Mother Jones this past issue concluded with the most eloquent discussion of the carbon cost of flying in I ever have read, but amazingly, you don't even have to read the piece, only look at this charticle:
A relatively modest trip by plane outweighs all sorts of other worthy efforts to reduce emissions.
That's one argument against flying. Here's another I found moving, published as an op-ed in The New York Times, reminding passengers stranded around the globe by the eruption of a huge volcano in Iceland of the psychic benefits of not flying:
In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of
long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed
and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The
Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have
to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly
every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed
work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly
wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a
very short period of time.So we are condemned to keep riding on
airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of
ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your
destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on
those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down
through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the
observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship.
Surface transport can be contemplative, picturesque and even enchanting
in a way that air travel never will be.
By Seth Stevenson, author of a memoir about traveling around the world…on the surface of the planet.
Kit Stolz 