From the Fairfax website traveller.com.au: Tourism and environmental damage: How travellers are ruining the world:
Some friends of mine have stopped travelling. Pretty much, anyway. They're refusing to fly anywhere, unless they're going to be staying in their destination for a very long time.
If they're travelling from Sydney to Melbourne, say, they'll drive. Same with anywhere else in Australia too. The only way they'd board a plane to fly, even to somewhere as close as New Zealand, is if they planned to stay there for a least a month, but probably more. Otherwise, to them, it's not worth the damage they're causing the environment.
The article doesn't explicitly say that their rationale is valid, but a reader could reasonably interpret it that way, and there's no attempt to debunk it either.
Based on the fact that they're willing to travel if they spend a long time at their destination, it's reasonable to assume they're worried about the impact of travelling from one place to another, rather than increased environmental impacts while they're at their destination.
The article doesn't indicate how many people would be travelling in the car, or what kind of car was involved. The cities referred to are Sydney, Australia and Melbourne, Australia, and the most distant major city in Australia from Sydney would be Perth, Australia.
Fuel Efficiency: Planes vs Trains vs Automobiles and Slate's Has Flying Become More Eco-Friendly Than Driving? seem to suggest that driving is not necessarily more environmentally friendly than flying, though there's a confounding factor of emissions being done higher in the atmosphere for flying.
Is travelling by car better for preventing climate change than flying?
A similar question was asked at Is flying the worst choice of travelling, considering the greenhouse effect and carbon-dioxide emission? but was closed for lack of a notable claim.
