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.

Sharing Volkswagen's Blame

What the Volkswagen Scandal can teach us about Canada’s transportation culture...

Originally posted at AlternativesJournal.ca

Volkswagen's managers, its market value and its global reputation have all taken a big hit since it was revealed that 11 million of the company's 'clean diesel' cars were actually polluting up to 40 times more Nitrous Oxides than the legal limit. And so they should! It has been estimated that the extra pollution from those vehicles is akin to the NOx emissions produced within the United Kingdom's transport, electrical, industrial and agricultural sectors combined!

In the wake of the scandal blame has been placed on everything from the failure of de-regulation to the avaricious corporate culture which is so often a feature of the contemporary neoliberal era. These are all important considerations, but to what extent are we missing the point when we - the drivers of those so-called 'clean-diesels' - absolve ourselves of any wrongdoing? 

Don’t get me wrong, what VW did was nothing short of criminal. The company should be prosecuted and those wronged by the crimes should see justice (I would be remiss if I did not declare that I too have signed on to one of the many class action lawsuits launched against VW). However, do we not do ourselves a deep disservice if we pin our society’s unsustainable practices in transportation all on the producers? What about the consumers?

Like millions of other VW owners, I too had a moment of fury when I found out my 'clean diesel' was not so clean after all. I felt duped. Suddenly, this proud possession of mine – which I thought was helping me contain my ecological footprint – became a deceitful polluting machine designed to cheat the system. Yet as the shock wore off I started to feel a sense of responsibility for the ecological catastrophe that is now encapsulated by the words ‘Volkswagen scandal’. And now I see it clearly: Before we go on heaping all the blame on this one ‘bad apple’ we would do well to take a deep long look in the mirror to assess our own culpability.

     

Why? Because there’s a palpable assumption that everything will be okay again if we just implement a more robust regulatory structure and a genuine corporate culture of social responsibility to ensure this kind of scam doesn’t happen again. But clearly those assumptions do not account for the fact that nearly every one of us in Canada is producing an unacceptably high volume of greenhouse gases (GHGs) on a daily basis regardless of how 'clean' and 'green' our vehicles may be. We are – after all – amongst the worst per capita emitters of GHGs in the world (the worst according to the World Resources Institute, who includes land use change and forestry in their calculations). And transportation is the biggest culprit in Canada, with the sector contributing nearly a quarter of all domestic emissions. Canadians are not driving less, but rather hoping that their purchases of cleaner vehicles will help reduce their environmental footprint. 

We know now that VW’s notion of ‘clean diesel’ was a false promise – but should we ever have bought into that crazy idea in the first place? It’s diesel – a fuel directly derived from petroleum! Sure, the sulfur is largely removed from the fuel, but there is an inevitable production of pollutants resulting from diesel compression! Like the absurd concept of ‘clean coal’ we should have known that “clean” was defined in relative terms. Yet more importantly we should have been thinking more critically about our attempt to consume our way into a smaller ecological footprint!

Like other VW diesel owners, I now contemplate my next vehicle purchase with a skeptic’s eye towards potential greenwashing. But it would be a shame if the lesson from this scandal ended there - it would be much better if this whole mess forced us to own up to our own role in contributing to climate change and pollution and let us to think twice about our excessive consumption of transportation.