"For the love of Earth, stop traveling."

An opinion piece in The Washington Post by Jack Miles ("a contributor to the University of California’s 'Bending the Curve' report on climate stability").

Atmosfair is a German public interest group that recommends limiting your air travel to about 3,100 miles per year — if you live in Los Angeles, that’s one round-trip flight to Mexico City... Last fall, having accepted an invitation to speak in Morocco, I used this online calculator to determine the carbon cost of my trip. My seats alone on the round-trip flights from Los Angeles to Casablanca (with a layover in Paris) helped emit about 8,400 pounds of carbon dioxide, prorated, into the atmosphere. Double that because my wife accompanied me. In sum, our seats alone on the planes to and from Morocco helped unload about 16,800 pounds of carbon dioxide. And this, of course, was just a small fraction of the emissions cost of the flight as a whole.

To put this into perspective, my wife’s and my annual carbon footprint in Orange County, California — counting gas, electricity, transportation and waste disposal — is about 33,000 pounds, according to the carbon footprint calculator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.... By taking one optional international trip that helped emit about 16,800 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, my wife and I increased our 2016 carbon footprint by more than a third. The harm we did with one international trip surely neutralized any good that we did all year as recyclers, eco-consumers and financial contributors to environmental organizations....

Take a deep, slow breath, and throw away that bucket list for good. You are needed at home, my friend, urgently needed. For the love of the Earth and of those who will inherit it when you are gone, stay right where you are.

It's easy for people like me — who love home and have to force ourselves to do a little travel because of a sense that you're supposed to travel — to forgo travel. The news that you're not supposed to travel — that you get virtue points for staying home — is happily received. It's like getting a compliment — how pretty you look today! — when you haven't done a thing to try to look good.

But for those who love to travel — who've built their conception of happiness around frequent travel — it's hard to hear this news. What do you tell yourself? These numbers must be wrong. 16,800... 33,000.... Denial. Bargaining: Can't I just turn down the thermostat and recycle more? Buy less? No, there's nothing you can do at home that will compensate for the extravagant carbon-spewing that is you on a plane.

IN THE COMMENTS: CStanley said:

People like Althouse who hate to travel should set up their own carbon credit exchange. Every week Althouse announces a trip she's not taking, and calculates the carbon emissions saved, and someone can purchase those credits for a trip they want to take.

Does Senator Jeff Flake disrespect the people when he calls populism "a sugar high"?

It bothered me, but lets talk about it. Here's the context, on "Meet the Press" today (and pushing his new book "Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle"). From the transcript:

SEN. JEFF FLAKE: I think today conservatism has kind of been compromised by populism... So I think that just because we have the House, the Senate and the White House, we can’t rest easy and say that populism is a governing philosophy because I don’t believe that it is....

CHUCK TODD: Well, let me ask you this, what would you -- going in hindsight now -- what should the conservative movement have done in 2016 that they didn’t do?...

SEN. JEFF FLAKE: Well, I’m not denying that populism isn’t popular. That’s why it’s called populism. The problem is I think it’s first and foremost the duty of conservatives to tell the truth to the constituency and it’s easy to point to a shuttered factory and say, “Hey, if we’d just negotiated better trade deals, then those jobs would be there.” When really it’s automation and productivity gains. It’s much more complex and my concern is that populism is a sugar high and once you come off it, it’s particularly troublesome for the party. And so I wish that we would have been more truthful with the electorate in terms of what we can and what we cannot do in Washington....

The dictionary definition of "populism" is "The policies or principles of any of various political parties which seek to represent the interests of ordinary people." That's from the OED, which gives, as one of its examples, this sentence from Time Magazine from 1972:

Populism is a label that covers disparate policies and passions: among many others, New Deal reforms, consumer rage against business, ethnic belligerence.

I'm concerned about the expressions of contempt for ordinary people and democracy. I can see saying we need more structured principles and sane practicality, but it feels disrespectful to say "populism is a sugar high."

IN THE COMMENTS: CStanley has a solid, succinct answer to my question:

In the context of his full responses I thought he was saying that populism was a sugar high for the GOP because it's easier for them to get votes that way than to sell the harder truths. That seems less offensive than the way Althouse is interpreting it because it's a diss of the politicians, not the voters.