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Last spring, I attended a conference on the converging catastrophes of peak oil and climate change at a bucolic estate outside Hamburg in northern Germany. It was an intimate affair, and it began with an informal round of cocktails on the tidy lawn next to the manor house. As the timeless cadence of horse hooves echoed from behind the barn, the assembled circle of eminent geologists, policy wonks and seasoned environmental journalists traded answers to the most pressing question of the day: "How did you get here?"

Most confessed to coming via Hamburg airport - some with eyes dropping guiltily earthward, others with what-else-can-you-do shrugs.

But certainly the greatest shame was reserved for those who copped to taking short-haul flights from London or Berlin.

The few intrepid souls who'd come by train earned something like bragging rights.

Eventually, someone asked me casually how I'd arrived. "Took the train out from Hamburg," I said quietly, to murmurs of general approval. It was the literal truth - I'd arrived a few days early to do some research and then hopped a commuter train to the station closest to the conference venue - but I assumed it was just old world decorum that held them all back from asking the obvious follow-up question: How was it, exactly, that I'd hauled myself from my Calgary home to Hamburg?

Looking back, though, I think I was witnessing a signal event in the moral confusion that marks this tumultuous age. We knew - as practically everyone now seems to - that profligate air travel is a carbon-black mark on one's green soul, potentially as damning as the keys to a Hummer. Almost all of us at the conference were sure that there were critical aspects of our way of life, transportation prominent among them, that had to change if global ecological catastrophe was to be averted. What we didn't know was precisely where those changes needed to occur.

Was there any good - truly good - reason to board an airplane? Could a low-emissions existence back home earn you offsets the same way the surcharge on a flight would? And could carbon offsets themselves even be trusted? Could air travel ever be neutral - or neutralized? And did the fate of the planet really come down to which one of us was best at this parlour game?

There are some obvious answers to these questions, but no definitive ones. At present, air travel accounts for only about 2 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, spiking to somewhere between 4 and 9 per cent of the sum total of human impact on the climate, when the full range and intensity of all the chemicals in the average contrail are considered. This would seem to indicate that the fate of the planet isn't affected very much by whether I attended that conference or you decide to take a spring-break getaway to Cancun.

On the other hand, airplane exhaust is among the most damaging and fastest growing types of transport emissions - likely worse than even the hated SUV per passenger-kilometre on a half-empty short hop, according to a recent Hydro-Quebec study. After the conference, I flew from southwest Germany to London on a $50 easyJet ticket, which was barely fifteen bucks more than the cost of the shuttle between airports once I landed in London. Surely a world in which an international flight is in the same price range as a crosstown bus can't be built to last. Weren't the enlightened among us obliged to reject such temptations?

My own response was, I suppose, a tacit no. I was raised an itinerant military brat, and as an adult I've come to see travel as a singular hybrid of costly indulgence and spiritual necessity; I'd sooner give up my car back home than abdicate the right to explore new places. And so I chose to carry on with the journey that had already taken me to the other side of the globe and back in the months before that German conference - a multi-leg research trip in search of the best responses to the climate change problem. It was a sort of self-constructed paradox: I was taking advantage of the lunacy of $50 easyJet flights to find the most effective ways to compel the mass shift in behaviour that would render them obsolete, that would oblige the cost of air travel (among many other things) to fully account for its climate-altering externalities.

Sir Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist and the author of last year's landmark British government report on the economic impact of climate change, has called the problem "the greatest market failure the world has seen." This gigantic glitch clearly extends to the logic of contemporary air travel. I felt like I was moving in an anomalous era, an interregnum between the age of dirt-cheap and seemingly carefree energy, which was just ending, and the age of profound consequence just dawning. And so I hunted in a frenzy for the tools to survive this new age - for hope, inspiration, renewal, a worldwide wealth of other ideas about how to live. The same sort of things, come to think of it, that had always fed the human desire for travel. I decided to explore not what we must sacrifice or what we stand to lose, but all we have to gain.

The shame economy has proved as susceptible to diminishing returns as any other niche market and I suspect that the demand for voluntary offset surcharges (not to mention eliminating air travel altogether) likely won't prove much larger than the one for overtly ethical products. A 2002 British study, for example, noted that while 30 per cent of consumers claimed to make their buying decisions based on ecological concerns, only about 3 per cent actually put their money where their virtuous mouths were.

Another niche market has emerged recently in the field of "global warming tourism," as cruise ships and scientific voyages alike shuttle unprecedented numbers of visitors to see the melting Arctic first hand and marvel at the distant early warning of wider catastrophe. Perhaps a handful of those thousands of tourists who stare a doomed polar bear in the face will be transformed into climate change activists. But the likelihood of the travel boom in the arctic - which has seen a 50 per cent increase in tourists since the early 1990s - providing the spark for a shift in mass consciousness can't be much more than that of the rubbernecking traffic at an accident becoming the nucleus of a revolution in motor vehicle safety.

I chose, in any case, to gawk not at doomed wreckage, but at the finest examples of durable assembly. From Ankelohe, I took a train south to Freiburg, the medieval jewel of Germany's Black Forest. I stayed in a hotel heated and powered primarily by the sun and rode an electric trolley beneath the inner city's 13th-century gate to a former military base that is being rapidly transformed into one of the planet's models of sustainable urban living, a town called Vauban. I strolled through tidy rows of primary-coloured townhomes built by the visionary green architect Rolf Disch - each of them crafted to produce more energy than it consumes. These were houses as power plants. For a few days, I inhabited an exhilarating near future that was built to last.

I came home longing not for another vacation, but for a better home. I brought back my memories of Freiburg and a dozen other places like Marco Polo with his Silk Road riches. I felt as if I'd seen a faraway dream made manifest. I was transformed. And isn't that - I'm not sure whether to say even still or especially now - but isn't that what travel is for?

Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need (Random House Canada), which is in stores Oct. 20. He lives in Calgary.