The airlines are magicians.
They’ve positioned flying as a minor part of the environmental crisis using distraction, manipulation and psychology. And we want to believe in their fantasy of air travel that doesn’t roast the planet.
The industry is responsible for about 4 percent of human-made climate change, an enormous amount given that only about 10 percent of the global population flies regularly. New technology and efficiency gains, the airlines say, will allow them to expand their number of frequent fliers, and reach the 7 billion people who don’t fly, without additional harm to the environment.
My Ph.D. dissertation was on jet engines, and I don’t see a credible path for the aviation industry to make flying sustainable in the near term. Once I realized this 13 years ago, I stopped flying for leisure. It seemed the least I could do to help people who are most affected by climate change.
In Europe, where you can reach many places by train, the European Commission has taken the airlines to court for greenwashing. Nearly one-fifth of Germans claim to have flown less because of environmental concerns, and France recently banned domestic flights between cities where a rail alternative under 2.5 hours exists.
My children, ages 11 and 13, have never flown. They agree it’s best we take trains and boats to vacation at the seaside and in the mountains and it cuts our family’s carbon emissions in half. It means we have to turn down invitations to join friends and family in places reachable only by flying. But my children have also never experienced delayed flights, airport security pat-downs or the stressful game of “where’s my luggage gone?” That everyone accepts these aspects of flying as totally normal is, by the way, part of the magic trick.
You might be wondering why planes can’t just go electric like cars and trucks. Many companies are developing short-haul electric planes, and they believe that electric planes could one day compete with commercial jets in terms of cost, safety and reliability. The challenge is that airplanes have to carry all their fuel with them, and the weight of that fuel dictates the size and range of the plane, and therefore the cost per person. Because aviation fuel delivers much more energy for its weight than a battery, we would need to increase energy density in batteries by more than 10 times for them to truly compete. That achievement appears to be more than a decade away. And so for now, boarding a commercial electric nonstop flight from London to New York is just a daydream.
American Airlines, Delta and even Bill Gates think sustainable aviation fuel, produced from crops and organic waste, will help make flying green, but these fuels face a different problem. Analysis shows that to manufacture enough of this fuel to decarbonize aviation would require 30 percent of global farmland by 2050. We need that land to feed people.
There are other ways to produce these fuels more sustainably, by reacting hydrogen and carbon dioxide. However, these can’t compete on cost with fossil fuels given the low price of oil and the pressures to keep it affordable for industry and citizens.
So what if the airlines used pure hydrogen as a fuel to make flying climate-friendly? The major manufacturer Airbus is promoting this as a goal. And indeed hydrogen could power aircraft by reacting with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce nothing but water vapor. But here, too, there are major technical challenges, such as how to safely store the liquid hydrogen onboard at the required temperature of minus 252 degrees Celsius. Lightweight tanks would need to keep this cryogenically stored liquid insulated and pressurized for the whole flight.
That’s a difficult task but hardly insurmountable. Hydrogen has been used as fuel for space rockets for decades, and hydrogen gas is already available, sourced from renewable electricity generated by electrolyzing water.
What is hindering progress on all of these fronts is that the short-term return on investment on them is low. With no tax on aviation fuel in many countries, there is little incentive for the aviation industry to make serious investments in a less damaging technology.
The only scenario that might save the aviation industry, and persuade my family to fly, is for airlines to stick with the current jet engine technology and pay to capture the carbon planes emit.
The simplest way to increase absorption of carbon from the atmosphere is by planting trees, and airlines have been selling carbon offset credits to their customers based on this concept. But numerous studies have shown these efforts to be mostly worthless. Another problem is that it would take hundreds of millions of acres to plant the 50 billion trees that would be needed to draw down the annual carbon dioxide emissions from aviation.
So we need other ways to take the carbon dioxide out of the air. Technologies to do this exist: The most proven ones involve removing carbon dioxide from power stations where it is emitted in a concentrated form from the burning of fossil fuels. This gas stream is purified, compressed and pumped underground to secure storage in sites such as rock formations.
The value of these carbon capture and storage schemes is debated. The schemes that work are often those connected to the extraction of fossil fuels, which defeats the purpose of trying to alleviate climate change. However, similar technologies that run on renewable energy are now being used to suck large amounts of carbon out of thin air and store it permanently. It is called direct air capture.
The world’s largest direct air capture plant, Mammoth in Iceland, runs off geothermal energy. It sucks air through filters, captures the carbon dioxide, mixes it with water and pumps it underground where it can be stored for thousands of years. Currently, Mammoth is designed to capture and store 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year.
But can this technology really be scaled up to capture the billion or so tons of carbon dioxide that airplanes emit per year? This would require access to huge amounts of cheap renewable energy, which is in high demand from many other industries that are prepared to pay more. A case in point is a direct air capture project in Wyoming known as Project Bison. Its goal was to remove five million tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, but the company developing the project scrapped its plans, citing the high price and low availability of renewable energy in the state.
Some airlines have begun investing in carbon capture, but the aviation industry has the power to get serious about these investments to eliminate all emissions from flying. That would mean ditching the magic show, and being honest with passengers about the harms of flying today.
You don’t have to go along with the fiction if the airlines fail to act. Why not make a New Year’s resolution to join me and family not flying for pleasure? Try it for a year. After all, flying on holiday is a luxury, and one that is jeopardizing our children’s futures.
The post I Won’t Feel Good About Flying Until the Airlines Solve This appeared first on New York Times.
