Swedes weigh global warming versus a better tan

Here.

Excerpt:

...This winter, 300,000 Swedes booked flights to Thailand alone.

"We're talking enormous travel distances, so even if the flight is full, the total emission per passenger will be fairly high," says Kjell Andersson, head of energy and transport at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. "One Sweden-Thailand round trip is equivalent to putting 15,000 kilometers [9,300 miles] on your car for several years."

Such facts jolt Katarina Eriksson. The hardware store employee just returned from a three-week trip to northeastern Brazil and says she knows "we're destroying the world." She and her husband travel abroad every fall and spring – usually to Greece – and plan eventually to retire away from the cold climate of Mora, their home town in the middle of Sweden.

After trying a winter trip to the tropics this year, they're contemplating adding India to their 2009 itinerary. "You think of your kids and grandchildren – what will life be like for them?" Ms. Eriksson says. "But I live for these trips. I used to get depressed every fall and winter, and I think our trips really helped me overcome that."

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency recently asked the government to curb airport construction and to impose stricter emissions caps on existing airports to make flying more difficult and expensive. Mr. Andersson also hopes that a future European aviation emissions trading scheme, which uses economic incentives to curb pollution, will slow the travel frenzy – especially in a weakening economy. "We don't tell people to stay home, but we can apply financial pressures," he says.