Air travel and climate change

We focus a lot on climate change factors related to industry, fossil fuel usage for heating and so on.

One of the major factors is air travel. It is not overlooked, but it seems to have taken a backseat in many discussion.

Let us look at it. I found something interesting here and here.

Aircraft engines are fed with fossil fuels. When burned, there is carbon emissions. On top of, there are micro-particles (soot!) released as well, depending on how ‘clean’ the engine runs.

All of that stays high in the atmosphere and that is where the problem with air travel lies. The carbon emissions and the particles stay there for a very long time (years) and that contributes to the heating of the planet. It is like CFC gasses again.

It is real as air travel is a huge part of all travel. I quote: “Carbon emissions from the airline industry grew by 75 per cent from 1990 to 2012. It’s expected they will continue to grow rapidly until 2050, where, if left unchecked, [it might account for 25% of all carbon emissions]”. The other issue is that air travel is going up. In essence: this is a real issue.

If we consider non-CO2 impacts, we must look at the contrails.

“[contrails] induce cirrus cloud formation which is a result of water vapour as well as soot particles emitted during flight cruise.

To reduce non-CO2 effects, airplanes can use clean fuels to reduce the amount of pollutants released and changing flight paths to fly at lower altitude, where contrail formation is avoided. Rerouting less than 2% of flights in Japan reduced the warming effect of contrails by nearly 60%.”.

The suggested solutions encompass cleaner fuel, electric planes and zero-emission planes. All of this is good and dandy, but is not going to do a lot about the real problem. Air travel emissions will grow based on its very nature.

The only real way is to simply fly less. We learned during Covid that business travel for meetings and so on are not essential. We can do so many other things. That is a huge chunk of air travel.

We are active on other fronts but this one is a looming problem that will not go away unless we do something.

For now, it is up to us all to be responsible and simply cut down on flying. It is not about legislation.