I’m pretty sure that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg would want to reconsider his tweet, but, not to worry, I’ve got the screen capture!

The math is simple: December 14^th, when he tweeted his original, is the 348^th day of the year, and the Secretary told us that this was his 99^th flight of the year. 348 ÷ 99 = 3.5151 repeating, 3.52 a close enough approximation. Every 3½ days the Secretary of Transportation has been flying off to somewhere!

From The Washington Post:

“Inevitably, every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge it or not,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Climate 202. “So I think that’s absolutely part of our mandate and part of our set of responsibilities as a department.”

It would seem that, in Mr Buttigieg’s 99 decisions to go leaving on a jet plane, he has taken 99 decisions to spew more CO₂ into the atmosphere! Were all of those 99 trips necessary? Has he never asked himself, “Could I do this by videoconference?”

Mr Buttigieg said, at the COP26 conference:

Well, thank you very much and thanks to the U.K. for hosting us. Let me also note, with this audience, how much pleasure I take in the knowledge that the aircraft that brought me to the U.K. returned back to the States full of international travelers, and we’re delighted at that news.

We’re honored to be here with our fellow founding members of the International Aviation Climate Coalition demonstrating that we hear the voices of our citizens, especially our courageous young citizens, who are demanding similar courage on our part, knowing that their lives will be defined by our decisions. And that means not only hearing them but acting, especially on the hard things. And aviation is a sector that is famously considered hard to abate which I think in a less urgent moment, as with maritime, might have meant that it would be on down the list of priorities. But at a moment like this, it also equates to have to abate – and that’s what we’re doing.

Aviation is so central to the fabric of our global economy and our global community. And of course, it’s how so many of us got here this week. And I can tell you as a former mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern city in the U.S., it’s not only important for our global metro centers, but for communities in every part of every country.

And as we know it’s a significant contributor to climate change and without dramatic, urgent action, there will be substantial additional growth in emissions over the next 30 years.

So, it falls to us to find ways to limit those emissions urgently. And the question has become: will we act quickly enough to protect our countries and to seize the economic potential that sustainable aviation represents?

The reality is that the timelines are not being dictated by conferences or by congresses; they’re being set by the laws of physics. And the other timeline that is so important is the engineering that it takes to design, test, produce, and deploy lower carbon aircraft.

But we can control our response, and with that we can shape our collective future.

Yeah, I get it: Mr Buttigieg is a very high-ranking American government official, and there will be some required travel, travel to places he can’t get on his bicycle or an Elon Musk produced Tesla.

But 99 plane rides in less than a year?

Perhaps, just perhaps, we plebeians might take the Patricians more seriously when they tell us we must reduce our CO₂ emissions if they showed us, by deeds, that they take their own words seriously.