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Business Traveller
Carbon Footprint; Jet Lag Study
Aired May 26, 2007 - 09:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
RICHARD QUEST, CNN INT'L. ANCHOR, BUSINESS TRAVELLER: Hello and welcome to CNN BUSINESS TRAVELLER. I'm Richard Quest, now reporting from the magnificent West Coast of Canada.
It's Part II of our special look at the future of travel and tourism. We've already seen what's happening the world of aviation, now we want to look at traveling and how it affects you. They say travel broadens the mind and that is certainly true, but it also takes a terrible toll on body and soul and, yes, planet Earth. So, we want to consider how you can still do your global travel and have minimum impact.
(Voice over): Coming up, measuring my carbon footprint.
(On camera): Oh, Lordie, Lordie.
(Voice over): Battling jet lag in Tokyo.
(On camera): Good grief, look!
(Voice over): And where to spend life, while on break. That's all on this month's CNN BUSINESS TRAVELLER.
QUEST (on camera): This is Spanish Banks. It is the sort of place that Vancouverites come on a sunny afternoon. After all, they get a lovely view of the skyline of their city. Canadians have always had a great affection for protecting the environment. It's no accident Green Peace was started here in 1971. Today's responsible travelers know that they have to keep in mind the affect they're having on the environment.
I'm now in Canada, Vancouver, but my journey began in London. So, let's consider what my carbon footprint is.
I'm about to leave on my journey to Vancouver. My carbon footprint is going to be monitored literally ever step of the way, by Greene Simmons, back here in London. He's going to be looking at what affect I'm having on the environment, by the choices I'm making, the miles that I wrack up -- and, you know, I don't mean air miles.
Let's go! Heathrow Airport, please!
GREENE SIMMONS, TREES FOR CITIES: So, here's Richard taking his journey from central London to Heathrow Airport, taking it by cab. Not the most environmentally way of doing it. He could have gone by public transports. He could have shared his cab, which meant he would have halved his carbon footprint.
QUEST: Halved it? Oh, all right, then. Public transport it is.
This is the environmentally friendly way to the airport, the Heathrow Express! It's a lot quicker and cheaper.
(Voice over): So, I'm arriving at LHR, the right way. Time to check in.
(on camera): So, 90 percent of my carbon footprint will come from my flight alone, from London, round trip, to Vancouver. And it's business class all the way.
Can I check in, please?
SIMMONS: Flying is big carbon footprint stuff. In 1999 the world's leading climate scientists estimated that 600 million tons of carbon dioxide was pumped into the earth's atmosphere through flying.
QUEST (voice over): The airlines, too, are doing their bit. They're buying fuel efficient planes. Like Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which is far more environmentally friendly.
(On camera): A few days before my trip, guilt set in. Fred Russell, from Trees For Cities, helped me plant some saplings to offset my carbon emissions. I'll need to plant nine trees to make up for my round trip to Vancouver.
FRED RUSSELL, TREES FOR CITIES: So, you ready to back fill?
QUEST (on camera): Oh, yes. Yes.
RUSSELL: Put some water in there.
QUEST: Oh, Lordie, Lordie. It's only been a couple of minutes.
By my reckoning I've just planted sufficient from London -- oh, maybe, to the west coast of Ireland.
I would say we've reached, I don't know, somewhere over the North Atlantic. Maybe Iceland, oh, we're probably oceanic by now.
Tree number three, I would say that puts me somewhere over, oh, Northern Canada.
The last tree, the fourth, is going to take us down the western seaboard, over Canada, and into Vancouver.
RUSSELL: Yes, absolutely.
QUEST (voice over): Putting it into perspective, roughly speaking, two trees will offset one seat on a short-haul flight. A longer flight, say London to New York, requires six trees to be planted.
Tree planting, though, is only one way to counter carbon emissions. I'm one of the first business travelers to try an individual carbon trading. And here's my certificate to prove it. For a mere $10 I am now, officially, carbon neutral.
NEIL ECKERT, EUROPEAN CLIMATE EXCHANGE: In the European Union you've got 2.2 billion tons of permits to pollute and if the individual traveler buys some of those permits and takes them out of the system. That is gas that cannot go up the factory chimney.
QUEST (on camera): It's not been easy, but I think I've done as much as I can. My conscience is clear. I arrive in Vancouver.
Pineapples from Hawaii, melons from Mexico, and a vast array of fruit and veg from the Unite States. These days it seems our food travels almost as far as we do. Getting the fruit to market involves transportation costs -- and, of course, it leaves its own carbon footprint. Local produce is usually preferred, so should we know consider what we eat, when we go to eat it?
(Voice over): I come to dinner at one of Vancouver's trendiest restaurants, Lumiere (ph), to meet the food expert Kezia Cawtan. She'll help me make my menu carbon footprint more palatable.
(on camera): I'm rather partial to a big of fragu gras (ph) and then I might follow it with a bit of venison.
Now, what have you got against that?
KEZIA COWTAN, LIFE CYCLES: When you're bringing food from very far away it can be as much as four times to 10 times as much, as if you were buying that product locally. And so that you should be thinking about buying a local meal, or going to a restaurant that is including local ingredients in its menu.
QUEST (voice over): I've decided to treat myself, the international menu. First the lamb, it has come all the way from Australia. Oh, generated a massive three kilograms of carbon getting here. The palette cleansing piece of Hawaiian chula (ph) is tasty, but it's not cheap at a kilo of carbon.
And as for that main course, New Zealand venison, looks good, but it is three kilos of carbon. The grand total, my menu is just shy of seven kilograms of carbon. Oh, dear.
(On camera): Food for thought. Coming up, after the break, we go back into the air, this time, more than 5,000 miles in that direction. A time difference of 16 hours -- and we've crossed the international dateline, a recipe for jet lag, if ever I heard one. We'll tell you how to beat it, after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
QUEST: I've left Vancouver, crossed the Pacific Ocean, and am now on the other side of the international dateline. Modern planes make this sort of oceanic travel relatively easy. But they take a terrible toll on body and the way you feel on the other end. We're all familiar with that feeling of half light before dawn.
There is, though, quite a lot you can do to help make yourself feel better, especially when it comes to the issue of sleep.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
QUEST (voice over): It's a familiar classic scene, sleepless in a strange and unfamiliar setting.
It's my first night in Tokyo and like every other business traveler, fresh off the plane, I'm feeling stale. And the city's sights go by unnoticed. Still there is one way to cheer me up, a quick stop, before hitting the sack.
(On camera) Her name was Lola, she was a show girl, in the heart of Havana, at the Copa, Copa Cabana.
(Voice over): Time to give it another go. Oh, no, don't worry, not the karaoke, but a bit of shut eye.
(On camera): My first night's sleep in Tokyo, I have to say, was a good night's sleep. I was exhausted from the flight, I didn't sleep well on the plane. Oh, and yes, I took half a sleeping tablet.
(Voice over): I'm keeping this sleep diary and I'm wearing this acti-watch. Both will track all my sleeping activity. So, five hours for my first night, not a bad start, that. The trouble is I've crossed 15 time zones, from London across the Atlantic, to L.A., and now the Pacific to Tokyo; all in the space of six days. Crossing as little as two times can result in a 20 percent decrease in productivity.
(On camera): A day of grueling filming, quickly exposes this truth.
(Voice over): That night, everything goes rapidly downhill.
(On camera): Well, I tried my best. And I seemed to have failed. According to the watch, it is 5 to 3 in the morning. And I'm wide awake and it looks like there's little chance that I'm going to go back to sleep anytime soon. What to do?
(Voice over): My third and last night in Tokyo it's the same sorry story. In total I slept 27 hours over six days, which works out as an average of about four and a half hours a night. What's crucial is how much rest one actually gets in a 24-hour period. Forget the idea of building up a reservoir of sleep. Sleep is not something you can store.
And the plane ride back isn't much better. By the time I get home to London I've been on the go for 24 hours. Sleep experts say this level of fatigue puts me over the UK legal alcohol limit, effectively, I'm drunk.
My first stop getting home is the Sleep Disorder Unit at the University of Surrey. Derk-Jan Dijk, and his team, analyze the results from my acti-watch. This is what is what my graph should look like; a normal, healthy sleeping rhythm. Mine is clearly a mess.
DERK-JAN DIJK, SLEEP EXPERT, UNIVERSITY OF SURREY: You see that there is no regular pattern, the activity is all over the place. So, what we clearly see is that local time and biological time have no longer matched up.
QUEST: Next, I'm wired up, hooked up, and then to my great pleasure, tucked in. The test, to see how long it takes me to -- yippee! - - fall asleep. It will determine the true damage to my sleep pattern that this trip has done.
Literally, 120 seconds into this experiments, it finally hits me.
DIJK: Sleep latency of two minutes indicates that you are very, very sleepy. Under normal conditions, a normal evening, your sleep latency may be 12, 14, 15 minutes. After five or six minutes, rather than going to stages three and four of non-rapid eye movement sleep -- which is the normal order of sleep stages -- we saw rapid-eye movement sleep after approximately 10 minutes. So that's an indication that his biological rhythms are somewhat abnormal after this heroic trip.
QUEST: No operating machinery for me, then? Hmm, back to the dream. Now, who was Lola?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
QUEST: When BUSINESS TRAVELLER returns the thrills and spills of an Arctic safari. The program's going to the dogs.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
QUEST: So far on this program we've looked at how we can improve our traveling life and our bodies -- and for the environment. Now, let's consider the soul.
Over the course of the past year, we've visited many places to escape. Innovative, imaginative, relaxing, let's enjoy some of the best moments. And keep in mind the idea is that we enjoy our travel.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
QUEST (voice over): Let's start by soaring above the volcanic peaks of the southern hemisphere. I'm escaping in New Zealand.
The North Island of New Zealand has the highest concentration of volcanoes in the world.
(On camera): Wow!
(Voice over): But I can't come to New Zealand and not see some sheep. Now, normally they don't let amateurs do this, but they're going to let me have a go.
STEVE EMERY, AGRODOME: Grab it around the front of it's neck, and your knees, you lift it up like this. Grab it here with your left hand, or right, both hands. Both hand here. Let's give it a go, Richard. I'll start it and then I'll pass it back to you to finish.
That's good, Richard. Right up to your hand.
QUEST (on camera): I'm not getting a lot of wool off, am I?
This is called repairing the damage. It's my first time! Sorry.
(Voice over): I like the natural world. I'm going to stick with it for the time being on a trip to an eco launch, on Vancouver Island. Where else? Canada.
It may look slow at first, but behind this brand of eco-tourism there are plenty of endorphins to enjoy.
(On camera): First up, giddy-up.
If you're a stressed business traveler, what do you come here for?
JOHN CATON, CLAIRMONT (ph) WILDERNESS RANCH (ph): Most of the business people that we get here are high on endorphins anyways when they actually get here. We're offing them an opportunity to go horseback riding in the morning for four hours, come in and have a lovely lunch, and go out kayaking for three hours in the afternoon.
QUEST (voice over): Fly fishing is next. Now, I might look a sight in this outfit, but wading into this cold water, I need it.
(on camera): OK, John, what should I do?
CATON: You know what, don't bend your wrist.
QUEST (voice over): Because there are no hooks at the end of the line, there were no mishaps. And eventually I mastered the motion of casting. I still came back empty handed, well it is the wrong time of year for this sort of fishing.
Now that I've unwound a bit, it's time to wind myself up again. A little action is required: Space Camp. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama. Here, giant leaps for mankind get turned into small steps for you and me. It's part theme park, part space geek heaven, and it's my chance to take a glimpse into the life of an astronaut.
(On camera): This is the multi-access simulator. Basically, I'm going to sit in it and it's going to go like that. And I'm going to try to keep my breakfast.
(Voice over): And you thought you had a turbulent flight. This is not so much a giant leap, they call this the Bunny Hop.
(On camera): This is really difficult because it won't do what you want it to do. It just won't go -- it won't go where you want it to go.
(Voice over): John Kennedy said about space, we don't do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard. I tell you what, he's not wrong.
(On camera): I think we're going up very fast!
(Voice over): To prove that escaping shouldn't just be left to the summer vacation, my globe trotting escape finishes in Lapland. My safari starts with man and machine. Driving a snowmobile is easier, I'm told.
Famous last words.
(On camera): Argh!
(Voice over): And it's not long before machine has got the better of man.
(On camera): Oh!
(Voice over): No harm done and soon I'm really motoring.
(On camera): I'm stuck! What did I do wrong there? Great, how do we get this out now?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've got it.
QUEST: Oh, no, no, no, I'm going to help here. I got you into this mess.
Two, three! One, two, three!
(Voice over): Machine has clearly beaten man.
I will surely do better with man's best friend.
(On camera): Forget horse power, I've got 10 Husky power to get me going. Ha!
Oh! Good grief! Of course we get on with a fair ol' lick!
They can run more than 50 kilometers a day and a top dog is worth thousands of dollars. My musher is Husky Dundee, with a well-chosen word, he steers the dogs. The power of these animals is awesome. The passenger view is unusual to say the least. But I'm not a passenger for long. My 150 euros allows me to drive the dogs.
(On camera): Mena! Mena!
(Voice over): I've stalled.
From dogs to horses and a quick canter around the paddock. This is the most unusual of winter sports, dragged around by a water ski rope, tied to the back of a horse.
(On camera): Now that is an Arctic safari!
(END VIDEOTAPE)
QUEST: Now, then, that should have given you a taste to start enjoying your travels. And that's CNN BUSINESS TRAVELLER in the 21st century. I hope you've enjoyed this bumper edition. Our traveling life may be uncertain, but there's one thing I know, I'll be back in two weeks with a new edition of BUSINESS TRAVELLER. We'll be looking at open skies, the deregulation of the airways, and the benefits to you and me.
Until then, as always, where ever your travels may take you, I hope it's profitable and environmentally friendly. I'll see you next month.
Now, where's Julie Andrews when you need her?
END
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