Commercial air travel causes 2-3% of greenhouse gas emissions, so COVID is an environmental boon. But don’t open the Champagne yet, travel’s expected to be back where it was in three years. And it’s been growing rapidly and inexorably over the last fifty years, don’t expect it to change without some help.
It’s getting relatively better. Aircraft are significantly more efficient, and carbon emissions per passenger have fallen by over 50% since 1990. But half of four times as much does not equal shrinkage.
There are kerosene-free alternatives in the works. Airbus plans hydogen-powered models for 2035, Boeing is looking at fully-biofueled ones for 2030. Biofuels are a nice idea, and versions (blended with the nasty stuff) are already here: you grow stuff, process its oil, pump it into the tank. If you’re cutting down the Amazon to grow your stuff and driving your processing plant off hydrocarbons then the carbon sums don’t add up. You must control for total carbon cost. But assuming you do that then you can have 100% carbon-neutral jet fuel, except for the economic problem. It’s at least twice the price.
So here’s a thing, fifteen years ago solar and wind power were never ever going to be viable alternatives to petrochemicals. They were just too expensive. Then we started subsidising them, people started buying them, manufacturers saw a market and developed them, and the economies of R&D and scale took over. Now they’re both cheaper than gas, without the subsidies. Should we subsidise aircraft biofuels?
The issue isn’t about making one cheaper, it’s about making one cheaper than the other. The 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation prohibited taxing aircraft fuel. There was a war on, so some encouragement of business and people mixing afterward was understandable. It’s been updated a few times since then, with no change to the fuel duty prohibition (Article 24), most recently in 1997, 2000 and 2006. We’ve known about climate change since the ’80s.
How about this for an idea: reneging on international treaties is in vogue these days, tax the fuel. You could tie the tax to fossil carbon emissions. You could have a sliding scale with a negative cost for negative emissions, so if your production consumed more carbon than the fuel emitted you got paid.
Spoiler: That would never actually happen, but you could have a time-window on the zero-point so you’d pay airlines a bit to do the – technically modifying – good thing for a couple of years. Within the decade there’d be a viable industry producing all jet-fuel.
There may not be enough raw material (farmland and biological waste) to make all the fuel the airlines hope we need, but if so that just puts an economic cap on the number of passenger-airmiles that can be done. With tax we then have a knob to control that.
The airlines would be spitting blood, but they’re bankrupt anyway. There’s big changes coming in that business. Many will go to the wall whatever happens and the rest will take whatever they get.
…We could even try the traditional approach and update the Convention, but where’s the fun in that?
Regardless, air travel has become too cheap. There’s no harm in prices doubling. And if the masses have to appreciate rarer holidays in the sun, and that leads to a few percent less CO2, then that’s OK by me. Airlines will cry regardless, Michael O’Leary will bellow regardless (though I think he’ll make money whether we like it or not). And my children would have a slightly less awful future.