Environment – Green aviation’s not going to fly

It’s the time of year – winter, when advertising is alluring with its pictures of golden sandy beaches and warm blue water. Social media is full of friends flying away to those idyllic places. A week in Rarotonga, beachside in Bali, parading in Portugal or sunning in Spain. Visiting friends and family on the other side of the world has never been easier or relatively cheaper.

Research says people are taking more, longer flights for shorter holidays. But the CO2 levels in the atmosphere have never been higher. The current count of atmospheric CO2 is 426.68ppm. In pre-industrial times, it was 280. Climate experts warn that the two degrees global heating limit in the global Paris Agreement is dead. That signals catastrophic impacts for human, animal and plant communities, for life on Earth as we know it.

Green tech solutions, which have promised we can have our cake and eat it, too, are taking us for fools.

And we’re happily fooling ourselves because the short-term pleasures of a trip to a sunny location in winter makes us feel better than considering the ecological collapse that we bring upon ourselves and children of the future, in part by flying around the world, driving everywhere, eating meat and ignoring climate change.

Greenwash myth-making convinces people (supposed leaders) that green tech will save us all. We can fly with impunity because electric, hydrogen or biofuelled planes are on the horizon. But like carbon capture, which promised that we could keep polluting, but pump CO2 into the ground to store it, and seaweed feed supplements that would reduce cattle methane, these tech silver bullets have evaporated into hot air.

Massey University professor in applied mathematics Robert McLaughlan recently presented to the Royal Aeronautical Society’s New Zealand division on, ‘Tech hopes for the aviation industry’. He showed that green tech aviation solutions were implausible, impractical and impossible. Instead, Professor McLaughlan says non-existent technologies function as “technologies of prevarication”, diminishing the perceived urgency of deploying proven, but possibly unpopular, options now, such as taxes through GST or the Emissions Trading Scheme, or flying less or not at all.

Jevon’s paradox also shows that any efficiency gains are offset by increased consumption, and pollution. And renewable energy ‘solutions’, like solar panels or wind, led to increased power use, not reduction. Aviation efficiency has doubled since the 1990s, but so have emissions as passenger numbers have quadrupled.

For nation states, aviation drives economic growth through tourism, immigration, trade and construction. But NZ has the sixth highest aviation emissions per capita in the world, more per capita than the UK and US, making up 12 per cent of our emissions.

We’re incentivised to fly with cheaper, more comfortable, more reliable flights. Demand rises with income. Flying’s a symbol of modernity and wealth. Flying becomes obligate or we risk becoming the fools who don’t jet off to warmer climes.