Someone posted this on Facebook a couple of days ago. Like
most of the quotes attributed to Michael O’Leary it may or may not have
actually come from his mouth. If it did there is no doubt in my mind that it
was said purely as part of his never-ending campaign to get free publicity for
his airline. Some years ago I met Mr O’Leary a number of times in a business
context and I am absolutely certain that he is way too smart to succumb to this
sort of category error. Weather and climate are not the same thing. There is
absolutely no contradiction between our inability to predict next week’s
weather and the very strong probability that average global temperatures will
continue to increase for many years to come based on the greenhouse gasses
already in the atmosphere.
So why would the CEO of one of the fastest-growing airlines
in history want to encourage doubt about the existence of human-made climate
change? Obviously because he wants to put off as long as possible the
inevitable day when the airline industry will be required to make its
contribution to slowing the damage and maybe even starting to reverse it.
The other extreme of this argument is represented by the protesters
who disrupted access to Heathrow the week before last. Their position is that aviation
is causing such enormous damage to the global climate that it should be stopped
in its tracks or at the very least have severe constraints placed on its
growth. Humans should revert to the lifestyles of a hundred years ago when most
people never moved more than a few miles from their birthplace unless some
calamity like a World War temporarily made them more mobile.
So where do I, as a scientifically-literate, left-leaning,
inveterate air traveller with several million air miles under my belt stand in
this argument? As always when we confront the big issues in life I think it’s
quite complicated. Answers need to be nuanced and sophisticated rather than
shouted from soap-boxes with the loudest voice winning.
Firstly, climate change is real. There is no serious doubt
about that and if you are having trouble accepting it you should be reading a
different blog to mine. Perhaps this one. On
current rates of growth in greenhouse gas emission the earth is on track to
increase its average temperature by four or five degrees Celsius. That doesn’t
sound like a lot but it will be enough to melt most of the ice in Greenland and
Antarctica, raise sea levels several metres and make large swathes of the
planet uninhabitable. World leaders are meeting right now in Paris to try to
agree ways to restrict the temperature rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees. This is still
a big rise and will cause substantial problems, especially for low-lying island
nations, but on the whole most of humanity will be able to adapt and get on
with life.
The main cause of climate change is the emission of gasses
into the atmosphere by human activity. Carbon dioxide is the one that gets most
of the attention but there are others including methane, nitrous oxide and
water vapour. This is not speculation. The physics has been well understood for
over a century. The impact has been known in scientific circles for over thirty
years. In 1977, during the second year of my physics degree, I wrote a paper
describing the impact of this “greenhouse effect” and the steps that would be
needed to counteract it. I said we should curtail the use of fossil fuels,
develop renewable energy technologies and bridge the gap by judicious use of
nuclear fission. In 2015 that’s still probably the best plan although thirty
years of inaction mean that it’s rather more urgent now than it might have
been.
Where does aviation fit in to this picture? Clearly the
biggest issue is that aircraft burn fossil fuels. Lots of them. In particular jet
engines burn a petroleum product called paraffin in the UK and kerosene in the
USA. When they do this they emit carbon dioxide which accumulates in the
atmosphere along with all the other greenhouse gasses. It’s real. There is no
doubt whatsoever that airline flights are contributing to climate change.
So should we severely curtail the amount of flying that we
do as a species as part of our efforts to maintain a habitable world? For many
the answer is an obvious yes but that would be to ignore the great benefits
that aviation can bring.
Aviation brings us together. It facilitates trade which
increases prosperity. It improves understanding between people from different
cultures and backgrounds. The huge growth in civil aviation of the last few
years has meant that a broader cross-section of people has been able to travel
and to get exposure to other places and experiences or just to get a
well-deserved holiday in the sun. It is not fanciful to say that aviation is
one of the most important factors that brings us together as a human family
rather than pushing us apart into a series of distrustful tribes. We still have
a long way to go in this respect but I firmly believe that the world is a
better place when its peoples are able to meet and understand each other.
So, we have a problem. Aviation is a good thing for the
reasons I have outlined but it is a bad thing because it contributes to climate
change. How do we square that circle?
It might be useful to look at some numbers. There are around
28,000 commercial airliners in service today and together they contribute
somewhere between 2.5% and 3.0% of all greenhouse gas emissions. That number is
growing and it may be that emissions high in the stratosphere are more harmful
than those nearer the ground. However aviation is a very long way indeed from
being the most significant contributor to the problem. There are around 1.2
Billion vehicles on the world’s roads and they contribute around 10% of the
greenhouse gasses. Livestock is responsible for about 18%, electrical power
generation 25% and housing (heating, lighting, cooking etc) 10%. Industrial and
commercial buildings generate about 15% of the global carbon footprint. (By the
way I do have reputable sources for all these numbers but I am not trying to
write a referenced scientific paper here so you must choose whether or not to
trust me). If we want to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas
generation the major impacts must come from sectors other than aviation. Not
only that but all of these other sectors have viable alternatives that will
enable reductions to be made in the short term providing the will is there. The
basic physics of aviation require the use of energy-dense hydrocarbons as fuel
– at least for the time being.
It looks as if the aviation fan sitting on my left shoulder
is winning out in this argument over the ecologist on the right. The benefits
of aviation are such that we should just overlook its admittedly small
contribution to climate change? Well no. Not really.
It is true that the big benefits of carbon reduction are not
to be found in clobbering commercial flight in the short term at least. But in
the longer run the world will need to reduce its emissions far more than most
of us currently realise. And in that longer run getting the contribution from
aviation down by a significant amount will be necessary. Even if aircraft emissions remain steady in real terms they will grow as a percentage when other sectors bring theirs down. Airlines and aircraft
makers should be working on this now.
For the time being the best thing that we can do is to fly
more people in bigger aircraft, improving the carbon economy per passenger. We
need to develop air traffic control technology such that aircraft can always
fly the least-fuel route and we need to deploy smart technology like electric
tugs so that aircraft can move around on the ground without burning kerosene.
And airlines need to continue replacing older aircraft with more modern fuel
efficient models.
In the slightly longer term we need to shift to hydrocarbons
that we manufacture using biology rather than extracting them from the ground.
First generation biofuels based on sugars have a mixed reputation not least
because they use agricultural land that is needed for food production. Future
biofuels will be made using algae or bacteria, probably genetically engineered,
in industrial processes that use solar radiation to produce the energy-dense
fuel that we need.
In the really long term we will be using more exotic
technologies like beamed energy to power us around the globe and maybe off it.
But that is a subject for another day.
For today we may look to Paris. The climate change
conference there is due to end this week. It will produce some kind of
agreement on how the nations of the world plan to reduce the impact of climate
change. It is unlikely that any treaty will have explicit provisions to affect
the airline industry but there is no doubt that there will be measures agreed
that will require it to look to its future practices. Perhaps there will be a
carbon tax that will increase the cost of flying. In the short term that will
be a setback for Michael O’Leary and his airline’s profitability but handled
effectively it will combine stick and carrots. Airlines that establish a path
to reducing their climate impact will benefit financially as well as enjoying the
warm glow that comes from simply doing the right thing. Some of Mr O’Leary’s
other ideas like cramming in twice as many passengers by making them stand up
might just bring him plaudits for reducing the carbon emissions per passenger
faster than anyone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment