Growing up with a father who was an Air Force pilot and a mother who needed regular trips from the USA to her family in Ireland, I spent a lot of my childhood in airplanes. Perhaps I chose the environmental profession to make up somewhat for those sins of my past, but I’m still having a hard time letting go entirely of flying even though I know I should.
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I look at my European colleagues with envy as they can travel most places in the relative comfort of a train while I find it difficult, living in Ireland, to travel entirely by land and sea.
I found out recently that Newstalk Presenter, Ivan Yates, doesn’t fly himself. Exploring my own issues around aviation and environment seemed like an appropriate topic for our first chat as part of our exciting new weekly ‘Down To Earth’ slot on ‘The Hard Shoulder’.
Listen to our ten-minute chat here or read it about in much more detail in my Verdant Yank blog this week below.
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Is flying really so bad?
Airplanes emit particulates and gases, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, black carbon, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, lead and water vapor while in flight, and as the popularity of air travel has increased, so too has the pollution. Even though there have been significant improvements in aircraft fuel efficiency, these improvements are eclipsed by the increase in air traffic volume. Since 1999, the number of people who fly globally has doubled and there are now 8.3 million people in the sky every single day!
Back in 1999, the contribution of civil aircraft-in-flight to global CO2 emissions was estimated to be around 2%. Now it is closer to 3.5% and IPCC projections indicate aviation will contribute 5-15% of global human CO2 emissions by 2050 if action is not taken to reduce them. More than 82% of the world’s population has yet to ever set foot on an airplane and as the global middle class grows, the aviation sector is expected to grow in tandem with the number of commercial airplanes set to double in the next twenty years.
Those numbers may not sound alarming, but the impact of air travel on a personal carbon footprint can be. Per passenger, a typical economy-class Dublin to New York round trip flight produces over 1.5 tonnes of CO2, 15% of the average Irish person’s carbon footprint of 12.8 tonnes, for just one trip. Figures released by Aer Lingus last March showed that Irish people fly on average almost seven times a year, so those flights can add up to a large carbon footprint for some people! And if you fly premium class over economy your impact is even worse because of the extra space you take up, with the carbon footprints of business class and first class three-times and nine-times higher than economy class, respectively.
Not surprisingly, London is the most popular destination for flights leaving Ireland, costing us 0.15 tonnes of CO2 round trip. If we took the ferry and drove on our own instead, it we would emit double the CO2 because one person traveling in a 4-5 passenger car is really inefficient, but if we took the ferry and train to London, we’d expend 73% less CO2 than flying.
So what can we do about it?
Personally, I don’t believe technology is going to get us out of this mess we call climate change, but in an effort to be objective and recognize that technology has some positive role in reducing emissions, here’s where the technological advancements in aviation may help reduce emissions:
Tomorrow's Tech
- Fly lower and choose smaller plans – At the high altitudes (8-13km) flown by large jet airliners, emissions of nitrogen oxides are particularly effective in forming ozone and these have a greater global warming effect. Emissions from jet flights are substantially higher than turboprop flights– probably in part because of their lower cruising speeds and altitudes compared to jet airliners
- The Future is Electric - Adding an electric drive to the airplane's nose wheel may improve fuel efficiency during ground handling or integrating an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) which would act as a catapult for take-off on the airstrips. Some companies such as Airbus are currently researching this possibility because as a lot of fuel is used during take-off in comparison to cruising.
- Biofuels – Some companies are researching biofuel technology for use in jet aircraft and some aircraft engines can already run on vegetable oil or ethanol. since 2008, there have been a number of jet airline test flights conducted using biofuels but this has global environmental and social risks with respect to deforestation and converting farmland used for food production for production of biofuels for the aviation industry instead.
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A Hyperloop could get from Dublin to London in 36 minutes or Dublin to Cork in 20 minutes. The Hyperloop wars have already begun and one company aims to deliver a fully operational Hyperloop system in the next three years.
Policy Drivers
Talking tech is fun, but climate change is such a wicked problem that it requires international and national policies to drive emissions down. The EU has had an Emissions Trading Scheme since 2012 which requires flights within the EEA to monitor, report and verify their emissions and trade carbon credits to allow a certain level of emissions from their flights annually. The system has contributed to reducing the carbon footprint of the aviation sector by more than 17 million tonnes per year to date (approximately 8% of EU aviation emissions), but some argue the price of carbon credits is still lower than it should be.
In 2016, the United Nations’ ratified an agreement to control global warming emissions from international airline flights and established airlines’ carbon emissions in the year 2020 as the upper limit of what carriers are allowed to discharge in the future. Airlines will be involved in an offsetting scheme whereby forest areas and carbon-reducing activities will be funded, costing about 2% of the industry’s annual revenues. The aim is to offset 80% of the emissions above 2020 levels through a voluntary system.
Personally, I wouldn’t hold your breath for a global aviation emissions trading and offsetting system. Trading emissions in aviation is complicated by its transient nature: If an airplane is made in country 1, owned by country 2, leased to country 3, takes off from country 4, flies over countries 5, 6, and 7, and lands in country 8, who is responsible for its emissions? Add a further complication of tree-planting to try and offset those emissions and the math gets even more complicated and far less likely to comply with the science to effectively reduce emissions.
There are other smaller policy decisions that could make a difference. The most novel of these is to end frequent flyer programmes. I you think about their very nature, frequent flyer programmes are designed to encourage more flying. Typically, employees get to use the miles they accumulate from business trips for personal use. This can amount to thousands of euros worth of free travel, encouraging families to fly more for personal holidays to avail of this benefit. Norway is one such country that has banned frequent flyer programmes due to competition laws, but large corporations who want to reduce their carbon footprints and be more sustainable could consider this as one of many ways to address the increasing impact of business flying.
Undoubtedly, the low cost of air travel is increasing its popularity and subsequent emissions. It’s only marginally more expensive to fly from Dublin to Cork than take the train, despite emission being 70% higher. We don’t incorporate the true environmental cost of flying into our ticket prices. In fact, aviation is highly subsidised so ticket prices can be kept artificially low out of the wallets of tax payers. There should be a tax or levy attached to ticket prices based on how much carbon is emitted from the flight. This would make rail travel more competitive, something we badly need as rail services like night trains struggle to survive in Europe.
I was surprised to discover there is already a levy attached to airline tickets in eight countries, including the United States, to fund health initiatives in the developing world, drugs for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. The UNITAID solidarity levy is a supplementary charge ranges from US$1 for economy class to in excess of $30 for first class, depending on the price of the ticket. If eight countries have been able to attach that levy to tickets for the past 12 years and raise over EUR 2.5 billion without most of us ever knowing, it seems like it would be quite easy to do something similar to address their greenhouse gas emissions.
Ironically, Ireland could lead on solving the emissions problem from aviation. Over 40% of aircraft are now leased, not owned, by airlines and Ireland retains over 20% of global aircraft leasing operators, thanks to some vision from Tony Ryan of Ryan Air in the 1990s and some cushy tax breaks enacted by our Government to encourage this industry in Ireland. Fourteen of the top 15 global lessors have operations in Ireland, including the four big Chinese state-owned banks. If aviation wanted to get serious about emissions reductions, they could build it in to their leasing models and the Irish aviation leasing sector could drive this change.
Getting Personal
Unlike some of my colleagues, I try to steer away from conversations about “what we can do at home” to solve climate change. I know this is what the media love to talk about, but I find that topic a bit fluffy and inconsequential, putting the onus once again on the lowly citizen instead of the Government. Behavioral change is hard to enact and takes a long time to have any impact, and my analysis (to be posted in a subsequent blog) has shown me that even if I make radical changes in my personal life, I still don’t get my carbon footprint anywhere near what it should be until my Government decarbonizes our energy system. However, flying is one place where personal behavior can make a big dent. A round trip flight from Dublin to New York can easily consume as many emissions has heating an average European home for one whole year, so if you really want to know what you can do at home to stop climate change, cutting out the flights is definitely on the list.
And it’s going to get bumpier anyway! - A report published in the science journal Nature Climate Change forecasts that increasing CO2 levels will result in a significant increase in in-flight turbulence experienced by transatlantic airline flights by the middle of the 21st century. Even today, runways at places like Regan National Airport in Washington D.C. have occasionally been closed because they’ve gotten so hot they’ve actually melted a bit! With air travel getting more uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, land and sea-based travel is looking more appealing.
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Several of my colleagues now refuse to fly and I am always fascinated by their stories of “slow travel”. Climate scientist, Keven Anderson, once told me how much great work he got done on a 3-week train journey from the UK to China and back and how so many Chinese people turned out to see this “strange English man who had travelled by land to their country”.
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I still fly for work sometimes because I can’t justify the extra days away from my daughter to take the slow route, but increasingly, I’m avoiding flying for personal reasons – much preferring to holiday on my beloved Inishbofin island as much as possible than anywhere else in the world! It’s a life goal of mine to take a boat to the USA instead of fly there for family visits, but I’ll have to find an effective solution to my propensity for sea sickness first!
It’s hard for those of us in Ireland to avoid flying altogether, but there are creative ways to reduce how much flying we do or off-set the emissions from that flying through a charitable donation to an organization working on climate action. My favourite creative solution comes from my friend Eoin who wanted to go on a climate communication trip to Canada but felt guilty about the emissions, so he went vegan for 6 months beforehand to offset. That’s the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that makes personal change interesting.
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To find out how much your flying impacts climate change and how it compares to other transport options visit www.carbonfootprint.com.
And as always, keep fighting the good fight! -Cara |
P.S. My new #DownToEarth slot with Ivan Yates on Newstalk FM airs Wednesday's approximately 18:40 GMT on 106-108fm in Ireland or online at newstalk.com. You can listen back on podcast and read complementary blogs on The Verdant Yank each week. Coming up... "Good-bye, Gasoline Blues". I'm celebrating our recently Dail victory to ban oil and gas exploration in Irish waters!
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