Twenty years ago, The Hawaiian chapter of the Sierra Club asked the much better funded Los Angeles/Orange County Sierra Club chapter to help fund an effort to sue the Hawaiian Tourism Authority to produce an Environmental Impact report on the effects of tourism on Hawaii. The lawsuit failed.
Over the years the efforts to establish a reasonable visitor carrying capacity for our islands and limit the increasing numbers of visitors have continued to fail.
Now decades later, the problems in Hawaii are much worse. We were aware then, of the Global Climate Crisis, but we were focused on other conservation and environmental issues. Today, the overwhelming issue facing humanity is what is going to happen to our shared global climate and what kind of world our grandchildren will inherit.
Hawaii is a small state, but per capita, we have a very large carbon footprint. People criticize China because they have the largest greenhouse gas emissions, but per capita, they rank seventh in the world while the United States is first! (twice as much.)
The largest consumer of fossil fuels in Hawaii is airline{s] travel. Greenhouse gas emissions from planes are rising rapidly – they increased by 32% between 2013 and 2018.
While improving fuel efficiency is gradually reducing the emissions per passenger, it is not keeping up with the rapid increase in total passenger numbers, which are projected to double in the next 20 years. Consider the 3.8 million visitors in 2017 from just the western U.S.A.; Hawaii’s biggest tourist market. The carbon footprint of their round trip air travel is roughly like driving a car around the equator — 225,000 times.
Airplane flights to and from Hawaii from the western U.S. produced 2.3 million tons of carbon in 2017. Flights to and from Hawaii from all over the world, produced approximately 6.3 million tons.
To capture that much carbon annually would take about 7.4 million acres of forest, so much more than the total 4.1 million acres of land in the entire Hawaiian islands.
It would help greatly if we increased electric car use, got rid of our monster trucks, and took advantage of public transportation but our greatest problem is tourism.
Tourism is the engine of our economy. It provides us with the great consumer culture: Big Box stores, fancy restaurants, car dealerships, lots of stuff to buy, plenty of jobs. But, almost no one disagrees that tourism has gotten out of hand; interfering and overwhelming our island and our residents’ lives. The biggest gripe is traffic, which, of course, also has a huge carbon footprint. But how many people are aware that there is a big building boom going on the South Shore?
More and more (legal) vacation rental condos are going up, each equipped with big air conditioners and heated Jacuzzis. The Maui County Council is deliberating a Visitor Accommodations Moratorium Bill that will try to stop the explosive growth of tourism, but as long as the Federal Aeronautics Agency (FAA) continues to approve more new flights to Kaua’i, we are going to get more tourists, more burning of fossil fuels, more crowds and more snarled traffic.
Too much tourism is a real threat.
What can we do about it? Stop building more vacation condos, vacation rentals and hotels? Lobby the FAA to stop giving more airline routes to Hawaii? We have got to do something. We owe it to our grandchildren and future generations.
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Gordon LaBedz is a retired Family Physician and a former national leader of the Sierra Club as well as a founder of the national Surfrider Foundation. He is a member of Kauai Climate Action Coalition which meets the third Monday of every month at 5pm via zoom. Contact us at Kauaiclimate@gmail.com for link and more information. Be part of the conversation and the solution.
