Section 02
Flying is ecological
Two contributors on emissions, land and whether the industry's own targets were credible.
“In 2008 the biggest drawbacks to flying are the high price of fuel and the emissions arising from burning it. These problems will be history in 50 years.” That is how the section opens, and it is a strong claim — strong enough that the two essays underneath it spend most of their length qualifying it.
The framing then shifts away from fuel entirely. Atte Korhola, professor of environmental change at the University of Helsinki, sets the real constraint elsewhere: “The future challenge is sustainable development, especially with respect to adequate supplies of water and food, and land use. The more asphalt there is on the globe, the less forest and farmland.” For an aviation project, choosing land use over carbon as the century’s binding limit was an unusual move.
Two contributions
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01
On flight as a symbol of technological confidence, how it became ordinary, and what climate concern did to the romance of it.
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02
The aviation industry in 85 years
Paul Steele, then director of aviation environment at IATA, asking what the industry will say in 2093 about its own 2007 environmental targets — including the zero-emissions aircraft pencilled in for 2057.
The uncomfortable question in Steele’s essay
Steele’s contribution is written as a set of questions asked from 2093 looking back, which is a rhetorical device but also a genuine audit. Will fuel efficiency have improved as promised? Was IATA’s 2007 environmental vision realised? Was the zero-emissions aircraft built by 2057?
Writing as an industry body director, he had every reason to answer yes. He does not. The essay leaves the questions open, which is the most interesting thing about it. Read now, the honest answer to the first is partially, and to the third almost certainly not on that schedule.
What actually happened to the two “drawbacks”
Neither became history. Fuel remained the largest single line item in airline operating costs, and aviation emissions did not resolve themselves. What did change is the mechanism: the industry moved toward sustainable aviation fuels and market-based offsetting schemes rather than the step-change airframe the section implied.
Korhola’s land-use argument, by contrast, has become mainstream in a way it was not in 2008 — including for aviation specifically, because the biofuel pathway the industry leaned on competes directly for arable land. The section did not connect those two things. Read together now, they connect themselves.
The section also links to a filmed interview with Rainer Von-Wrede, then head of environment at Airbus Engineering, whose line was that sustainable development is a must “not only in our business, but in our whole existence”. The video interviews page records what he and four other Airbus engineers said.
The numbers the section was working from
Korhola’s essay is unusually well sourced for a corporate microsite, and the figures are worth recording because they show what the 2008 baseline actually looked like. He put world air traffic growth at 5 to 10 per cent a year, strongest in the Far East, and cited World Bank statistics showing passenger numbers up 28 per cent between 2003 and 2004. UK passenger volume was then forecast to double to around 475 million by 2030.
On emissions he gave aviation roughly 2 per cent of human carbon dioxide output in 2008, expected to pass 3 per cent by 2050, with the caveat that carbon dioxide is not the whole effect: nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and water vapour all contribute, and by 2050 aviation might account for as much as 10 per cent of all climate-warming emissions of human origin. Aviation was already the fastest-growing emissions sector in the European Union.
He also names the tension that has defined the argument ever since. Emissions per passenger kilometre had fallen substantially and were expected to keep falling, but traffic growth was outrunning the efficiency gain. On the IPCC baseline scenario he quotes, a six-fold increase in aviation by 2050 would still raise fuel consumption 2.7 times.
Steele’s side of the ledger is the industry’s own record: fuel efficiency improved 70 per cent over the four decades to 2008, with a further 25 per cent expected by 2020. IATA’s 2007 strategy rested on four pillars — investing in technology, flying aircraft more efficiently, building efficient infrastructure, and economic instruments such as tax credits and research funding. He is direct that technology is the only route to zero emissions, and names solar power, hydrogen cells and biofuels as the available building blocks.
The efficiency trend continued roughly as described. The traffic growth did too, which is why the gap Korhola identified never closed.