Twenty years ago, the Sierra Club Hawaiian Chapter asked the much better funded Los Angeles / Orange County Sierra Club Chapter to fund efforts to sue the Hawaiian Tourism Bureau for an environmental impact report on the impact of tourism in Hawaii. The lawsuit failed.
Over the years, efforts to create adequate visitor capacity for our islands and to limit the increasing number of visitors have continued to fail.
Now, decades later, the problems in Hawaii are much worse. We were aware of the global climate crisis at the time, but focused on other nature conservation and environmental issues. The overwhelming problem facing humanity today is what will happen to our shared global climate and what kind of world our grandchildren will inherit.
Hawaii is a small state, but we have a very large carbon footprint per capita. People criticize China for having the largest greenhouse gas emissions, but per capita they rank seventh in the world while the United States comes first! (twice as much.)
The largest fossil fuel consumer in Hawaii is travel on airlines. Greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft are increasing rapidly – they increased by 32% between 2013 and 2018.
While improving fuel efficiency gradually reduces emissions per passenger, it cannot keep pace with the rapid increase in total passenger numbers, which is projected to double over the next 20 years. Look at the 3.8 million visitors in 2017 from just the western United States. Hawaii’s largest tourist market. The carbon footprint of their round-trip travel is roughly the same as driving a car around the equator – 225,000 times.
Airplane flights to and from Hawaii from the western United States produced 2.3 million tons of carbon in 2017. Flights to and from Hawaii from around the world produced approximately 6.3 million tons.
It would take 7.4 million acres of forest to produce that much carbon annually, much more than the entire 4.1 million acres of land in the entire Hawaiian Islands.
It would be very helpful if we increased the use of electric cars, got rid of our monster trucks and used public transport, but our biggest problem is tourism.
Tourism is the engine of our economy. It offers us the great consumer culture: big box stores, fancy restaurants, car dealerships, lots of things to buy, lots of jobs. But almost no one disagrees that tourism is out of control; to disrupt and overwhelm our island and the lives of our people. The biggest point of criticism is the traffic, which of course also has an enormous CO2 footprint. But how many people are aware that there is a big building boom on the south coast?
More and more (legal) holiday apartments are being built, each with large air conditioning units and heated whirlpools. Maui County Council is considering a moratorium on visitor accommodation to try to halt the explosive growth of tourism. As long as the Federal Aeronautics Agency (FAA) approves more new flights to Kaua’i, we will get more tourists, more fossil fuel burning, more crowds, and more growling traffic.
Too much tourism is a real threat.
What can we do against it? Are you stopping building more vacation rentals, apartments and hotels? Lobbying the FAA to stop offering flight routes to Hawaii? We have to do something. We owe it to our grandchildren and future generations.
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Gordon LaBedz is a retired family doctor and former national director of the Sierra Club and founder of the National Surfrider Foundation. He is a member of the Kauai Climate Action Coalition, which meets every third Monday of the month at 5 p.m. via Zoom. Contact us at Kauaiclimate@gmail.com for links and more information. Be part of the conversation and the solution.
