Airline Emissions ‘Far Higher Than Previous Estimates’
The aviation industry’s failure to curb its soaring carbon emissions could lead to the “worst case scenario” for climate change, as envisaged by the United Nations.
An unpublished study by the world’s leading experts has revealed that airlines are pumping 20 per cent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than estimates suggest, with total emissions set to reach between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion tonnes annually by 2025.
The report, by four government-funded research bodies, is one of the most authoritative estimates of the growth of pollutants produced by the industry. It was presented to a conference co-organised by the United States’ Federal Aviation Authority but not given a wider audience.
Combining data produced by the leading emissions-modelling laboratories in the US, Britain and France, the study found that the number of people seriously affected by aircraft noise will rise from 24 million in 2000 to 30.3 million by 2025, despite the introduction of quieter jets, and that the amount of nitrogen oxides around airports, produced by aircraft engines, will rise from 2.5 million tonnes in 2000 to 6.1 million tonnes in 2025.
Jeff Gazzard, a spokesman for the Aviation Environment Federation, the group that uncovered the report, said: “Growth of CO2 emissions on this scale will comfortably outstrip any gains made by improved technology and ensure aviation is an even larger contributor to global warming by 2025 than previously thought. Governments must take action to put a cap on air transport’s unrestrained growth.”
The report, Trends in Global Noise and Emissions From Commercial Aviation for 2000 through 2025, was presented last year to the USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Seminar in Barcelona but withheld from wider publication.
Its authors at the US Department of Transport, the European air traffic management body, Eurocontrol, Manchester Metropolitan University and the technology company QinetiQ predict that CO2 will rise from its current level of 670 million tonnes to up to 1.48 billion tonnes by 2025. This exceeds the previous estimate, made in 2004, of 1.03 billion tonnes by 2025. The growth in aviation CO2 means that the highest forecast for aviation emissions produced by the International Panel on Climate Change will be met or exceeded.
The aviation industry, which is exempt from the Kyoto protocol on reducing greenhouse gases, claims the introduction of new technology over the next 25 years means that the contribution of flying to global CO2 emissions will rise from 2 per cent of the total to 5 per cent by 2050. Critics claim the true figure will be much higher because it does not include the CO2 reductions being made elsewhere.
The International Air Transport Association, which represents 240 airlines, said it was working towards producing binding targets to reduce CO2 emissions. “With fuel costs doubling in the last year, airlines already have an incentive to work towards greater efficiency,” a spokesman said. “There has been a 70 per cent improvement in fuel efficiency in the last four decades. Aviation is a benchmark of environmental responsibility for others to follow.”
© 2008 The Independent
Reducing the number of flights that are less than 400 miles long by constructing high speed rail in the more heavily travelled North American transportation corridors would have been a good move toward solving this problem.
Unfortunately, the aviation industry is part of the military industrial media complex and its forte is lobbying Congress to assure that it gets its way. The aviation industry has successfully lobbied Congress to not adopt high speed rail standards. Without government sanctioned standards, the financial community will not finance high-speed rail.
Remember when 9/11 happened and the FAA and the US military grounded all flights?
And how air quality immediately improved continent wide?
It was an unintended experiment, but one that proves just how much CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere. And why we should act rapidly to curtail most if not all of our emissions.
Having flown quite a bit in the past - or maybe just a normal amount for a childless middle-class north american - and mostly on pleasure trips, last year I made a kind of vow to myself, and also ‘publicly’ (I occasionally give environmetal talks) that “I’ve taken my last flight.”
Saying so, especially in a public setting, felt odd at first, and vaguely unsettling, but is now just ‘how it is’. I’ll never get on a plane again. I have no reason to fly and have lost all desire.
I don’t say this smuggly or boastfully - I used to love to travel - but can’t do it with any sense of integrity any more.
I realize that this is a decision ‘of priviledge’ and makes no difference in the scheme of things. In any case, I’ve grounded myself, now and for always.
Notice that military impacts weren’t addressed in this report. How much does the military contribute to air quality degredation from it’s activities? Bombing sovereign countries rather than using diplomacy to solve conflicts has become acceptable foriegn policy.
What incredible arrogance humans have developed. The general public believes it’s their god given right to fly to France for brunch on Saturday. Never once do the privledged beautiful people look at the impacts of thier actions. It’s taken for granted that because they have the resources to travel that’s the cool thing to do. Ninety percent of air travel is nothing more than entertainment on demand sold by an extremely subsidized travel industry.
Not only are there incredible impacts to air quality as a result of air travel, impacts to health and agriculture are huge also.
andersdl:
Absolutely spot-on. Though I wouldn’t limit that to 400 miles and less. High speed, Zero-emission maglev rail systems are possible to institute across the entire continent(s).
Barring transcontinental travel, which needs massive re-evaluation as well, this current system is farcical.
As George Monbiot said (I paraphrase and dramatize), “love miles will kill the planet.”
http://cei.org/pdf/5331.pdf
I find this to be interesting.
Note report posted on BBC news that oil should go from $120 to $200 in the next six months. Effect on travel? Probably none but at what price level will it simply just not be profitable to run an airline? Oil at $300? Would you pay a 50% surcharge for fuel for a ticket? Double current price?
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Also, about Sept 2001. The climate scientists measured a 1 degree average temperature rise during those 3 days in the continental US without the blocking of the soot from planes. When the flights do begin to taper off, watch out for faster climate change. Besides the air pollution from planes, another thing holding back massive change now is the constant building of coal-fired plants. Eventually, like that disowned preacher said, what goes up into the air comes back, the climate chickens will come home to roast.
True survival ability points to having back up means of transportation which should be of interest to our Congress!
As someone who grew up in the city and not driving, I came to the suburbs and driving kicking and screaming. I was right! The waste and stupidity of life and petroleum in the suburbs has been extravagant and arrogant in my 30 plus years of watching it here. A way of life based on waste.
CO2-’emissions’ are a meaningless ‘threat’ (they are, in-fact, good for plant-life and for our Biosphere, and CO2 helps in cooling the planet — not ‘warming it’ at-all).
However, the OTHER crap that spews-forth from aviation-nonsense is APPALLING and completely-unnecessary, and is ‘up-there’ where it can do the “utmost harm”.
while I am occasionally forced to travel by plane on my job, for pleasure travel in the US I use Amtrak whenever possible. The leisurely 2 1/2 day ride on a superliner sleeper from Chicago to Seattle, Portland, or down the California coast is relaxing and scenic. (the high-end compartments even have their own bathrooms and showers - low-end, you use a shower downstairs) No, it usually doesn’t run on time, but remmeber, you are on vacation. Open another bottle of wine with your lover and enjoy the scenery.
But certainly the technology exists for trains to go from New York to Los Angeles in 24 hours, counting station stops in cities along the way, and be on time. For some reason, I really can’t see how busines poeple not being able to get to the west coast in 6 hours is going to kill the economy.
And conscience, I learned how utterly and quite deliberately wasteful suburbia is coming from the other direction. I grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, and much later moved to a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where walking and public transit worked just fine. What an epiphany! It is even quieter than most suburban areas. If suburbanites would only realize what a ball-and-chain their cars, and th insane sprawl that makes them necessary, are.
I find it interesting that Airbus and Boeing, et al., design bigger and bigger planes, which use more and more fuel. A lot of those planes fly almost deadhead. People can’t afford to fly and half of us are on “no-fly” lists anyway.
Smaller, more economical, aircraft flying full would make more sense to me, but what do I know?
As to ground transport, we had rail right-of-ways all over the nation, most of which have been abandoned and sold to property developers and strip mall merchants. To come up with a decent transportation system now, we would have to buy right-of-ways for a hundred times the value of what we abandoned.
Just follow the money. It won’t help, but at least you’ll see where it goes.
Aviation is a benchmark of environmental responsibility for others to follow.”
You can earn bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees from prestigious ivy-league universities on the art of lying to manipulate mass behavior to drive increased consumption of expensive commodities with huge hidden costs. You will be paid very well to formulate lies such as above by the International Air Transport Association to help drive economic growth at all cost, the grand-daddy of all profit agendas, and important only to hierarchy and empire.
If you want to serve the society instead of the hierarchy you can discredit the IATA with facts such as rail transport having ten times the fuel economy as air transport for the same speed (see wikipedia). In Europe, rail transport has mostly replaced air transport for shorter links. The US promotes only the most wasteful modes (air, road roughly equal) for economic growth to fuel the misbegotten empire. Air freight volume is increasing 7% per year while general air volume is increasing 3 to 5% per year according to sciencedaily.com. The idea is to fuel mass addiction to instant gratification, and ultimate slavery to empire.
Most flight is in the high troposphere and low stratosphere where the water vapor in the aircraft contrails condenses and freezes adding to and dispersing into cirrus clouds. Both the water vapor and the CO2 from aircraft remain in the atmosphere much longer than emissions from ground sources due to the high altitude. Cirrus clouds amplify manmade global warming, according to NASA. The IATA won’t mention the water vapor until more studies are performed as global warming increases exponentially past all predictions.
Urgent action needed to support effort to fix the Highway Trust Fund without adverse impact to Public Transportation!
May 5, 2008
http://www.apta.com/government_affairs/washrep/2008may05.cfm
USAn, at first it seems we should get rid of suburbia but another option is to allow suburbia to remain and do a great demographic shift. First we shrink industrial agriculture down so it can be drowned in a bathtub. Then we shift most agriculture production to suburban yards. Also, the typically oversize suburban dwellings are perfect for housing the cottage industries and craftsman workshops. So suburbia becomes the home of the gardener/craftsman class. Ideally this would be a majority of the population.
byronw, there are two problems with Americans paying high fuel prices - first they are enslaved to destructive trade, and second the huge windfall profits are invested to escalate the enslavement and destruction. The destruction escalates as the fossil fuels become more scarce and lower quality, and the greedy become more greedy. So we have extra reasons to limit consumption of fossil fuels.
Peace Czar- And exactly how do you intend to energize the mag-lev ‘zero emission’ railway? Perhaps using the VERY alternative energy ‘Zero Point Energy’ Generator, long theorized. but never even close to being experimentally realized?
The Mag-lev train may be ‘zero emission’, but the power plant burning coal or natural gas to power it isn’t. And even if you are using hydro-electric dams, there is still petroleum being burned to construct and service them, not to mention manufacturing the thousands of miles of transmission cables for all three common generator stations.
With aircraft it is not necessarily the CO that is the problem; there are many other dynamics with a much greater forcing rate than CO (e.g., contrails, under-reported particulate and emissions, direct deposits of never studied chemicals since they are not naturally occurring, etc.).
Thus, it is not be necessarily carbon alone that causes climate change and I will give you an important example:
Aircraft are the only proven cause of temperature change (climatic, regional, diurnal). What is significant is that it was proven by the actual removal of the source from the equation and the effects are immediate and dramatic (Travis, 2002).
When all planes (except 6 military) were grounded for 3-4 days after 9-11, the temperature over North America changed by almost 2 degrees C (huge). Basically, the temperature reverted back to the way it was pre-1950s, (before the jet age)!
There is a lot of dynamics going on with aircraft that could contribute or be the actual determining factor.
The plan now, is to massively increase flights artificially (dating back to the deregulation promise) in the next few years, starting with the 2008 economic globalization treaties.
Obviously, with the above mentioned, the results could be very serious, perhaps in a very few years.
We am being advised by top scientists and climatologists that are very
concerned that the Atlantic Belt could be shut off very soon as a result
of what we have been stating, (keep in mind that we have a very accurate track record and were at least partially responsible for getting the IPCC to include aviation into its studies), perhaps as early as 2010-2013 and a catastrophe (e.g., Ice Age or warming) could occur shortly thereafter, if the flights are allowed to go forth.
If it isn’t already happening and too late.
I am very concerned!
The “market” is actually having quite an impact. High fuel prices are causing mergers and service reductions, and discount airlines are dropping like flies. Alitalia has been a propped up basket case for years and will probably die soon. Boeing’s new dreamliner promises better mileage, and Southwest has revamped all its schedules so it can fly slower to save fuel.
The British government has taken a lot of criticism, and there have been protests, for the Heathrow airport expansion. Its hypocrisy to sign the Kyoto agreement and then expand one of the world’s largest airports.
I know things nuclear are not very popular with CDers, but that could be the answer. Nuclear power could electrify the rails without GHG emissions. (It already does, partially.) Nuclear powered aircrft carriers are probably the fastest large ships ever built, and nuclear subs are incredibly fast. We could return to the steamship era, but with much faster and cleaner ships.
Whatever we do, something has to give. Air travel does create huge amounts of CO2. The emissions need to be capped and then reduced, even if it means rationing.
A thought. Do we really need overnight deliveries? FedEx, UPS and DHL consume huge amounts of jet fuel.
Bbr-001- And you extract the Uranium with…what?
BTW, I agree with you that we do not need overnight anything. A trip across North America from New York to San francisco could be anywhere from 4-6 weeks by stagecoach, 1-2 weeks by train, or up to 4 months by ship around the Horn.
There is a whole social movement devoted to slowing life down. books have been written on it (’In Praise of Slow’ is one).
Maybe it is more than time to derail modern society…
What is driving the massive and unprecedented growth of aviation are 4 factors; they are a result of the 1978 airline deregulation promise.
1) 2008 economic globalization treaties
2) jet taxi service to accommodate for the treaty traffic jamming up the US major airports; the expansion of about 6,500 US airports (see” FAA OEP below).
3) cheap composite business jets (starting at $800K US); also to somewhat relieve the majors.
4) cheap personal jets that takeoff, land and fly themselves and pop a parachute when they get in trouble. The first one, made in China, is expected to be certified this summer.
The plan is similar globally…
As a result, the plan is to build hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand of new airports in the US to handle the massive increase (FAA Operational Evolution Plan).
Fuel (oil) is a temporary setback; however, there is no environmentally friendly fuel in-the-pipe that will accommodate the three major issues: noise, toxic, climate. Even if we had this magic fuel today, it would be at least 3 decades before enough of the world fleet would be equipped with the technology.
The players behind economic globalization (Crowns, Daleys, Condit [Boeing Aircraft] are going ahead as planned.
As I stated before, I am very concerned…
It won’t be too difficult for a lot of folks to give up flying (as “Paddy” suggests)- it’s a total DRAG to deal with the airports nowadays! Never mind the new restrictions- how about the way they treat people? So many people have stories about the rude airport personnel- and how about the having to walk without shoes over a trail walked by millions of other (perhaps really nasty)feet? Ew. A super-fungus awaits us.
It kind of stands to reason that you can not burn billions of tons of fuel up there and not cause some damage. Lots of people look at air travel as some right of freedom. Businesses send people out there as if shot from cannons.
We have to just STOP all unnecessary air travel period. With a little advanced planning a lot of air freight can get to its destination by other more efficient and less damaging means.
Modern society sort of goes off on these binges of madness now and then as if Fed Ex is the only way to ship because it positively absolutely has to be there over night. Probably because some one screwed up and did not plan ahead.
The aviation industry is a dead man walking. Anybody in it should find some way to bail and cash out their pensions while it’s still possible. A reduced pension is better than the zero pension you will recieve when the whole business goes bankrupt.
Sure there will be token service between the major cities but it will be like taking the Concorde. You could take your own plane but it’s a chance to mingle with the quality.
Anybody who thinks air travel can pencil out if oil hits $200 a barrel is nuts. The collapse has started already and will accelerate. Count on it.
pangolin May 7th, 2008 11:39 pm
>The aviation industry is a dead man walking.
>
Yes, in its present form.
However, the present plan is to develop alternatives for other modes (i.e., autos) by 2010 to allow oil for aviation growth.
You can run aircraft on alternatives, a proven source is ethanol; however, there are temperature factors. One of my members, Baylor University School of Aviation and Air Sciences, has even run them on chocolate waste (If anyone could believe that any chocolate is waste :>) ).
The next major jet fuel is coal; that has serious implications for climate, health, etc. But the DOE & DOF is going ahead with military aircraft.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040330090947.htm
The most promising technology that I have seen is light propulsion. Some years ago, I did see the original tests and they were very interesting; however, we will be long dead before that technology advances. Unlike flying aircraft with alternatives such as hydrogen, it has no known harmful effects.
I have been studying, advising about this industry since the late 1980s and have watched them overcome every obstacle (generally from the other side of the fence) and am amazed just how versatile and important to governments it is.
Knowing what drives the industry, economy, etc. and dealing with the governments from the United Nations on down, I just do not see the demise of the industry, just change.
…With that said, that is if the industry does not destroy our earth the way we know it, first!
Why is railroad travel often more expensive than taking a plane, car or bus for moderate distances? Aren’t railroads intrinsically more efficient? Does anyone know?
Adviser- Ethanol. Right. Some scientists who were concerned about that conducted a study to determine how much arable land would be needed to grow the high sugar plants to service ONE airlines needs.
The answer?
All of it. Everywhere. Growing NOTHING but that one crop. No wheat. no roses. No carrots. No grass. No tress. ANYWHERE!
So ‘bang’ goes that little pipe dream…
Aren’t railroads intrinsically more efficient? Does anyone know?
Railroads are intrinsically far more efficient, although those heavy superliner cars and conventional diesel-electric locomotives Amtrak uses except on the E. coast, probably aren’t paragons of efficiency.
One would think that maintenence of railroal rolling stock would be vastly cheaper than airplanes too.
But, contrary to standard propaganda, markets don’t promote “efficiency” in the sense of allocation of natural resources. Air travel is heavily favored by public-financed, multi billion dollar airports in every mid to large US city, air trafic control, and the biggest one - artificially cheap, low-tax fuel - made avaialble through US foreign policy and the US military, and lots of bloodshed.
The there is economy of scale, and the incredibly low wages paid to employees of non-union airines like Southwest or Jet Blue.
Adviser wrote:
“When all planes (except 6 military) were grounded for 3-4 days after 9-11, the temperature over North America changed by almost 2 degrees C (huge). Basically, the temperature reverted back to the way it was pre-1950s, (before the jet age)!”
How could such a trend be deduced over a period of 3-4 days? It was colder after Sept 11, 2001 because the seasaons first large continental-polar air mass had moved into a large part of the US and Canada. The day of the hijackings was probably chosen because the strong cold front passing the day before guaranteed excellent visibility and few clouds.
USAn May 8th, 2008 12:08 pm
Adviser wrote:
“When all planes (except 6 military) were grounded for 3-4 days after 9-11, the temperature over North America changed by almost 2 degrees C (huge). Basically, the temperature reverted back to the way it was pre-1950s, (before the jet age)!”
“How could such a trend be deduced over a period of 3-4 days? It was colder after Sept 11, 2001 because the seasaons first large continental-polar air mass had moved into a large part of the US and Canada. The day of the hijackings was probably chosen because the strong cold front passing the day before guaranteed excellent visibility and few clouds.”
It is probably best for you to read the study(s) for yourself, for you to get a complete understanding of how that was compensated:
http://facstaff.uww.edu/travisd/pdf/jetcontrailsrecentresearch.pdf
Other studies:
http://facstaff.uww.edu/travisd/
http://www.areco.org/studies.htm#climate