TECH TALK
HAS AVIATION DONE ENOUGH REGARDING CLIMATE CHANGE?
BY JOHN PAWLICKI | OPM RESEARCH
LET’S START WITH ADDRESSING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM; THIS IS NOT AN ARTICLE THAT DEBATES CLIMATE CHANGE. THE SIMPLE FACT IS THAT AVIATION IS ONE OF THE INDUSTRIES WHICH AFFECTS THE CLIMATE, SO THE WORLD NEEDS TO IDENTIFY METHODS BY WHICH TO MINIMIZE EMISSIONS FROM AIRCRAFT AND ASSOCIATED GROUND OPERATIONS. AVIATION AS AN INDUSTRY NEEDS TO FIND WAYS TO REDUCE EMISSIONS IN THE SHORT- TERM, AS WELL AS MOVE FORWARD WITH MORE SIGNIFICANT SOLUTIONS OVER THE LONG TERM.
THE GLOBAL ARGUMENT TO REDUCE AVIATION EMISSIONS
In the past decade, the aviation industry has begun
addressing concerns regarding the need to reduce CO2 emissions from the operation of aircraft and airport vehicles in various ways. This is due not only to emissions from aviation today, but also since the amount of passengers is expected to double over the next 20 years — driving this percentage even higher. With this projected rise in global air travel, even the UN-chartered industry group International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) predicts that aviation emissions will grow by approximately 300% by 2050. One industry-led group estimates that in 2018, ~4.4 billion passengers were carried by the world’s airlines, and such flights produced 895M tons of CO2 in 2018. In comparison, humans produced over 42B tons of CO2 on a global basis from all activities. Due to all of this, aviation is being chided by not only
environmental activists, but also by many governments and by the flying public. While some of the projections on the amount of emissions from aircraft do vary slightly, they are reasonably close to another. Figure 1 has two diagrams that illustrate how the US government identifies emissions from the Transportation sector in general, with aviation being broken out as being behind trucks and motor vehicles as a group in regards to Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG). Figure 2 comes from the NBAA (National Business
Aviation Association), which used data from GAMA (General Aviation Manufacturers Association), and it shows a broader range of information along with the overall footprint of the transportation sector while breaking out aviation and the general aviation subsector even further.
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DOMmagazine.com | dec 2019 jan 2020
Figure 1: US Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector (Source:
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions)
The two sets of charts differ quite a bit, and the source data which these charts were generated from vary to some degree, but this demonstrates how data and statistics can be presented differently to illustrate a particular point. But whoever you choose to listen to in regards to this argument, aviation plays a significant part in the global emissions challenge.
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