Will Sustainability Fly?

Aviation Fuel Options in a Low-Carbon World

Walter J. Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134766734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho civil

While international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been less than satisfactory, there is a presumption that a significant level of multi-lateral commitment will be realized at some point. International air and marine travel have been left to one side in past talks because the pursuit of agreement proceeds on the basis of commitment by sovereign nations and the effects of these specific commercial activities are, by their nature, difficult to corral and assign to specific national jurisdictions. However, air travel is increasing and, unless something is done, emissions from this segment of our world economy will form a progressively larger percentage of the total, especially as emissions fall in other activities. This book focuses on fuel. The aim is to provide background in technical and policy terms, from the broadest reliable sources of information available, for the necessary discourse on society's reaction to the evolving aviation emissions profile. It considers what policy has been, why and how commercial air travel is committed to its current liquid fuel, how that fuel can be made without using fossil-source materials, and the barriers to change. It also advances some elements of policy remedies that make sense in providing an environmentally and economically sound way forward in a context that comprehends a more complete vision of sustainability than 'renewable fuels' traditionally have. The goal of Will Sustainability Fly? is to broaden and contextualize the knowledge resource available to academics, policy makers, air industry leaders and stakeholders, and interested members of the public.

Chapter 1 The Size of the Problem

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547169-2

Scope in Time

In order to get where we are going we sometimes have to go somewhere else first. Maybe we even have to start off in a different direction: the train goes east to our destination but the departure station is at the west end of town. The matter that is discussed in these pages is enormous in its complexity and consequence, and moreover is only one part of a larger difficulty that is almost beyond our ability to conceptualize. In those circumstances it is too easy to get focused upon what is of most immediate concern and, taking a step in what seems like the right direction for now, we find that we have left ourselves a longer and more difficult journey. So we need to take the long view in examining the question of how aviation will address global warming and climate change. Some of what follows will seem of little practical applicability to our situation in this very early part of the twenty-first century. But we cannot—we dare not—lose sight of the fact that we have to solve these problems in a way that will have made sense at the end of this part of our history. What is offered here is presented in the context of striving for an ultimate good in an ultimate time rather than pursuing some more immediately advantageous tactic.

This chapter is specifically about the scale of difficulty that we confront. In order to consider that, we should bring a few of the remarks contained in the Introduction into more direct context here.

We face an entirely new kind of problem in the issues that bedevil our world’s climate. The deployment of a fossil energy resource into a technological and social revolution in what is now the developed world, over nearly two centuries, creates a difficulty. But the whole world clamors for development. Maintaining living standards in the developed world and enabling others to improve their lot now requires us to leap ahead and put that same technological prowess out in front of what we have created. While this is not an uncommon sort of human circumstance, it is unprecedented at a global scale.

Depending upon technological fixes when it is technological innovation that brought us to this pass is, admittedly, pretty unnerving. When we think about our climate wobbling, the pace at which technology is developing, and the different directions that it seems to want to take us, we are entitled to feel that we have a very uncertain hold on this tiger’s tail and we are being pulled off our feet. But no matter how distasteful further recourse to technological fixes may seem to some, we have to put every last bit of energy and wit into allowing our technological strength to perform as it has never performed, to achieve as it has never achieved. Events have foreclosed on many other options. It is not certain that we will succeed, but we will definitely fail unless we can move rapidly and with purpose to somehow get the tiger caged. A few of us may be injured in the endeavor.

By contrast, many are instinctively (and justifiably) tempted to simply throw up their hands and cry, ‘Enough! Stop everything, development has become evil!’ However, if it is true that we have been running heedlessly, it is still also true that if we stop or veer too abruptly, the danger of falling and landing on our heads is real and immediate. In any case, it is unlikely that the aviation industry, the people who now use it, and all of the people who would like to use it would contemplate just stopping. If we are willing to consider the premise that we cannot halt, and that we need to harness our economy and technologies to work our way out of the current threat, we should also expect that caution must now become a much more important consideration. We have to do something, but first we need to spend more effort to understand the problem in a detailed way. The need for care in determining our actions is as great as the urgency.

As to the reality of all of this, the overwhelmingly common assessment remains that the threatening climate crisis is real. Politicians seem to accept the current science-based assessments—notwithstanding a few frequently uttered, politically motivated, and publicly stated opinions to the contrary. Our leaders may wrangle and opine over who is most responsible and who among them is best equipped to take initiative and direct the use of money and resources, but they do not spend a lot of time denying that our world’s atmosphere threatens to change the fabric of climate and life.

While we remain unsure of exactly what to do about global warming and the climate change that will accompany it, recognizing the need to acknowledge and react is the only useful way forward; that is becoming a political and social reality. I do not set out to prove the validity of current climate theory, I simply focus here on the place held by aviation—particularly commercial aviation—within the climate discussion. We want to know how aviation contributes to the problem and how it intends to reduce its negative effects.

Arguments presented here regarding technology, economics, and policy make a certain assumption about a larger perspective: Recognizing that the climate crisis represents failure to ensure that our actions could be perpetuated without compromising the status of our planet’s ecological systems, we must now proceed on the basis of an informed commitment to the notion of sustainability. Nothing that we intend to do in science, commerce, or any part of the sphere of human affairs (including our developing struggle toward a remedy for our signal failure in the matter of climate) should be undertaken unless the proposed action is demonstrably sustainable in all of sustainability’s dimensions, or at least fits within a strategy that leads toward sustainability. If it seems that addressing all of the provisions of a sustainable approach will slow us down, we have to remember that if our actions are not sustainable, we will end up worse off than we are now. We have ignored many of the negative externalities, the unintended consequences of what we do. It is time to account for them, and it is beyond time to ensure that when we are embarking upon any new path we ask these questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing this? What will happen?

As this book proceeds we will gradually knit as many of the elements of sustainability as possible into the fabric of our discussion. But it is air travel’s special relationship to our climate issues that inspired this project, and it will be our entry point.

I qualify what follows with the foregoing because talking about the size of a challenge is not useful if we do not think about its nature as well.

The Raw Numbers and the Raw Reality

First things first: How big is aviation’s contribution to the perturbation of our atmosphere? As later parts of the book will show, policy—and the inevitable relative urgencies that attend its discussion—demands a sense of scale in order to resolve matters such as the setting-out of national and international priorities over time. It is important to know the extent and nature of the contributions of air transport and other industries to our climate difficulties so that we can determine pace and priorities, and assess and allocate the resources that we might bring to bear in addressing them.

Without going too deeply into the science of global warming, paying some attention to the physical mechanisms will allow us to contextualize our thoughts on how we should react. Air travel does not contribute to global warming and climate change in exactly the same way as other industries or activities do, so it is important to understand its differences and the ways in which it must change. It is a complex task to assess the effect that commercial aviation has on the ocean of air that blankets the Earth and the life that inhabits it.

The aspect of this discussion with which we are probably most familiar is the production of greenhouse gas (GHG), most prominently carbon dioxide (CO₂). All GHGs have a residency time in the atmosphere, and that of CO₂ is quite long. A good part of the CO₂ that has been emitted since the dawn of the industrial age is still up there. When we look at the contribution made by an industry or by a country’s overall economic activity, we must consider not only the current rate of contribution but also the persistent remnant of the total contribution to date. Aviation’s current rate of contribution of CO₂ is not only fairly modest, but has only become significant in the last few decades, so the amount of CO₂ currently in the atmosphere that can be attributed to commercial flying is extremely small.

But CO₂ is not the only pollutant that is emitted in air travel. Water vapor, aerosols, oxides of nitrogen, oxides of sulfur—many substances are cast into the air by airplanes and other emitters. However, important differences are associated with the special nature of aviation: even though other human activities produce some of the same pollutants, airplanes deposit them at altitude. What is the effect of releasing these substances in the stratosphere, several kilometers above the Earth’s surface?

We must set out here knowing that our answers can be framed in only limited detail. It is a challenge to accurately quantify the amount of CO₂ for which airplanes are accountable, but even more difficult to assess the amounts and altitude-dependent effects of the entire host of materials that come out of our collective air fleet’s tailpipes. And let me acknowledge that advocacy can seem to alter the facts; it is not strange that environmentalist organizations can find numbers that differ from those offered by the air industry or its regulators. But most of the differences take the form of variations in what gets emphasized in news media rather than actual disagreement over the data. There are reliable sources that both industry and environmentalist advocates use in assessing and forecasting emissions and their effects.

The Significance of Data

Since much of what we talk about here is hard to quantify and controversial at the level of detail, it is important to consider what we really need to know. It is certainly necessary to have a clear picture, but we do not need every number to be rendered with great precision; we often only need to be able to say (albeit, with very high confidence) whether an effect is big or small and what its particular character might be. Since the technological and economic context that provides the setting for all future polluting activities is dynamic, we must accept a coarse assessment of aviation’s contribution to global warming and climate change, partly because our understanding of so many aspects is inevitably tentative. Many factors are rapidly evolving: the science of the character of emissions, the technologies that we might employ in reducing them, and the future extent of air travel activity in absolute terms and (perhaps even more importantly) in terms relative to the size of the global population and the total economy. But we must know with certainty whether aviation’s contribution is considered to be large or small, how it is likely to trend, and what is its nature.

Personal Shares of GHG Emissions: Flying is a Sin

In the summer of 2006, during the height of holiday travel from the United Kingdom (UK), the Bishop of London observed that a life characterized by profligate carbon emissions was not right, and that flying away in an airplane to enjoy a vacation was a particular sin (Barrow 2006). It would be understandable if the hearts of travelers and air travel workers dropped at that news: a single flight looms large in an individual’s GHG emissions profile and the world is wrestling with a serious climate matter.

According to 2010 data, the average Canadian or American (to use high-emissions developed-world examples) produced on the order of 20 to 22 tonnes of all GHG emissions as deemed equivalent to CO₂ per year. But UK 2010 per capita emissions were much lower, about 10 tonnes (Conference Board of Canada 2013). The same Daily Mail article that outlined the good Bishop’s chagrin also describes how a single flight can substantially raise a person’s GHG emissions: a family of four traveling from the UK to Florida and home again would be responsible for an additional 6.4 tonnes of earth-warming pollution—1.6 tonnes for each individual (Barrow 2006). Assuming this vacationing British family’s GHG emissions were in other respects average, that one additional flying vacation would raise its profile by approximately 16 percent. We can extrapolate the rather startling reality for those among us who travel frequently by air to distant places. It is probably part of the reason why the numbers for Americans and Canadians are so much higher.

There is no question that air travel can be a potentially very important part of an individual’s personal carbon footprint if they fly, especially if their GHG emissions are otherwise modest. So it is no surprise that aviation causes a particular fright in those parts of the developed world where significant initiatives have been undertaken to reduce overall emissions. Similarly unsurprising, policy-makers in the less-developed world, where per-person emissions are quite small due to lower levels of economic activity and attendant lower standard of living, can see air travel as an especially offensive extravagance, a costly luxury for wealthy people in wealthy nations. And yet, many in the developing world want greater access to air services for themselves. While emissions from air travel are low globally because of the relatively small numbers of people who undertake it, they would be huge in a world where our development goals for less-wealthy people and countries had been realized.

Ironically, air travel is an important facilitator for the kind of economic development that is often fervently sought, especially by the least advantaged among us. The extent to which aviation functions in world and state economies in an infrastructural, enabling, and wealth-producing role, and the extent to which access to air travel constitutes a social and political justice issue will be explored in later chapters. But it is important to note here that airplanes serve a role in society and in the economy, beyond delivering cash to airlines’ balance sheets.¹ The air industry makes claim to a disproportionately large contribution to economic activity, a claim that is sometimes overstated, according to critics, but generally valid. Nonetheless, the larger economic benefits of air travel should not be used as an excuse for inaction on the environmental front. If the general effort to reduce GHG emissions intensifies but aviation’s share is not contained, then other sectors will have to make larger reductions in order to achieve a continuing decrease in total emissions. Will it help the economy if aviation gets a free emissions pass while every other sector suffers inordinate pressure?

1 Some airline executives would argue that air travel has neverdelivered cash to airlines’ balance sheets.

Global Aviation Emissions

As we shift from looking at the degree to which a flight can affect an individual’s emissions to the question of the size of aviation’s contribution to the world’sglobal warming difficulty, it is encouraging that the airline industry has been able to make great strides in making flying more efficient and keeping its total contribution small. Nevertheless, as we develop the discussion, we will find two additional things: unless something is done, air travel will be an ever-growing part of the problem, both in absolute and relative terms; and that the state of current knowledge does not allow us to be entirely sure how big the problem actually is.

I have avoided depending upon any sole data set and this presentation should be read in that light; the sources quoted are those that I find to be credible and representative. This kind of qualification will appear more than once: It is probably unhelpful to argue over particular data when the point can often be more usefully understood in terms of a range of possibilities.

Aviation is a growing and different kind of polluter. By one estimate, aviation’s current rate of emissions of CO₂ constituted 2–3 percent of the anthropogenic (caused by human activity) total for 2005 (Owen, Lee and Ling 2010). But the same study also points out that the raw CO₂ number is only part of the picture; other exhaust substances plus the consequence of these substances entering the atmosphere at altitude represent a potentially larger total global warming effect than that of CO₂ alone. The sum of the various ways that aviation pollutes can roughly double its global warming effect, rendering it on the order of 4.9 percent of humanity’s current contribution. The other statistic of note in this study relates to the size of the aviation industry: recent annual growth in the sector has averaged around 5 percent. The research on the nature of the pollution that aviation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 The Size of the Problem
• 2 Aviation’s Energy Predicament: Reducing the Wingprint
• 3 Aviation’s Energy Predicament: No Fuel Like an Old Fuel
• 4 Jet Fuel: One of Alternative Energy’s Orphans
• 5 Policy: Background
• 6 Understanding Sustainability
• 7 What Do We Owe the Future (and How Much Shall We Pay)?
• 8 Closing the Circle
• 9 Measuring Sustainability
• 10 Sustainability Assessment and Certification: Who Should Do It?
• 11 Policy Development
• 12 The Machinery of Policy Development
• 13 Policy Strategy: Support
• 14 Discussion of Current Attitudes and Efforts
• 15 Conclusion: There is No Such Thing as ‘Business As Usual’
• Bibliography
• Index