Taking the train across Canada is worse for the climate than flying (and why the government ought to do something about that)

Despite its reputation as a more sustainable form of transport, long-distance passenger rail travel in Canada typically results in a higher carbon footprint per passenger than long-distance commercial air travel. This is what I discovered after diving into the emissions data (recently published in the journal Canadian Geographer). I know it seems crazy, but that's what the data suggest...

So, I wrote a blog post about this, which the folks at the University of Ottawa's Institute for Science, Society and Policy kindly published on their blog site. Check it out! In it I explain why Canada’s long-distance rail services defy the ‘green’ reputation held by rail transportation globally, and offer some policy proposals for improving the situation.

Here's the link--> https://issp.uottawa.ca/en/news/taking-train-across-canada-worse-climate-flying-and-why-government-ought-do-something-about

Flying under the climate radar!

Here is a post originally written for A/J magazine (here), but revised and posted on the CIPS blog more recently (here):

Monday, 13 July 2018 was a day for the record books. On that day the Swedish company FlightRadar24 tracked 205,468 flights occurring around the world, making it aviation’s busiest day in history. It would be a herculean task to determine the total carbon footprint of all those flights put together, but a basic back-of-envelope calculation yields some jaw-dropping figures. Consider that even a one-way short-haul flight in Canada (such as the average 1-hour trip between Ottawa and Toronto) generates about 4718 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO₂) — about as much as a typical passenger vehicle does in a whole year.[1]

If the Ottawa to Toronto route is representative of the global average in terms of distance travelled, aircraft type, and occupancy, then the aviation sector would have consumed the equivalent of over 2.2 million barrels of oil on that single day! By way of comparison, that’s enough energy to power nearly 105,000 North American homes for a whole year! It is so much CO₂ that it would require 1.1 million acres of forest a full year to remove it all from the atmosphere.[2] That’s one big day of air travel!

Of course, it’s quite possible that many of the flights tracked were not as damaging, since the tracking software sometimes includes non-commercial small aircraft. But even if we cut that estimate in half, the energy used would still be equivalent to the amount of oil coming out of North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields every day. The point is that any way you look at it, the aviation industry is an unmitigated climate change nightmare. Studies show that global flight emissions alone account for about 2% of all anthropogenic emissions globally.[3] Yet that’s just direct aircraft emissions of CO₂. Planes also emit nitrous oxides, water vapour, sulfates, and soot — which also impact the climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that in 1992, aviation was responsible for 3.5% of all “anthropogenic radiative forcing” (in other words, 3.5% of human-caused climate change), which was expected to climb to 5% by 2050. But that figure doesn’t even account for the sector’s broader supply chain, which would have to factor in all the energy that goes into building, maintaining, and energizing airports and runways; producing, refining, storing, and transporting jet fuel; and of course, feeding all those hundreds of thousands of daily travellers.

There are no good global estimates of emissions from the entire aviation supply chain out there. However, one study of the life-cycle emissions for the aviation sector in the US found that an equivalent of 30% of aircraft emissionsare generated through indirect categories such as jet fuel production, airport and runway construction, aircraft manufacturing, and so on. If the same is true in global terms, then the aviation sector is responsible for about 4.6% of anthropogenic radiative forcing.

According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), there were more than 4 billion air passengers last year. Of course, not everyone in the world flies. In fact, most of the world (80%) has never been on an airplane. And of the remaining 20%, some travel frequently and some travel about once a year. One educated guess is that 6% of the world’s population flies in a given year (as distinct passengers) — so, about 446 million people in 2016. The aviation sector thus has a population akin to that of Indonesia and Nigeria combined, being responsible for about 4.6% of anthropogenic warming.[4]

All of this raises an important question: Why is it that while the world’s biggest oil companies and, more recently, the world’s largest livestock producers, occasionally get lambasted in the media for their willful ignorance on climate change, the world’s biggest airlines do not? While it’s true that there is a growing popular understanding that flying is a “climate negative” behaviour, there is very little sense of how significant the sector is as a contributor to anthropogenic climate change.

More worryingly is how significant it will be according to projections of growing air travel. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), air travel is expected to double over the next two decades. So how is the aviation industry avoiding being held to account for climate change? 

First, the sector benefits from the publicity received by technological innovations and efficiency gains in aviation — this gives the perception that the corporations that build and operate aircraft, and the governments that regulate them, are taking the necessary steps to tackle the problem. While the idea of electric airplanes is pretty much a non-starter for commercial aviation, there are indeed some recent efficiency and technological gains made by aircraft manufacturers and airline companies. Notably, these include the growing use of biofuels, new lightweight materials being used on airplanes, and improvements in air traffic management (all of which help reduce emissions).

Combined with the rise of “offset” products, these innovations give the false impression that aviation emissions are under control. But nothing could be further from the truth. For instance, the sector’s target of 1.5% fuel efficiency improvements per year between 2009 and 2020 are clearly being overwhelmed by the annual growth in passenger demand, which has hovered at around 6% per year. Improvements in efficiency are certainly helpful, but they are simply not keeping up with the growing pace of emissions.

The second reason relates to problems with the IPCC reporting mechanisms for aviation emissions. Because of the international nature of aviation vis-a-vis the nation-based reporting to the IPCC, countries submit figures for domestic and international aviation separately. In part, this is borne of a methodological dispute over who ought to take the emissions burden in their national greenhouse gas (GHG) reports.

For instance, should emissions for an international flight be split 50/50 between the countries of departure and arrival? What if the majority of the flight occurs over one country, or if the majority of passengers are from another — should those countries report a higher share of the flight emissions? Or, should the emissions be attributed to the country where the airplane fuelled-up?

The problem with this dual-reporting mechanism is that emissions figures often end up being downplayed. For instance, a 2012 government reportentitled Canada’s Action Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Aviation claims that only around 5% of transport emissions (about 1% of national emissions) are due to aviation. But that figure only includes domesticaviation. A deeper dive into Canada’s National Inventory Report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (hiding somewhere on page 88) shows that when international travel is included, aviation is actually responsible for 11% of transport sector emissions, or 2.7% of the country’s total emissions. In the end, the ability of aviation — like global shipping — to sneak out of national reporting has helped the sector fly under the radar at the national level, since domestically oriented policies try to identify and reduce GHG emissions from the most polluting sectors.

Finally, there’s CORSIA — the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. This is the global aviation industry’s ambitious plan for addressing climate change. According to CORSIA, the aviation sector has less than a decade to cap and reduce its flight emissions to 2020 levels, and then by 2050 it aims to bring them down an additional 50% compared to 2005 levels. While that would indeed mark a substantial reduction, the likelihood of it being achieved is extremely low. So much of CORSIA relies on what it calls a “Global Market-Based Measure” (MBM) — essentially a global-scale carbon fee that most nations would have to agree to that would go towards offsetting the projected growth in international emissions relative to 2020.

Obviously, the plan to implement a global MBM is riddled with problems. Not only does it require the international community to co-operate on the implementation of new carbon pricing (a political policy wedge in countless industrialized nations today), but it also assumes problematically that carbon offsets work in the first place. As one expert explains, “offsetting is worse than doing nothing. It is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading, and almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global emissions growth.”

Ultimately, like the publicity around new technologies in aviation efficiencies, CORSIA gives the impression that the problem is being addressed, when clearly it is getting worse. Even if the CORSIA plan reached its objectives of 50% of 2005 emissions by 2050, the sector would still be contributing about 857 Mt of CO₂ by mid-century (about as much as Germany emits today) — meaning that the aviation sector alone would be eating up 12% of the global carbon budget for 1.5⁰ C of warming.

In the end, we are left with the classic challenge of trying to balance the benefits of global aviation (and I’ll be the first to admit there are many) with the extreme scale of damage caused by the industry. It’s hard to imagine giving up flying in this fast-paced, integrated, modern world. Perhaps a good starting point is to consider the merits of tackling growth in aviation, which ultimately means coming up with concrete ways to fly less overall.

Until the aviation industry is held to account for its contribution to climate change, the band-aid solutions of trying to minimize the impact of this booming sector will continue to allow it to fly under the radar.

[1] According to ICAO, the average aircraft on that route burns 1866 kg (493 gallons) of aviation fuel during the trip. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), jet fuel emits 9.57 kg of CO₂ per gallon. So, the average Ottawa–Toronto flight emits 4718 kg of CO₂ (4.718 Metric Tons).

[2] These conversion factors all come from the EPA’s “Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator” — using a value of 969,398 Metric Tons (Mt) of CO₂(4.718 Mt x 205,468).

[3] According to the ICAO, the international component of the sector emitted 448 Mt CO₂ from direct fuel consumption in 2010. The ICAO also notes that international aviation accounts for 65% of global aviation fuel consumption, meaning that another 241 Mt CO₂ is emitted from domestic aviation. Together, 689 Mt CO₂ is equivalent to 1.4% of global anthropogenic emissions in 2010 according to the IPCC. According to IATA, air transport accounted for 2% of anthropogenic emissions in 2017 (about 859 Mt of CO₂).

[4] In reality, those two countries combined only produce about 2.3% of global emissions.

Let's Talk about the Jumbo Plane in the Room...

Here's my latest post for Policy Options. View the original here.

The policy dilemma of aviation emissions

GHG emissions from air travel are rising and will hamper the world’s efforts to curb climate change. The policy options are limited.

The news these days is rife with stories about the impending electric vehicle (EV) revolution, and for the most part, it’s a good-news story: EVs are expected to take over the global automobile market in the next few decades, thereby helping to reduce the transport sector’s carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, we hear almost nothing in the media about the rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from air travel, which seem poised to negate some of the gains made from EVs. Unfortunately, unlike the shift towards electrification of automobiles and the growth of renewables, there are no good policy options on the table for adequately reducing emissions from aviation.

It is shaping up to be quite a dilemma: By all measures, modern humans are addicted to air travel, and yet despite considerable efforts by the airline industry to make airplanes more efficient, there is no practical way to produce zero-emission aircraft. Sadly, the only genuine way to reduce our collective carbon footprint from long-distance transport – given available technologies – is to significantly cut down on passenger and cargo flights.

And that’s where things get very uncomfortable. Clearly, major society-wide reductions in air transport would spell disaster for a range of economic sectors, not least aviation, but tourism and the petroleum sector too. It would also dramatically alter the social relations to which we’ve become accustomed in a globalized world. Cut out air travel or continue contributing to the ongoing climate emergency faced by our home planet — this is the inconvenient juncture at which we have arrived.

In some ways we’re lucky these are not the same stark choices we face for local transportation. Switching out an old gas-guzzling car for an EV (or even better, a bicycle or transit pass) may dramatically improve one’s local carbon footprint, but no parallel solution presently exists for fast long-distance travel, even domestically. For instance, VIA Rail’s transcontinental train journey from Toronto to Vancouver takes four days and (despite conventional wisdom) is substantially more taxing on the environment than flying, thanks to the low occupancy ratios and VIA’s old diesel-powered locomotives.

Transportation accounts for 14 percent of global emissions, but in industrialized countries like Canada and the United States the sector is responsible for about a quarter of anthropogenic emissions. In Canada, transportation emissions have grown by 42 percent since 1990, driven mostly by growth in road transportation. In fact, emissions from domestic aviation have only grown marginally since 1990, thanks largely to improvements in fuel efficiency counterbalancing growth in air travel. However, Canadian-based GHG emissions for international aviation (which are not included in the domestic figures above) have actually grown by 85 percent since 1990.

Again, this emissions growth is despite major improvements in the fuel-efficiency of aircraft in recent years. Indeed, many airlines have been successful in reducing carrying weights (through innovations in lightweight equipment and those expensive baggage restrictions we all know so well) — all of which helps cut down on fuel use. They have also been fairly successful in incorporating biofuels into the fuel mix (which can theoretically reduce the carbon footprint of a flight). Canada’s leading airlines are betting big on second-generation biofuels (which use forestry residue and agricultural by-products as feedstock rather than diverting food crops) to help reduce emissions. Unfortunately, the development of second-generation biofuels has largely stalledthanks to the low price of oil, and biofuels are not expected to make up more than a fraction of the fuel mix used in aviation in the coming decade. Meanwhile, the first-generation biofuels currently in use raise a host of other social and environmental concerns.

In short, improvements in fuel efficiency will take us only so far. The jumbo plane in the room is, literally, the jumbo plane! The number of air travellers globally has more than doubled in the last two decades, and forecasts expect demand for air travel to double again in the next two decades. The same story is true of world air cargo – with base-scenario forecasts expecting global air cargo traffic to more than double over the next two decades as well.
Efficient planes or not, this growth trend is clearly working against the already troubled efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming. Airline emissions today account for 2.5 percent of annual anthropogenic GHG emissions worldwide (that’s more than all GHG emissions emitted by Brazil — the world’s seventh-largest carbon-emitting state). Even in a scenario with moderate technological improvements and modest regulatory changes, emissions from aviation are expected to grow by upwards of 76 percent over the next two decades, simply because of the increase in demand.

While it is in the interest of airlines to improve fuel efficiency (since fuel accounts for up to a third of operational costs), it is clearly not in the industry’s interest to curtail growing demand. This is why the industry’s proposed solution to the problem, backed by global institutions, is a new program called the Carbon Offset and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation(CORSIA). The plan largely relies on offsets – investments in various emissions reduction projects elsewhere to cancel out the emissions from aviation. Yet while CORSIA might sound ambitious on paper — calling for the industry to cap its GHG emissions to 2020 levels by 2027 — it is bound to fail as a carbon mitigation strategy. Offsets, much like biofuels, face substantial limitations and conceptual flaws. As Kevin Anderson, former director of the Tyndall Centre (the UK’s leading academic climate change research organization), has written in Nature: “Offsetting is worse than doing nothing. It is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading and almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global emissions growth.”

Not only are global regulatory “solutions” like CORSIA a non-starter, but new technologies are also impractical or unlikely to work at the level of the jumbo plane. Prototypes for everything from hydrogen fuel-cell-powered airplanes, to atomic airplanes, to solar-panelled airplanes, to hybrid-electric airplanes whose batteries can be recharged while in flight, all presently exist. But the chances that any one of these technological solutions will be applied to large commercial aircraft in the next decade are slim to none — because the technologies are only possible on small aircraft, or are too dangerous, or would take multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investments in a cutthroat industry that typically spends many years developing new aircraft only if a return on investment is expected.

In the end, the only practical way to reduce our society’s emissions from long-distance air transport (while admittedly giving rise to social costs elsewhere) is to restrict the growth in demand for air transport. It’s going to take some political guts to try to shape or nudge the demand for passenger and cargo air transport, and there are a number of mechanisms through which that could be done, ranging from the unpopular levying of flight taxes, to the political suicide of imposing hard-cap restrictions on flight growth. Needless to say, neither of these policy options is likely to be attempted. Either way, the jumbo plane needs to be let out of the room: Relying on technological innovation, other market forces, and a global system of carbon offsets will not solve the serious problem of growing GHG emissions from aviation.