In The Woodlands, Texas, suburban planning has a sense of humor. Sidewalks end mid-block. Bus stops are rumored, not seen. The default mode of transport is “drive, even if it’s two minutes away.” So when I tell people I carpool or catch the bus when I can, I get the look you’d give someone ordering a salad at a steakhouse.
This fall, I’m trading that landscape for the University of Glasgow, where I’ll be studying finance for a semester. There’s one part of the trip I can’t sustainably engineer my way out of: the flight over. The Atlantic does not have a train. But everything after wheels-down in Scotland is mine to design.
I’ve planned my semester around a simple rule: if the rails go there, I do too. Weekend in Edinburgh? ScotRail. Highlands? The Caledonian Sleeper. Tempted to “just fly” to Amsterdam for a long weekend like everyone else seems to? I’ll take the train down to London and the Eurostar under the Channel; arriving in roughly the same total time as flying once you count the airport circus, for a fraction of the carbon. A short-haul flight emits several times more CO₂ per passenger than the equivalent rail journey. As a finance student, I find that math hard to argue with.
This isn’t asceticism; it’s better capital allocation. UN SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) talk about transport emissions and accessible public systems. Trains are how Europe already lives those goals. I’d rather slot into the existing system than fly over it.
The smaller commitments are coming with me too: a refillable water bottle and reusable bag (Scotland charges for plastic bags, and rightly so); buying groceries from Glasgow’s actual produce markets instead of air-freighted supermarket imports; choosing accommodation within walking distance of campus so I’m not commuting; eating local — which in Scotland means embracing oats and root vegetables, and which I am unreasonably excited about.
There’s a finance lesson in all of this. Sustainability is just long-term thinking applied to the planet’s balance sheet. Every flight skipped is a deposit. Every produce-stall trip instead of a supermarket run is compounding interest. Every train ride is a refusal to externalize cost onto somewhere, or someone else. ESG isn’t a buzzword in my degree; it’s the direction the entire industry is pointing. I’d rather practice it on my own travel before I’m asked to evaluate it in a boardroom.
I won’t pretend a semester abroad is carbon-neutral. It isn’t. But I can refuse to make it worse than it has to be. Glasgow has pledged to become a carbon-neutral city by 2030; one of the most ambitious targets in the UK. I’d like my semester there to nudge that needle in the right direction, even if only by one quiet, train-shaped degree.
