IMAGES: GETTY
IN NUMBERS Decarbonisation 10 billion The projected number of
global aviation passengers per year by 2050
13-15%
The current proportion of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions estimated to come from aviation
300%
The projected year-on-year increase in sustainable aviation
Balancing act The elephant in the room — one we all got a glimpse of during the pandemic — is, of course, stopping flying altogether. But this will never happen in the UK. Aviation and its ancillary sectors are simply too valuable, contributing £22bn to GDP and supporting (directly or indirectly) almost a million jobs, according to Sustainable Aviation, a group that represents the UK’s airlines, airports and aerospace manufacturers. But if going cold turkey isn’t
feasible, let’s at least see some moderation, says Dr Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK. “It’s completely ridiculous that the concept of demand constraint doesn’t seem to be even a feature of discussion,” he says. “The aviation industry always wants continued expansion; and they always get it.” He said he understands that flying is “entrenched”, particularly for tourism, but wants to see a frequent flyer levy that incrementally penalises the 15% of people in the UK who take 70% of flights. The government argues that
the only way to decarbonise is to keep flying — a Faustian pact to avert an Icarian calamity. At
the Airlines 2023 Conference in London last November, DfT aviation director David Silk reiterated the case for expansion. “It’s emphatically the case that we need growth,” he said. “We want to enable people to fly to generate the revenue to be able to decarbonise. If we don’t invest, we risk having an old, rusting infrastructure that can’t decarbonise.” While new technologies come
on stream, offsetting is going to be crucial: the Sustainable Aviation group believes the contribution needs to be as much as a third of the proposed net carbon reduction by 2050. Jonathon Counsell, group head of sustainability at IAG, calls offsetting a “transitional measure” and stressed that schemes in the often maligned sector have to be “high-quality, independently verified and end in actual additional carbon removal”. For all the UK’s aspirations
around decarbonisation, a siloed approach to something as manifestly transnational as aviation’s carbon emissions would seem to make about as much sense as those little curtains you used to get around onboard smoking sections. Professor David Lee, a
professor of atmospheric science at Manchester Metropolitan University, agrees: “It’s great that the UK has its own target and wants to push that,” he says. “But you have to realise it’s a global sector and global industry and it takes [multiple] governments to push this along.” While the chasm between the
situation now and the blue-skied idyll envisaged a mere 26 years from now may seem unbridgeable, Pourkashanian prefers to look on the bright side. “If in the case of SAF we’re only currently producing 0.2%, and you see how much is going to be needed to replace [traditional fossil] jet fuel, then you can see the opportunity.” Investors, he says, are flooding into the market. A green gold rush? “It’s already happening.” Lee accepts that flights such
as #Virgin100 are partly PR exercises but doesn’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. “As a result, we’re talking about this issue,” he says. “The situation [aviation emissions] is a huge problem. It’s a nightmare. None of which means you should throw your hands up in the air and say ‘it’s too hard’.”
fuel (SAF) production in 2024 — to 1.875 billion litres
490,000
Commercial flights to date that have operated with some level of SAF
90%
Reduction in carbon emissions using Power to Liquid (PtL)
3,800mph
The top speed Swiss start-up Destinus is planning for its
long-range, hydrogen-powered passenger jets
20%
Estimated peak improvement in fuel efficiency of each new generation of aircraft in recent decades
1.5C
The target temperature, above pre-industrialised levels, for global warming, agreed by 195 nations in the UN's 2015 Paris Agreement
MARCH 2024 159
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