Planes or Planet? Why we need to make air travel more sustainable.
Since the world’s first commercial jet airliner took off in the 1950’s, the production and reach of air travel has grown exponentially with the general trend of air travel prices becoming more and more affordable. More recently, the year 2019 saw around 115,000 commercial flights daily with some 4.5 billion passengers throughout the year[1]. This increase in the availability of air travel and therefore connectivity between places all around the world has played a crucial role in the development and progression of humans and the populations prosperity and wellbeing. However, the extent of air travel we see today takes its toll on the very habitats us humans and our fellow species live in. this is as the average commercial airliner produces approximately 53 pounds of carbon dioxide per mile of travel[2] or 900 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide emitted per year by commercial aviation per year[3] as in 2019. When considering the large distances travelled, each flight produces thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide: a gas known to further grow the greenhouse effect on earth which is increasing global warming at an alarming rate. Furthermore, these same commercial airliners are seen flying products such as children’s toys and baseball caps across the world just so companies can capitalise on the small profit they make on faster delivery. Therefore, this raises the question of whether the extent of our current (growing) rate of air travel is sustainable and whether we can make it more sustainable while keeping the world connected.
Commercial airliners have allowed families that are spread throughout the globe to stay connected and in touch while allowing sizeable businesses to operate as executives and those required to meet can travel and conduct meetings. However, one could argue that the extent of this globalized era has been taken to a new level as unnecessary travel has become common due to low costs and flight availability. For example, it is common for business executives, politicians, and many professionals to travel for work when it is unnecessary as these trips could be easily replaced with conference calls or video calls. Essentially, the extent of our technology has made many reasons for air travel obsolete. Additionally, the Covid-19 Pandemic has taught us that the use of zoom and interactive software is an extremely accessible alternative. For two years majority of world travel had been halted: and while the world was in a crisi, and required maximum number of meetings and communications, most of the worlds professionals and workers resorted to zoom and Microsoft teams. Furthermore, these softwares proved to show extreme effectiveness as it allowed schools and universities to resume without students travelling in from all around the globe as well as world political and economic summits occurring with each individual safely isolated at home. Although we are now approaching what appears to be the end of the pandemic such practices, if resumed could see the world be a far more eco-friendly place as air-travel and travel as a whole would stick to only emergencies and necessary travel. This would result in air travel becoming significantly more sustainable. However, due to years of habit building and therefore one feeling the need to have to travel for such occasions has sustained and even grown the amount of air travel being seen in the world although this could be easily avoided. For example, many of the post pandemic political and economic summits can see people flying in from all around the world, in many cases in personal business planes, and these can be very easily conducted on interactive video calling services such as zoom or Microsoft teams. Although in many cases such travel is essential such as when businesspeople may have to travel to supervise the running of manufacturing plants or factories, this is quite rarely the case.
One of the most avoidable reasons for air travel is from fast shipping. Large conglomerates such as amazon take a small fee for same day or next day shipments which requires air travel to fulfil these rapid orders. Although these additional charges often result in a significant increase in these companies’ profits, the negative externality of say a smart watch arriving the next day rather than a week is enormous. Furthermore, 53% of all air travel is conducted by cargo planes out off which a significant chunk is non-essential goods that do not require to be rapidly shipped such as a smart watch order from amazon[4]. Hence, if these nonessential goods can be removed from air travel, then freight planes would have significantly more space to carry and deliver essential packages such as food and sanitation resulting in significantly fewer freight planes traveling per day. Therefore, this would result in a significant reduction in the number of flights per day and therefore the amount of carbon dioxide being produced by large airplanes every day. Furthermore, this would result in air travel becoming significantly more sustainable. Therefore, if for example governments bypassed laws that such rapid cargo transportation can only be accessible for goods such as medication, sanitation, and foods to name a few essential items, the entire air travel industry would have a significantly reduced environmental impact.
Another nonessential form of air travel that has extremely large carbon dioxide contributions to the environment is the use of personal business jets. This in many cases is the most unnecessary as the carbon emissions for this is large while the carrier only carries a handful of passengers. Furthermore, the use of business jets is often seen between extremely common routes such as Los Angeles to New York. This is particularly unnecessary for the environment as a passenger easily get on one of the many daily flights between New York and LA. There are approximately 10,000 private flights in the US per day alone[5]. Additionally, out of these 10,000 flights per day each plane produces approximately 2 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hour[6]. Yet out of these 10,000 flights a day a very small percentage would be to or from a location where there are no commercial flights in a day. Therefore, very few of these flights have almost any level of necessity. Hence if only the necessary business flights operated the amount of carbon dioxide emitted due to air travel could be seriously reduced. Therefore, eradicating this could have a significant reduction on the effect on the greenhouse effect and therefore allowing air travel as a whole to be far more sustainable.
One other aspect of air travel that is important to consider is the use of helicopters. Many people, often executives and famous people are seen using helicopters and small planes to travel from one part of a city to another. Although these smaller crafts are far less impactful to the environment, they do have a far larger impact than required. For example, the average car produces 400 grams of carbon dioxide per mile[7] while the average while a helicopter produces about 250 kg per hour which would amount to significantly more usage in majority of cases[8]. However, since the use of such vehicles are so limited the total impact on the environment is less than 1% of that of total air travel emissions.
When talking about the sustainability of air travel it is important to touch upon carbon offsetting. Carbon offsetting is the process by which airlines and large C02 emitting populations compensate for their large carbon footprints by making up for their CO2 emissions by planting trees. However, the percentage of emissions that are offset are very limited. The amount of carbon offsetting conducted as of now is nowhere near any significant amount to make a difference. However, carbon offsetting presents an opportunity that if conducted in a large enough scale could have an extremely significant impact on the net amounts of CO2 produced by each flight and in the long-term could result in net CO2 emissions being negligible[9]. However, to reach this stage companies must acquire large amounts of land to be able to plant enough trees to fully offset their emissions. This therefore is quite unrealistic as to reach such a scale cities would have to be replace with forests. Therefore I believe taxing air travel companies for their emissions above a certain emission threshold gives companies financial implications to reduce air travel or invest in research and development for technologies that make air travel more sustainable.
There are many more potential innovations and ideas that could result in air travel becoming far more sustainable. For example, innovation in technologies such as the use of electric airplanes could result in the total CO2 output falling to zero. Another such technology could be the implementation of high speed electromagnetic, electric trains such as in Japan. This would result in an extreme reduction in the use of airplanes. This is as, as in Japan, these highspeed trains that have a top speed of almost 400 miles per hour would result in a significant reduction in air travel as these tickets would be cheaper than that of airplanes and would result in majority of the world’s population resorting to this alternative for domestic and shorter distance travel[10]. Although these would result in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions by air travel, such technologies are either not readily available to us or would require extremely large investments and manpower to make possible within the next two decades in countries such as the US.
In conclusion, air travel is occurring at too large a scale for it to be sustainable at its current level. There are many forms of air travel that are largely unnecessary and are therefore resulting in the entire industry being completely unsustainable. As discussed above one of the largest contributors to this are the excessive use of airplanes for shipments that are of nonessential items that do not require to arrive at such short notice. Additionally, the extensive use of private business travel is having a drastic impact on the planet. However, with a few adjustments as discussed above we can make air travel far more sustainable. Furthermore, the concept of carbon offsetting is something that we as inhabitants of this planet need to dig far deeper into and use to fully offset our carbon footprint. If we do this starting with air travel as a footstep it will further expand into every industry and could result in us drastically changing the expected longevity of wildlife and humanity on this planet.
References
- Duggal, Hannah; Haddad; Mohammed. “Visualizing the Global Air travel Industry.” AlJazeera. Dec 2021
- World Air Transport statistics 2021
- Brown-Young- Fiona. “Private Aviation flights At New Highs. Sherpa Report.” June 2021
- Chiu, Allyson. “Celebrities Use Private Jets Excessively. It’s a Climate Nightmare.” Washington Post. August 2022
- United States Environmental Protection Agency. May, 2014
- CarbonIndipendant. Feb 2022
- Astor, Maggie. “Do Airline Climate Offsets Really Work? Here’s the Good News and the Bad.” The New York Times. May 2022.
- Wakatsuki, Yoko. Japan Maglev Train Sets World Record. CNN. October 2016.
- Salas, Erick Burgueño. Global CO2 Emissions From Commercial Aviation 2004–2022. Satista.Sept 2022
