.

Shame sure as hell worked. If you wanted to drastically cut down air travel — and why wouldn't you want to do that if you believe what you've been told about global warming and carbon dioxide? — you could do it with clear, stern shaming. You've got people flying all over the place in huge numbers — numbers that are predicted to "double in the next 2 decades" — and they're doing it in large part because the media barrage them with the idea that this is the good life, this is what impressive, successful people do, this is the way to fulfillment and happiness and even a higher consciousness and empathy with the real lives of the less fortunate peoples of the world.

Withdraw that support and replace it with the advice that you should not travel, that it wreaks depredation on the climate, that it is not even the tenth best way to gain understanding of other cultures.

You could do that so easily, New York Times. You are choosing not to. Shame on you.

Back to the Seth Kugel drivel:

[S]tart by cutting back on your overall travel mileage. Do you really need to take that many trips a year? There are platitudes aplenty about travel — it inspires, it educates, it reduces bigotry. But not all trips meet those standards: Consider an educational exchange program in Vietnam compared to a week at a resort in the Maldives.

An educational exchange program in Vietnam....? I agree that it's idiotic to fly from America to a beach resort on the other side of the globe, but Kugel is bringing it up to create a bigger contrast with his other option, which has Americans traveling almost to the other side of the globe and getting some absolution by making it "educational." You could travel by foot around your own town, maybe visit the parts with a high concentration of immigrants, and try to talk to people and form some kind of relationship, and stop by the library and get some geography and history books to read. That would be educational.

... So I recommend setting a high bar for your travel, making sure any trip maximizes your connection with the place you’re visiting, whether that be through volunteer activity, seeking out a particularly responsible tour operator or traveling where you have friends who can help you live truly local.

No, you know where you can "live truly local"? At home.

Kugel also presents the idea of flying to a distant foreign place and, once there, using trains to get from city to city. So you get a round-trip ticket to, say, Paris, but then you use trains to get to other European cities, and you can feel good about yourself because the alternative of flying as you hop around in Europe is worse.

When you do fly, pay a little extra to make it cleaner. Favor airlines that are taking their carbon footprint seriously....

Something I don't take seriously: airlines taking their carbon footprint seriously. Flying burns a massive amount of fossil fuel. The rest is propaganda. The NYT is telling us to take propaganda seriously. (And I know some of you think the NYT is nothing but a big propaganda operation.)

After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:

Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.

No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for "for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in." But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air.... other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world's climate.

This is a terrible, execrable column. But do go over there and stare at the Tim Enthoven illustration. It makes the strong argument Kugel won't.