Aviation’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Triple in the Next 50 Years
A new study, “Flying into the Future: Aviation Emissions Scenarios to 2050” in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology journal, reports that aviation is now a main driver of global warming. Right now, international aviation isn’t even included in the Kyoto Protocol, although it’s a source of 60 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft, according to study author Bethan Owen and her colleagues, David S. Lee and Ling Lim. And although it’s not a main driver of global warming right now, it will be. According to the study:
Even though there have been significant improvements in fuel efficiency through aircraft technology and operational management, this has been outweighed by the increase in air traffic.
Global air traffic is contributing between 2-3 percent of carbon dioxide emissions—the main greenhouse gas in global warming. Scientists predict those emissions will probably double or triple within the next 50 years, which means by 2100 they could be seven times what they are now.
It seems the news linking airlines and carbon dioxide emissions just keeps getting worse. Two years ago a report from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Eurocontrol, the Manchester Metropolitan University and a technology company, QinetiQ, used various models to calculate fuel use and projected out to 2025 what emissions would be like. Jeff Gazzard, a spokesperson for the Aviation Environment Federation was quoted in Wired saying:
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.
What’s to be done? It often seems an intractable problem. We could all fly less, for one, but that’s neither likely nor realistic. The aviation industry has acknowledged that if it goes unchecked, the industry will become the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas in the developed world. A year ago, the European airline industry pledged to slash carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050, which would likely involve carbon offsets or trading schemes and force up airfares. But there could be another race that comes out of it: one among manufacturers, trying to harness new technologies to create greener airplanes.
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UK columnist George Monbiot’s book “Heat” takes a look at what technologies might replace each use of fossil fuels: heating, electricity, cars, etc. His last chapter is on air and is despairing: no good substitute for aircraft fuel.
But I can’t help but notice the traffic patterns in this popular NASA video of air traffic worldwide for 24 hours:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1L4GUA8arY
…see how much of it is overland? And relatively short-haul, within Europe or the East Coast of the US, or SE coastal Asia?
That’s at least possibly replaceable with trains that ran fast enough and often enough. 300 MPH trains are an engineering reality, the problem is the cost.
And even if the money came to make sense and it was a better end-state, the transition of destroying the airline industry down to long-haul transcontinental flights while building an infrastructure of high-speed trains everywhere is daunting.
Europe might do it, though, and even more likely SE Asia. Us, not so much.
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