6/11/19: The popular revolt against flying

Qual é o sentido que faz deslocarmo-nos para aeroportos de comboio, automóveis eléctricos ou mesmo de bicicleta eléctrica, se a pegada de carbono da aviação é gigantesca e não para de aumentar !?

OVOODOCORVO dedica atenção a esta urgentíssima questão que começa, embora muito tímidamente, a ser discutida em Bruxelas.

Ler os três artigos em baixo … https://www.facebook.com/O-Voo-do-Corvo-Blogspot-465825430137758/?ref=bookmarks

“Aviation accounts for about 2.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, and grew by 5 percent last year. But the sector has largely been left out of  global efforts to rein in rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Commercial flights now account for 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The Air Transit Action Group (ATAG), an industry lobby, claims commercial aircraft coughed out 859 million tons of CO2 in 2017, out of about 40 billion tons emitted globally. Air travel’s slice of global carbon emissions is expected to rise through 2050, as sectors like energy make faster transitions to greener technology.

Meanwhile, demand for flights has never been higher.

Airline emissions are not covered by the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord. The schemes that do try to address the industry largely aim at keeping aviation emissions flat, even as emissions from other parts of the economy — power stations, manufacturing industries, cars — are required to cut back.  This means that the sector’s emissions will make up an ever larger share of global emissions.”

The popular revolt against flying

Flying has gone from glamorous to scandalous, and the industry is scrambling to prop up its fading popularity.

By          SAIM SAEED       6/11/19, 5:18 PM CET Updated 6/14/19, 4:04 AM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-popular-revolt-against-flying-climate-european-airlines-carbon-emissions/

Illustration by Carlo Giambarresi for POLITICO

Europe’s airlines have a new problem — their customers.

Decades ago flying was reserved for the glamorous few, then it became a mass market for cheap tourism. Now the aviation industry is in danger of joining the ranks of cigarette makers and plastics producers in the business hall of shame.

That’s due to something most passengers ignored until only a few years ago — the industry’s growing carbon footprint. But now it’s a problem in a world where worry over global warming is shooting to the top of political and social concerns.

Across Europe, campaigns to reduce air travel emissions are gaining traction. The sources of the criticism vary widely. In Sweden, where climate activist Greta Thunberg’s decision to abstain from flying has pushed the issue into the spotlight. In France, where Yellow Jacket protesters have called for taxing airline fuel instead of their cars’ gasoline.

“In the future, I expect the aviation industry’s license for growth to be linked directly to perceptions of sustainability” — Violeta Bulc, European commissioner for transport

“A kind of top-down-bottom-up fight is brewing,” said Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. “And I’m not sure how it will play out.”

So far it’s more hot air than action. Aside from what may be a temporary blip in Swedish air travel, people may be talking a good game when it comes to aviation and climate change, but continued growth in most markets shows they haven’t yet given up on flying.

But politicians — traditionally airline industry boosters — have noticed the change in attitude.

 “In the future, I expect the aviation industry’s license for growth to be linked directly to perceptions of sustainability,” European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc told airline CEOs at a summit in Korea earlier this month.

A succession of European governments — left and right alike — are mulling aviation taxes, an end to traditionally heavy subsidies, and are reconsidering airport expansion plans.

Airlines are on the defensive. Even as they look forward to transporting ever more passengers — with airlines like Ryanair posting double-digit growth in traffic — carriers worry that the protests could prompt government intervention and jeopardize those projections.

The Swedes have a word for it

Swedes have a word — flygskam, or flight shame — for the guilty feeling of boarding a plane, knowing the flight damages the environment.

“Unchallenged, this sentiment will grow and spread,” Alexandre de Juniac, chief of global airline lobby International Air Transport Association (IATA), told the Korean summit. “Along with reducing emissions, we must collectively engage and tell our story more effectively.”

Ryanair, the Continent’s second-largest airline, is already feeling the hot breath of climate campaigners on its back. A ranking by NGO Transport & Environment puts the airline as one of the top 10 polluters in Europe, in the company of nine coal-fired power plants.

In reaction, Ryanair is now publishing monthly figures on its carbon dioxide emissions — the first European airline to do so. Ryanair’s pitch aims to combat flight shame, arguing that its passengers average less emissions per kilometer compared to the airline’s peers given the company’s efficient fleet.

According to the NGO Transport and Environment, Ryanair is one of the top 10 polluters in Europe | Toms Kalnins/EPA

“Ryanair is Europe’s greenest/cleanest airline,” Ryanair’s chief marketing officer, Kenny Jacobs, said in a statement.

For now, the first country to feel the sting of flight shaming is Sweden, where the aviation industry contracted by 5 percent so far this year — a change blamed in part on shifting attitudes toward flying.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has made airplane pollution a focus of her widely-publicized, youth-led campaign, traveling only by rail during her barnstorm of Europe, a habit she encourages others to copy. Online, hashtag campaigns like #jagstannarpåmarken and  #tagskryt, and their English versions #stayontheground and #trainbragging, are growing on Twitter and Instagram.

But it may be a blip. A forecast by Eurocontrol sees Sweden’s air traffic rising by 1.9 percent this year and by 2 percent in 2020.

Policymakers change tack

The industry’s PR effort may not be enough to dissuade politicians from taking a harder look at how aviation is taxed. In March, the Belgian government backed a Dutch proposal for an EU-wide tax on aviation.

“It’s not sustainable that we fly for a weekend with some friends all around Europe when we could do it with the train,” said Dutch Secretary of State for Finance Menno Snel.

Clamor for an aviation tax has spread to the European Parliament; all major candidates for the European Commission presidency pledged support for the idea.

“The privileging of the airline business must be stopped,” center-right European People’s Party candidate Manfred Weber said during a campaign debate in May.

“Why is there still no tax on kerosene?” Socialist lead candidate Frans Timmermans asked in another pre-election debate. “That’s crazy.”

“The #ClimateEmergency places a responsibility on us to cut emissions faster" — Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish first minister

And even if politicians balk at making airlines pay more, citizens could force their hand. In April, the Commission registered a European Citizens’ Initiative for an EU-wide aviation tax. It needs 1 million signatures by May 2020 to compel the Commission to act.

That pressure is already visible in France. The Yellow Jackets, who have vehemently protested the French government’s proposed hike on petrol claiming it unfairly targets the working class, have decried the lack of taxes on jet fuel and no VAT on air tickets. They, too, have called for an aviation tax.

Pais has noticed. French President Emmanuel Macron began his tenure promising to make its aviation industry more competitive. Last year, the government cut the air tax from €1.30 to 90 cents per ticket. But the protests have forced a change in tone.

“I want to warn you,” Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne told French aviation industry officials in March, “what is being expressed in this country [are calls] not to support the competitiveness of air transport.” France backs the EU-wide air tax, and Macron’s party campaigned for it during the European election.

A similar shift is taking place in Scotland, where First Minister Nicola Sturgeon reversed her government’s pledge to cut the Air Departure Tax — the U.K.’s ticket tax — as a response to what she called was a “climate emergency.”

“The #ClimateEmergency places a responsibility on us to cut emissions faster,” Sturgeon said.

The Scottish government is also reconsidering its support for a new runway for Heathrow airport — part of a broader international rethink on the need to upgrade airport infrastructure.

Many airlines believe the tax proposal will hurt them. They “increase the cost of travel and reduce connectivity,” argues Airlines For Europe, the lobby representing Europe’s largest air carriers.

Some public officials agree. “Tax is punishment,” said Henrik Hololei, director general of the Commission’s Mobility and Transport department. An air tax “will not lower emissions in the long run.”

Smoggy skies

Aviation’s carbon footprint has grown by 20 percent in Europe since 2005, and continues to increase at an average of 4 percent annually. It currently accounts for about 2.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If it were a country, aviation would be the sixth-largest carbon polluter in the world, eclipsing Germany.

Both the industry and policymakers are aware of the need to do something. IATA has pledged to cut emissions to 50 percent of their 2005 level by 2050.

Flights within the EU are already part of the bloc’s Emissions Trading System, a mechanism by which emissions are capped and carbon allowances are traded among companies. And while the program has slowed the rise in aviation emissions, it hasn’t stopped that growth, and efforts to make it apply to non-EU flights have failed.

The U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization is finalizing a worldwide scheme called Corsia to curb emissions, which would cap emissions at 2020 levels and require airlines to pay for programs to remove any additional emissions over that level from the atmosphere. But there are complaints it isn’t as stringent as the ETS, and participation until 2026 is voluntary.

“Growth for the sake of growth cannot be an objective in itself. Aviation has externalities that cannot be overlooked" — Violeta Bulc

In the face of surging demand, those regulatory efforts are unlikely to choke off emissions growth.

There is also no technological rescue on the horizon.

While today’s airplanes are significantly more efficient than in the past — using 24 percent less fuel than in 2005, according to a European Aviation Safety Agency report — overall emissions from European aviation have risen by 16 percent over the same period. The culprit? A 60 percent increase in passenger kilometers flown.

“Growth for the sake of growth cannot be an objective in itself,” Bulc wrote in the report. “Aviation has externalities that cannot be overlooked.”

Ideas like alternative fuels, electric engines and radical airplane redesigns are far in the future.

Fear of flying

That leaves one sure way of cutting aviation emissions — flying less. It’s an idea that keeps aviation industry executives up at night.

Airbus Chief Technology Officer Grazia Vittadini argued that people still need to travel. “We’re working hard on teleportation but it hasn’t happened yet,” she said at an event in Brussels in April. She pointed to the high demand for new airplanes, with Airbus’ projections showing at least 37,000 additional airplanes will take to the skies by 2040.

In an effort to undercut the appeal of flight shaming, Vittadini argued that less flying would impact world peace. “Connecting people is something which should not be underestimated. When it comes to awareness of each other’s differences, to have a world that is more inclusive and open,” she said. “I would not want to take that away.”

But Sweden excepted, the protests have so far not translated into emptier airports. Ryanair’s traffic numbers for May grew by 13 percent year-on-year. For April, Lufthansa’s grew by 3 percent and Air France-KLM by 9 percent. On average, Europe’s air traffic grew by 3 percent last year, and by 2 percent so far this year.

“Talk about mixed messages,” said aviation consultant Andrew Charlton.

This article is part of a special report called Aviation's Climate Challenge.

EU takes aim at global airline emissions pact

One MEP denounces the carbon reduction scheme as ‘an absolute joke.’

By          KALINA OROSCHAKOFF  6/13/19, 6:00 AM CET Updated 6/14/19, 4:04 AM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/aviation-climate-challenge-eu-takes-aim-at-global-airline-emissions-pact-paris-climate-agreement-greenhouse-gases/

Could a global effort to rein in the airline industry’s greenhouse gas emissions undermine the EU’s fight against climate change?

That’s what regulators in Brussels worry could happen as the United Nations takes on one of the fastest growing causes of global warming.

At issue is the so-called Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (Corsia), which would require airlines to buy into forest-planting schemes or other efforts to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if they pollute more than they are currently doing.

Some EU officials say the approach proposed by the U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization is not transparent enough, vulnerable to fraud and miscounting, and in any case doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Worse, it could derail the EU’s own efforts to force the industry to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s the most important fight we have to fight internationally” — Peter Liese, EPP environmental coordinator

“We can no longer rely on offsetting to deliver long-term climate goals,” Mauro Petriccione, the European Commission’s top civil servant working on climate change, said at a conference on international carbon markets. “The use of international carbon markets needs to reflect ambition. We cannot remain stuck in the past.”

Green skies ahead

Aviation accounts for about 2.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, and grew by 5 percent last year. But the sector has largely been left out of  global efforts to rein in rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Airline emissions are not covered by the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord. The schemes that do try to address the industry largely aim at keeping aviation emissions flat, even as emissions from other parts of the economy — power stations, manufacturing industries, cars — are required to cut back.  This means that the sector’s emissions will make up an ever larger share of global emissions.

The one place where the industry is required to cut back is in the EU. Since 2012, airlines flying within the European Economic Area are forced to buy permits covering 15 percent of the sector’s emissions under the Emissions Trading System — a bloc-wide carbon market. The EU has sought to expand the scheme to include international flights, but the effort was rebuffed in 2012 by major powers such as the United States and China.

Free emissions allowances are “effectively a fossil fuel subsidy,” said Bill Hemmings, director of aviation and shipping with the NGO Transport & Environment.

Far from wanting to lighten these regulations, the political winds, as evidenced by last month’s European Parliament election, are blowing toward holding the industry to higher standards.

“It’s the most important fight we have to fight internationally,” said Peter Liese, the environmental coordinator for the European People’s Party, the parliament’s biggest group.

By 2024, the EU will also have to review whether to include international aviation in the ETS. European lawmakers are already gearing up to tighten the screws on airlines.

Leading environmental MEPs such as the EPP’s Liese now want to boost the number of emission allowances carriers have to buy from 15 percent to as much as 100 percent.

Free emissions allowances are “effectively a fossil fuel subsidy,” said Bill Hemmings, director of aviation and shipping with the NGO Transport & Environment.  “Why should the ETS provide a fossil fuel subsidy to the aviation sector? … It’s perverse that they don’t have to pay.”

‘Hot air’

Corsia, by contrast, takes a much lighter approach.

The scheme would cap airline emissions at an average of 2019 and 2020 levels, and by 2027 carriers emitting more than that would have to buy carbon offsets — although it’s still unclear who they’d buy those offsets from and who would regulate such a global program.

Corsia is backed by the aviation industry, which is keen on a global market-based measure that would avoid having to comply with a tangle of regional schemes. But the plan hasn’t found much favor among environmental activists or many European politicians.

The concern among EU climate officials and environmental campaigners is that Corsia will be full of loopholes.

That includes double-counting emissions savings, worries over whether regulators will stick to offsetting standards, and poor compliance rules. Another issue is whether the system will allow the sector to use surplus emission permits created under the 1992 Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement’s precursor.

European Commissioner for Energy and Climate Miguel Arias Cañete warned last week that continued use of “substantial” amounts of Kyoto emission permits in global carbon market schemes “will reduce ambition or at least defer action for many years.”

There are also questions over the effectiveness of Corsia, which will be voluntary until 2027, and whether major polluters will opt in from the start. Signals suggesting China won’t join the voluntary phase has EU officials worried this could undermine the case for the U.S. to comply and leave Europe saddled with more onerous obligations than its rivals.

The European Commission has to make an assessment on whether Corsia is robust enough, once it’s started, to allay the bloc’s environmental concerns, and how the EU should apply it domestically.

“If Corsia is not more than a fig leaf, there will be lots of voices, not least in the Parliament, to say, ‘No, let’s not count it,” said a long-standing EU observer who was involved in aviation measures. “Politically, we back the scheme but we always left open that it should be meaningful.”

Some have already made up their mind.

“Corsia — that’s an absolute joke,” said Liese, adding the scheme doesn’t require emission reductions from the industry. “It’s just hot air.”

This article is part of a special report called Aviation's Climate Challenge.

Authors:

Kalina Oroschakoff

No quick fix for growth of aviation emissions

Battery-powered planes and alternative fuels are unlikely to allow the industry to go green.

By          JOSHUA POSANER           6/12/19, 1:30 PM CET Updated 6/14/19, 4:04 AM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/no-quick-fix-for-aviation-climate-challenges-technology-fuel-cells-emission-boeing-easyjet-commercial-flying/

Visitors watch a phototype of Lilium's eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) Jet at a trade fair in Nuremberg, Germany on December 4, 2018 | Christof Strache/AFP via Getty Images

Every day, millions of people take hybrid cars, zero-emission trains, even bicycles to an airport — only to board planes burning tons of fossil fuels.

Commercial flights now account for 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The Air Transit Action Group (ATAG), an industry lobby, claims commercial aircraft coughed out 859 million tons of CO2 in 2017, out of about 40 billion tons emitted globally. Air travel’s slice of global carbon emissions is expected to rise through 2050, as sectors like energy make faster transitions to greener technology.

Meanwhile, demand for flights has never been higher.

“Demand for air travel increases at twice the pace of the economy,” Airbus’ chief technology officer, Grazia Vittadini, told reporters last month. “That means that the global commercial aircraft fleet doubles roughly every 15 to 20 years.” In 2017, the number people who traveled by air passed 4 billion.

“Evidence is strong that aircraft manufacturers are currently deploying only about half of the available technologies to reduce the fuel burn of new aircraft” — Dan Rutherford, who leads research on aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation in San Francisco

But white-coated scientists won’t be riding to the industry’s rescue anytime soon; stringent safety rules and the slow lifecycle of airplanes make tech fixes much more difficult to implement than in power stations and cars, where mistakes don’t mean falling out of the sky. Prospects for battery-powered planes and more efficient, self-guided aircraft are years away. Alternative fuels have barely gained a foothold with airlines.

Here are five technology obstacles facing the air travel industry as it tries to clean up its planes.

Batteries are too heavy

A zero-emission passenger jet would likely run on electricity from batteries. Unfortunately, batteries capable of producing as much energy as a similar load of kerosene — a feather-light fossil fuel that stores enormous amounts of power and is widely used in aviation — is still many years away.

“It will be a very long time before batteries offer anything like the energy density found in fuels,” said Richard Aboulafia, who leads research at Teal Group, a consultancy. “It would take many decades of progress to change that, and we might never get there.”

That hasn’t dissuaded some from making ambitious promises. Lilium, a Munich-based start-up, says it can get small electric urban aircraft flying 300 kilometers on a single charge by 2025, drawing on the same batteries as a standard family vehicle. Boeing is pushing a similar prototype, pending certification and commercial trials. Norway, already a leader in e-cars, wants all domestic flights to be electric by 2040. The Norwegian government hasn’t explained how it intends to do that.

Battery power is tougher still for long-haul flights — but essential to lowering emissions. About 80 percent of aviation emissions are produced by flights longer than 1,500 kilometers, according to ATAG.

A battery able to hold 30 times as much electricity for the same weight as today’s batteries would still only allow a passenger jet like Airbus’ A320 to reach a fifth of its usual range, carrying just half its usual payload of passengers and luggage, said Airbus’ Vittadini.

“The physics just won’t work,” she said. “Pure electrical propulsion will probably not be enough in the short term.”

Alt-fuels don’t scale

Without batteries, the search for a cleaner substitute for kerosene would seem like a good transitional step. But no one’s produced a reliable, affordable alternative fuel yet.

“Current use [of alternative fuels] is well below 0.1 percent of global jet fuel, or about one one-hundredth of what some were predicting by this time,” said Dan Rutherford, who leads research on aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation in San Francisco.

Cost is a concern. Cleaner burning fuels, like those made from isobutanol, typically cost up to five times more than kerosene, he said.

The other problem is the small supply of so-called boutique fuels.  Currently, aviation burns an estimated 5 million barrels of jet fuel each day. Any new fuel would have to replace that capacity, quickly.

Fuel experiments are still very small scale; Lufthansa is promising to use synthetic kerosene for 5 percent of the fuel it uses at Hamburg airport over the next five years.

“Getting enough sustainable aviation fuels flowing to significantly reduce emissions before 2030 seems unlikely,” said Rutherford.

Ticket prices can’t rise

Rutherford thinks online flight booking platforms such as Kayak and Google Flights should do more to illustrate emission output estimates between different flights, helping to nudge airlines to do more on aircraft efficiency or face a consumer backlash.

Some airlines have long given bookers the option of offsetting their CO2 emissions, but the voluntary offset market is still very small.

Oliver Aust, a former easyJet executive who now runs a Berlin aerospace consultancy, says airlines have been experimenting with offsetting for a decade. “Unfortunately very few passengers make use of it,“ he said.

Either way, consumers will likely need to shoulder more of the climate cost than they’d like — and perhaps more than they can. Research by green group Transport & Environment estimates that switching from kerosene to low carbon alternatives would add 58 percent onto the price of a standard ticket. If conventional fuel were subject to tax, the rise would be 23 percent.

Incremental improvements

Instead of a silver bullet solution, airplane manufacturers will have to look for ways to combine tiny design changes that add up to big savings. That’s a longer, more evolutionary process than betting on a single breakthrough in battery or fuel tech.

“There is no single technology that will enable us to achieve these ambitious targets,” said Vittadini of Airbus’ objective to cut emissions. “It will be more a concurrent, coherent development of several technologies.”

For example, introducing laminar wing design, a wing-shape innovation developed by an EU/Airbus project called BLADE, could cut CO2 output by 5 percent by providing greater lift. It’s at prototype stage.

Not everyone is buying the insistence that the industry is making the supersonic progress it claims.

Vittadini said Airbus is using materials as unlikely as algae and spider silk to make materials lighter and more aerodynamic. Another area of study, “biomimicry,” would copy natural patterns to automate flights, allowing swarms of aircraft to “surf each others vortexes,” reducing drag. These kind of innovations are a long way from the marketplace, however.

An estimated tenth of aviation emissions are caused by jets just circling above hub airports waiting for a slot to land, so using computers to automate landing patterns could offer another opportunity for shorter flight paths and emission savings.

Satellites can also help plot more effective flight paths, but new systems for airspace management are stuck in a Brussels legislative standoff, owing to a spat over sovereignty and jurisdiction of the Gibraltar airport.

The problem with those ideas is that the rapid growth in flying drowns out small improvements, and despite better technology aviation emissions continue to rise.

We may have to learn to trust robots

Aust, the former easyJet executive, thinks the industry is doing its fair share on climate and notes that Airbus — which has just undergone a management change — is focusing its resources on sustainability, with a deal just signed to work on developing hybrid aircraft with Scandinavian airline SAS.

But not everyone is buying the insistence that the industry is making the supersonic progress it claims. “Evidence is strong that aircraft manufacturers are currently deploying only about half of the available technologies to reduce the fuel burn of new aircraft,” said Rutherford.

Then there are the passengers, who will have to accept fundamental changes to a decades-old means of travel. Convincing the public to pay 50 percent more for a ticket to ride on a battery-operated drone made of algae-based plastic and spiderweb glue, “swarming” over the Atlantic to save drag, could be challenging.

Regulators will also need convincing. This year’s grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX after two fatal accidents shows that safety agencies are unlikely to be enthusiasts for experimental technologies.

Currently, six out of seven Germans say they would feel uncomfortable flying on an autonomous plane, according to a recent study by German digital industry lobby Bitkom.

One in seven may think it’s going to be awesome, however.

This article is part of a special report called Aviation's Climate Challenge.