"Does Flying Harm the Planet?"

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Does Flying Harm the Planet?
By BRYAN WALSH 
Time Magazine 


Given the rage that air travel can provoke in even the most tranquil among
us these days, it may be surprising that riot police aren't a more regular
feature at airports. But Sunday's pitched battle between roughly 500
environmental activists and a phalanx of baton-wielding police at London's
Heathrow airport wasn't about long lines, delays, lost luggage or missed
connections. Instead, the protesters - who had demonstrated outside Heathrow
all of last week - were trying to draw travelers' attention to the impact on
climate change of the carbon gases emitted by the aircraft in which they
fly. A placard from one activist at Heathrow expressed it thus: "You Fly,
They Die."
 
Airplanes operate on petroleum fuel, which means they release large amounts
of carbon dioxide when they fly. Commercial air travel is currently
responsible for a relatively tiny part of the global carbon footprint - just
3.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. But the unique chemistry of high-altitude jet
emissions may produce an additional warming effect, while the explosive
growth in air travel makes it one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon
gases in the atmosphere. And unlike energy or automobiles, where carbon-free
or lower-carbon alternatives already exist, even if they have yet to be
widely adopted, there is no low-carbon way to fly, and there likely won't be
for decades. 

"It's not so much where we are now, but where we'll be in 30 years time,"
says Peter Lockley, head of policy development at the Aviation Environment
Federation in London. "We need to bring global carbon emissions down
rapidly, but this sector is just going to grow."

And grow. The Airports Council International estimates that the number of
airline tickets sold per year will double to more than 9 billion by 2025.
Much of the growth will come in rapidly developing Asia, where passenger
numbers are increasing by 10-15% annually. The already badly overburdened
Heathrow - the busiest airport in Europe - is pushing to open up a third
runway by 2020, a move that touched off last week's protests. 

Airplane manufacturers and airlines are working on ways to cut carbon
emissions by raising fuel efficiency - building lighter and more aerodynamic
planes, towing jets on the ground, and improving engine capacity. Designers
are looking at running planes on biofuel, and Virgin Atlantic head Richard
Branson has promised to build a biofuelled jet by next year. But industry
experts believe such incremental changes could improve efficiency by 1% or
2% a year at most, while passenger miles are set to grow at 5% to 6%
annually. "We're left with a sustainability gap," says Roger Gardner, chief
executive of OMEGA, a British study group looking at aviation and the
environment.

Even as carbon emissions from air travel grow rapidly, scientists are
investigating claims that they may double the warming effect because of the
altitude at which they're emitted. As jets soar they leave behind contrails,
vapor threads of condensation that can persist for hours, especially in
colder areas, and behave like high-altitude cirrus clouds. Those clouds seem
to have a net warming effect, trapping heat in the atmosphere. Planes also
create ozone, a greenhouse gas that has a stronger warming effect at high
altitudes than low. The science is still being nailed down, but the side
effects of high-altitude emissions could double air travel's contributions
to global warming, says Dan Lashof, science director for the Natural
Resource Defense Council's Climate Center.

Though there's no technological silver bullet, there are policy options
available to manage air travel emissions such as carbon cap and trade
schemes. But those won't be simple: Air travel was left out of the Kyoto
Protocol on curbing emissions in part due to the complexity of assigning
national responsibility for gases spewed by international flights. Just
getting governments to share air space more freely, which would allow planes
to fly more direct routes and cut fuel consumption, has proven to be an
ongoing headache.

So what's the solution? Perhaps that there is no solution, or at least no
simple one - aside from just flying less, as the Heathrow activists
demanded. And there's little sign of that happening, as air passenger
numbers rose 6.3% globally through the first half of 2007. So, expect
similar protests in the future. The activists at Heathrow threw out a moral
challenge to those well-off on a global scale (anyone who can afford a
JetBlue ticket) to stop flying in order to save the poor from the effects of
climate change. It's not quite that simple, but until technology and policy
catch up - which still seems a long way off - carbon emissions will only
slow if consumers choose to use less energy, live more modestly, and fly
less. In other words, stay at home to save the world.

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