Green aviation’s case as Leeds Bradford Airport consultation ends – Piers Forster

Yet, despite huge efficiency gains, aviation emissions had been increasing rapidly prior to 2020 due to about a roughly six per cent rise in passenger numbers every year.

Six months into the Covid crisis, things look quite different: airlines are running at less than 40 per cent capacity, there have been swathes of job losses from the industry and big names like Virgin Atlantic have filed for bankruptcy in the US.

Can the industry recover and can it make itself green?

To address the climate crisis, aviation, like all industries, needs to get to net-
zero emissions in as short a time as possible.

It is disingenuous of Sir Bernard Ingham, The Yorkshire Post’s columnist and former press secretary to 
Margaret Thatcher, to suggest in his recent piece that global warming is a myth.

The climate has demonstrably 
changed in the UK. It is directly implicated in recent winter Yorkshire flooding events.

Overseas, it is proven to increase wildfires. Unfortunately it will continue to get worse until carbon dioxide emissions in all parts of the world and all sectors of the economy reach zero.

This is the real global challenge 
which makes a moon-shot look like a cake-walk.

However, unlike the moon-shot, we haven’t really got a choice over making the change, it’s more a matter of when we make the change.

With all the evidence indicating that we will save lives and money the sooner we act, we need to get cracking.

Over the last four years, I have been working with colleagues from Manchester to produce a new assessment of the role of aviation on climate.

Our new work finds that aviation accounts for 3.5 per cent of global warming.

This is much less than the role of car travel, but it is growing fast and if international aviation were its own country, it would rank sixth in the list 
of largest polluters, nudging out Germany.

The issue is not the current level of flying but its emission growth and the lack of replacement technologies that might allow the sector to decarbonise.

Our study found that most of the warming from aviation has been from its formation of contrails: long thin lines of ice crystals that condense in the exhaust of high-flying aircraft.

The carbon dioxide warming effect is still a big factor, running the contrail warming a close second. However, the two warming effects are very different.

The contrail warming effect disappeared as soon as planes were grounded during Covid, whereas the carbon dioxide warming effect will persist for many decades.

So what is the future of aviation? Boris Johnson has commissioned a Jet-Zero council tasked with building a zero-emission aircraft.

Battery-powered short-haul flights maybe possible one day, but this currently looks like a pipe dream for long-haul passenger jets. The industry is banking on the development of sustainable aviation fuels and carbon offsetting.

These can help, but only if future passenger growth is limited to a more sustainable level.

Greater use of video conferencing can make businesses more productive and we can boost home-grown tourism.

Such actions not only boost our economy and jobs, they will also tackle all the climate effects of flying such as contrails, not just its carbon dioxide emissions.

The impacts of climate change will continue to worsen every month we 
wait.

To plan for guilt-free summer holidays, investments should support the industry to recover and develop these lower carbon technologies.

It is also the time to look at alternatives to flying that enable us to build a more resilient future rather than simply more airport capacity.

The only way to justify increasing capacity at an airport such as Leeds Bradford, as the consultation for its proposed extension comes to an end, would be if it led to genuine long-term carbon savings and the capacity at other airports were reduced.

Professor Piers Forster is Director of the 
Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds.

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