Interesting article in today’s Las Vegas Sun by Richard Velotta about how undue concern over carbon emissions may seriously impact travel. This has tremendous implications for Las Vegas:
Seventy-two government agencies have cut their travel budgets because of environmental concerns, a top travel executive said, leading him to conclude that overzealous environmental policy could be the next roadblock facing the tourism industry.
This is a real threat to the Las Vegas economy. The city has really suffered from the decline in business travel, and any continued decline would obviously hurt the economy even more. And the implications for leisure travel are even more disturbing.
In many ways, these anti-travel folks are taking the “evils of carbon” disaster porn they’ve been fed and carrying it through to its logical conclusion. If you really believe that carbon emissions are responsible for “destroying the planet,” then only a sadist or a fool would willfully create these emissions for something as trivial as a bachelorette party.
This is one of the reasons why it’s sensible for resorts to take specific action to be more “environmentally responsible”–like reducing waste, recycling, or decreasing energy usage by switching to LED lights. But going away from specifics and talking about nebulous concepts like “sustainability,” I think, raises all sorts of questions, questions whose answers we might not like.