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When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its last major report on climate change last year, stating with the highest degree of confidence that people are mucking up the planet in ways that will cause a whole mess of human suffering, it understandably generated a lot of media attention. One headline that broke through the chatter came from a journalist’s emotional public renunciation of air travel.
“I realized, just now: This has to be the last flight I ever take,” tweeted meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus the day the release was published. “I’m committing right now to stop flying. It’s not worth the climate.”
At the annual SXSW Eco gathering in Austin, Texas, on Monday, Julie Felgar, Boeing’s managing director of environmental strategy presented Boeing’s case for sustainable air travel. She was quick to remind her audience that air travel accounts for only 2% of global greenhouse emissions.
(According to the most recent IPCC accounting, transportation today accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. International and domestic aviation make up 10.6% of that quarter, or roughly 2.5% of global emissions.)
Yet Holthaus’s message, and others like it, have struck a chord among the climate concerned and have forced Boeing to respond.
Air travel is considered the most carbon-intense form of transportation, but there are exceptions. Long-distance, single-passenger car trips, for example, have been shown to out-pollute airplanes in studies like this one from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute and this research from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
But while cars can already use alternative fuels – such as ethanol, biodiesel and natural gas – today, airplanes require large amounts of power to keep themselves aloft that only jet fuel – or something very much like it – can provide, Felgar said.
According to the 2013 IPCC report on climate-change mitigation strategies, the answer is to reduce travel, as well as to advance technology: “Sectoral studies suggest that achieving significant reductions in aviation emissions will require reductions in the rate of growth of travel activity through demand management alongside technological advances.”
Technological advances found room in Felgar’s Austin talk, but demand management – intentionally limiting the number of people flying – wasn’t mentioned.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Boeing projections show a steep growth curve ahead for the air travel industry that Felgar said will require an estimated 36,800 new planes by 2033, only 40% of which will be replacing old aircraft. The dynamic growth scenario makes bringing biofuels into cost parity with traditional petroleum-based fuels even more critical to arresting climate change.
“I firmly believe we are at a nexus point,” Felgar told the Guardian a few minutes after her Austin address. “We’ve come so far down the techo-economic curve now [in biofuel development] that I think within the next five to six years we’re going to start seeing some major breakthroughs.”
One research development program that has Boeing’s interest – and investment dollars – involves efforts in the United Arab Emirates, where a small-scale research project is preparing to break ground in super-green Masdar City, outside Abu Dhabi.
The project of the Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium (SBRC) and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology plans to pump sea water into aquaculture ponds stocked with shrimp or fish, the wastes of which will feed plots of salicornia, a salt-loving halophyte whose seed oils and biomass can be used to create biofuel. As the waters flush back toward the sea they will wash through bands of cultivated mangroves, which can also be converted into biofuel.
“The idea here is to be able to produce biomass in a sustainable way,” said SBRC Director Alejandro Ríos, who shared the stage with Felgar at SXSW Eco. “We’re not falling into the debate of water use. We’re not falling into this food versus fuel debate, because we’re actually producing food and producing energy.”
While the project has tremendous potential for the growing arid zones of the planet, it will take up to five years to grow the planned two-hectare pilot into a 200-hectare demonstration project before it could be commercialized.
There were skeptics in the audience and in subsequent panels. One audience member suggested that airplane emissions are more damaging due to the altitude at which they are released, a notion supported in the scientific literature.
But perhaps the most vociferous critic was travel writer Edward Hasbrouck, author of “The Practical Nomad,” who presented on the idea of “peak air travel” Tuesday.
While Hasbrouck doesn’t expect most people will voluntarily fly less because of climate concerns, he does expect peak oil to price air travel out of reach of most.
Calling aviation the most heavily subsidized form of travel, Hasbrouck complained about the Obama Administration’s decision to exempt US airlines from inclusion in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme.
“Ethics and policy aside, peak oil is likely to make air travel much more expensive,” he said. “Obviously the aviation industry doesn’t want to talk about its impending contraction.”
The time has come, he said Tuesday, to begin considering where alternative modes of travel can expand – such as a transcontinental light rail in the United States, for example. He also mentioned the need to modify global shipping ports to accommodate what he cast as an inevitable rise in the public use of cruise ships and ocean liners.
The aviation industry’s suggestion that biofuels will rescue it from the rising costs of petroleum and the carbon-emissions problem was equivalent to greenwashing, he said.
For Felgar’s part, she sees proof of the potential of biofuels in Boeing’s research and development investments on six continents. In addition, major airlines – which collectively account for roughly a third of global jet fuel purchases – belong to the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group.
“The policy mechanisms are right,” Felgar said.
And what if the sustainable fuel efforts in Masdar City fail?
“If we do not produce a drop of fuel, in the end this system actually acts as an aquaculture filter”, producing a steady source of protein, SBRC’s Ríos said, in a country that imports about 90% of its food.
Hasbrouck, on the other hand, said the UAE biofuel plan wasn’t even close to a sufficient response.
“I’m glad they’re working on it. But they have all their eggs in one basket,” he said. “There’s no other option. There’s no plan B.”
- This story was amended 8 October. A previous version incorrectly stated that 33% of all biofuels are now certified by the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group. In fact, the group doesn’t certify biofuels. Instead, airlines that account for about a third of global jet fuel demand belong to the group.
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