Why NOT to Look To Aviation For Greenhouse Gas Reduction
March 3rd, 2012
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A lot has been made recently of a plan by the European Union to assess fees on airlines landing in EU airports for the carbon dioxide emitted by those aircraft. Many countries outside the EU are not taking kindly to the proposal. The US is one of them, but Russia, China and a few other Asian countries have gone even further in calling for an end to proposals of carbon fees on airlines. Officially the fees took effect on January first, though not all EU countries are expected to begin enforcing them right away.
Countries rally against EU carbon tax on airlines
Delegates from 26 countries opposed to a new EU carbon tax on airlines are meeting in Moscow to consider possible retaliation, amid fears of a trade war.China, India, Russia and the US are among the countries opposed to the EU fee, which took effect on 1 January.
Critics say the EU has no right to impose taxes on flights to or from destinations outside Europe.
But in December the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU tax on CO2 pollution from aircraft was legal.
The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) creates permits for carbon emissions. Airlines that exceed their allowances will have to buy extra permits, as an incentive to airlines to pollute less.
“Nobody has fought harder than the European Union over the years to get a global deal”
The number of permits is reduced over time, so that the total CO2 output from airlines in European airspace falls.
The EU’s Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, said the opponents should work with the EU to create a global scheme to cut aviation pollution.
“Nobody would be happier than the EU if we could get such a global deal,” she told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is just a bad idea. If you’ve concerned about pollution and especially greenhouse gasses, don’t go after aviation. It’s the smallest, highest hanging of the fruit you can pick from. Well under 1% of human generated greenhouse gases come from aviation and yet that relatively small percentage comes with enormous benefits to mankind.
Far more CO2 is generated by processes as low profile and unnoticed as cement manufacture. Additionally, it’s really the height of insanity to burden airlines and passengers in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions when most of the electricity generated in Europe comes from fossil fuels. Yet pinching aviation to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has an exceptionally poor cost-benefit ratio when compared to reducing power plant emissions.
Furthermore, the idea that reducing the number of permits over time will reduce pollution by making airlines more efficient is ridiculous. Considering the price of fuel and the fact that airlines pay more for fuel than any other expense, they have already done all things reasonably possible to improve aircraft efficiency. Modern turbofan engines have gotten very good, and while a tiny bit more fuel efficiency may be squeezed out in the years to come, it’s not likely that there’s going to be any development that will magically reduce the amount of fuel required by aircraft.
So why are they doing it? Personally, I think it’s politics plain and simple. Airplanes are conspicuous and everyone knows they burn fuel, but most people are likely unaware that cement manufacture is a major CO2 source. Airline travel may also be cast as a luxury (even though it is increasingly a necessity) and therefore can play into various social ploys.
Really, however, if you were just looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you would focus your energies elsewhere.
Reasons why civil aviation is good, should be encouraged and not burdened by additional costs:
- It’s a huge industry which provides a large number of jobs, many of them skilled and very high paying.
- Many other sectors are heavily dependent on aviation for travel, rapid shipping of products and other important uses of aircraft.
- Tourism is almost completely dependent on aviation and makes up a huge part of the economy of many nations. Innumerable businesses and livelihoods depend on economical travel to exist at all.
- Many areas of the world are entirely dependent on aviation-based tourism and without economical air travel their entire economy will completely disintegrate. These include some of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the world which are preserved largely because they draw tourists and, if they didn’t have tourist potential, would probably be destroyed by the locals trying to get by on whatever resources they could recover.
- World travel is educational, mind expanding and results in cultural exchange that cannot otherwise occur.
- When people travel they see the most majestic parts of the world, which would tend to make them want to preserve them.
- Many areas of the world are entirely dependent on aviation for things far beyond tourist travel. For island areas, especially, planes may be the only traveling and of bringing in critical goods like medical supplies and even food.
- When disaster strikes, civil aviation is often pressed into service for evacuation or transport of vital supplies. You want a healthy airline sector in case you ever need to suddenly use it for this.
- The airline business is already extremely cutthroat. Profits margins are razor thin. Airlines file for bankruptcy and are restructured frequently. Even a small additional burden can make a big difference.
- Aircraft are about the safest way possible to travel. If flying becomes more expensive, it becomes more attractive to drive long distances. More people drive, which is more dangerous and thus a net increase in deaths.
- There’s simply no way of reducing the carbon footprint of aircraft by any significant amount other than just not flying as much. Fuel is already the number one expense to airlines, so they already take all reasonable measures to conserve it. There’s really nothing other that can be used to fuel an aircraft other than hydrocarbons. Hydrogen is too low density and requires special handling and storage. Ammonia is only slightly better and batteries are far too heavy.
Reasons why civil aviation is bad, should be discouraged and burdened by additional costs:
- It produces carbon dioxide, although not very much in the grand scheme of things.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 7th, 2012 at 4:37 pm
Kit P said:
New? Well, perhaps a little. But the idea of dark energy and that most ulcers are caused by bacteria is even newer. Newness does not itself matter.
Kit P said:
You could take global warming off the table and I’d still argue that coal as a primary energy source is unacceptably environmentally destructive.
Kit P said:
I’d never argue against the whole idea of global warming being used as an excuse to push for a philosophy of minimalism and luditism that borders on being outright anti-human. This often does have an aspect of hypocritical anti-elitism. In other words, it’s wrong for people to gain money and use it for comfort and luxury, except for the self-appointed experts, who can fly around all they want.
Kit P said:
This is primarily a science blog. I’m trying to look at issues like this from a standpoint of cost/benefit and the overall facts. One thing that never seems to get anywhere is the passive aggressive nationalism. You know what is a great way to piss people off? Backhanded insults of their nation or culture. Seriously. Can we just avoid this?
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March 7th, 2012 at 4:51 pm
drbuzz0 said:
This is Kit P’s favorite modus operandi when he has no real argument: turn it into a bar fight. Again this troll shows he has nothing at all to say of any great moment, and should be ignored.
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March 7th, 2012 at 7:09 pm
“Can we just avoid this? ”
Yes ‘you’, are free to take responsibility for your feelings anytime you want. If you want me to advise you as part of the ‘we’ discussion I would suggest not looking for perceived insults.
“passive aggressive nationalism ”
Is that not what we are talking about? From the fist paragraph.
“Many countries outside the EU are not taking kindly to the proposal. The US is one of them, but Russia, China and a few other Asian countries have gone even further in calling for an end to proposals of carbon fees on airlines.”
Why in the world would counties victimized by the colonial powers and sucked into many nationalistic wars not be skeptical be skeptical of shallow attempts to collect taxes?
The point here drbuzz0 is that I was not attacking you nut just sticking to the central theme as I saw it. Let me address some of drbuzz0 since he has chosen to object to my points.
“Newness does not itself matter.”
It does matter in the context of complex time dependent natural systems.
“I’d still argue that coal as a primary energy source is unacceptably environmentally destructive. ”
I would be happy to correct your misconceptions drbuzz0 if you do not promise to call me a shill for coal. Since I used to be anti-coal it should be easy for drbuzz0 to get me to change my mind again if he has good scientific evidence.
I love having a good civil debate drbuzz0 but it requires effort on both sides.
@ ANON
I agree that there is not technical problem providing a high standard of living with nuke generated power. ANON does not tell us where he is from or his background. The same pattern of junk science used against nukes is used against coal, ethanol, and everything thing else. For those of us that have a background in producing what people need, we soon realize that the answers are not so simple. A few months ago, I asked my doctor about the benefits of a med I was taking after hearing a story on NPR. He did not want me to stop taking it. At my last visit he took me off of it citing the opinion of local cardiologists. He changed his mind based on having time to study new information and others expert had to say.
“LOL. So that’s why no one in the US is trying to ban abortion. ”
You think there may be a difference between a tax on an insignificant environmental problem and taking a life?
Working in nuclear I have many times been told about the dangers of radiation. More often than not it by people who have not problem sucking up cocaine. So yes there are people who want government to protect them from insignificant risk but not protect them from their on actions.
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March 7th, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Kit P said:
I’m not trying to start a fight by saying “Europeans are so much more accepting of big government” or “Americans are idiots” or something like that.
I’m stating a fact: The EU carbon quotas and permits imposed on aircraft have resulted in objection from the US, India, China, Russia and some others. That’s just the way it is.
I’m only going after one EU policy and not making some kind of sweeping generalization about everyone who lives in Europe.
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March 7th, 2012 at 9:27 pm
Kit P said:
Falling back on old habits, trying to dictate terms to a blog owner, I see. I predict that this will earn you the usual response if you keep doing that.
Common courtesy (to say nothing of commonsense) would move most people to simply avoid a subject or tack that the blog’s host has politely indicated that he wants to see avoided. Not so it would seem in your case. You seem to be under the impression that posting comments in other people’s spaces is a right – it is not – it’s a privilege. I suggest you comport yourself accordingly.
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March 8th, 2012 at 8:16 am
Anon said:
Indeed they were but investment is still required to develop a high-speed rail network as much as the airport network, and that’s just in France. Other nations (such as the UK, which has quite a poor rail system) are lagging behind.
Any sources for that claim about “majority of market share”? I’m sceptical and suspect it’s heavily dependent on how you set up the statistics.
As an anecdotal aside on both points: when EDF need to send staff out to power plants scattered around France, for the most part we fly. For a lot of sites, you’ll find a small airport closer than a high-speed train station. This is arguably linked to a bad choice of central office location for our site engineering – the TGV network is only slowly decentralising itself from the Paris hub.
BMS said:
Urgh. No, if you pick your train right you can get from Marseille to Lille-Europe directly and it’s just a matter of changing and going through the much-less-invasive Eurostar security.
Otherwise you get sucked into Paris and cross from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord via the metro. Notably, this cripples one of the major advantages of the train trip : virtually unlimited baggage allowance.
Kit P said:
A minor point but in this day and age it doesn’t usually matter which resources you have internally – Britain gets through huge amounts of the stuff but most of it arrives on bloody great ships.
http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=UK
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March 8th, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Kit P said:
Okay, whoever threw abortion into this discussion, good job, see what you’ve done? It’s all downhill from here.
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March 8th, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Well at least he didn’t mention Hitler or compare anyone to Nazis!!.
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oops!
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March 9th, 2012 at 1:39 am
Gordon said:
I didn’t expect him to prove my point so directly.
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March 9th, 2012 at 6:44 pm
First of all, although it may not apply in Europe, I strongly suspect that the most successful users of wind power are the airlines that save fuel by routing their long journeys to take advantage of the jet streams. I dare say that actual genuine savings of fossil carbon fuel could be documented, in contrast to the far-fetched claims and predictions made for anything so fickle as the wind that powers wind turbine farms.
It was NOT easy for France, having no coal. You might say that solar is easy for California, having significant amounts of desert. But it is clearly very difficult for Germany and Britain, having thrown their brains away in fear of the dreaded PLUTONIUM.
The French, being somewhat notorious for logic, and having abandoned the belief that “La republique n’a pas besoin des savant” when Robespierre was discredited and perhaps influenced by not liking the coal-rich Germany, created a nationalised entity called Electricite (acute accents missing from the first and last letters) de France, which now produces something like 75% of France’s electricity, and was exporting it at a price with which Europe’s energy producing companies could not compete. The latter complained that being able to borrow money with the assurance of a national treasury behind it gives a capital-intensive industry an unfair advantage, and bullied France into privatising EDF. Nevertheless EDF now owns what used to be British Energy, which came into being when Margaret Thatcher dismantled the nationalised CEGB, after which several nuclear power plants, in spite of the fact that their capital expenses were already paid, mysteriously became unprofitable and have been decommissioned.
This may seem a digression from the bit about airlines, I’d love to know where the blog’s host gets the figure of “Well under 1% of human generated greenhouse gases”, but if so I’ll accept his argument.
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March 9th, 2012 at 7:22 pm
Oh dear, there are comments in this thread that suggest nuclear protagonists are in the same boat as coal, petroleum, and gas proponents. That is very contrary to the way I see it. Nuclear is by my reckoning the only way to get rid of those fossil carbon fuels.
During the great California electric power peak price fiasco, there was reason to suspect that the electric power companies were making a profit from the fact that certain nuclear plants were out of service for maintenance that could have been delayed. By not having the inexpensive power on-line, the distribution utilities were obliged to pay through the nose — or their customers’ noses — for very expensive “spinning reserve” to be available.
To those who doubt the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW ), I present three facts.
1/ The Earth receives, and has to get rid of as much solar energy in an hour as human industry uses in a year.
2/ Carbon dioxide, and methane and nitrous oxide, are gases which alter the transparency of the atmosphere to those wavelengths of infrared radiation that correspond to temperatures that the earth’s living organisms find comfortable. The temperature at which equilibrium is reached between the incoming radiation and the outgoing radiation goes up. That’s the GW part.
3/ The anthropogenic part is simple. Fossil carbon was laid down, from photosynthesis, by floods and tectonic upheavals, over a period of 64 million years, called the Carboniferous Era. There is evidence that the average temperature of the atmosphere dropped about 10 degrees Celsius in that time, carbon dioxide was reduced, and oxygen increased. I do not know how much of the carbon thus sequestered has actually been returned, by human industrial processes, as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
But for every percent of it, in perhaps 250 years, we have consumed what took 640 thousand years to be created.
Evolution adapted the species from the beginning of the Carboniferous into those that flourished at the end, although there was, I believe, an extinction that had nothing to do with oxygen or carbon dioxide, some thousands of years later. The rate at which AGW is occurring is far in excess of what most evolutionary processes can bring to big life forms like polar bears, poor sea-shore-dwelling humans, orchids, corals, and even frogs. Yes, I know that corals are built by quite small organisms, but their homes are large and immobile.
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March 9th, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Albert Rogers said:
Wouldn’t be too surprising, even if they aren’t the most successful they are still successful at it.
Sailing ship operators also had to use wind power and were pretty successful at it, at least until something better came along and much of industry (what little there way) before the steam engine was powered by wind. It’s also pretty good at pumping water up from wells (though you do need a human powered backup for that, preferably not a playpump).
Albert Rogers said:
The airlines do it precisely to save money so they’ll have calculated exactly how much fuel they don’t burn by optimising the flight paths (though they could probably be improved by moving away from fixed skyways).
Albert Rogers said:
Having no coal, oil or methane meant they didn’t have a choice if they wanted to be self-sufficient so once they decided on that part it was relatively easy to switch to nuclear (at least in comparison to a country with significant domestic fossil fuel resources).
Of course it did take an oil crisis to convince the public they needed to be self-sufficient in electricity production.
Albert Rogers said:
Easier than Germany and Britain doesn’t mean it’s easy or even proven to be possible.
Albert Rogers said:
Britain doesn’t seem to be all that anti-nuclear, at the very least there does seem to be a realisation that they’ll need nuclear.
Albert Rogers said:
Not really, or at least it they have enough illogical beliefs that we can’t conclude that France’s nuclear power programme is due to a tendency of the people to be reality based.
Albert Rogers said:
Only a few, but they are vocal.
Albert Rogers said:
At the present time that is how it appears, hydro can’t supply all our needs (and not by a little), geothermal can supply even less and the other renewables are basically useless while we can’t reduce energy consumption as much as Amory Lovins believes we need to.
Albert Rogers said:
Capitalists will make a profit where they can, though it wouldn’t be surprising if they scheduled maintenance of reactors when it would be most profitable to have those reactors off-line.
Albert Rogers said:
Exactly what the effects of global warming will be is still open to question though it will probably have some significant negative effects. Past changes in CO₂ concentration at the rate we’re observing today did correlate with mas extinctions but also tended to correlate with other things as well (e.g. asteroid impacts) so only present a worst case (but it’s still good reason not to emit CO₂ when you have an alternative that’s better on safety and economics grounds).
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March 10th, 2012 at 4:03 am
“It is easy for California and France to not use coal because they have none.”
France does have coal, a lot of coal. It can gasify its underground coal in north France or strip mine its coal in la Nièvre. But the French nuclear lobby wouldn’t share its cake. That’s why shale gas drilling has recently been banned (yes, banned !). It’s all politics, or more precisely political capitalism, sometimes with the serendipitous aid of greenies.
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March 10th, 2012 at 5:03 am
Anon said:
I wonder if the privation France suffered during the German occupation (when it was cut off from American oil and British coal) was also a factor in encouraging France to adopt nuclear energy on a large scale.
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March 11th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
“11.There’s simply no way of reducing the carbon footprint of aircraft by any significant amount other than just not flying as much. Fuel is already the number one expense to airlines, so they already take all reasonable measures to conserve it. There’s really nothing other that can be used to fuel an aircraft other than hydrocarbons. Hydrogen is too low density and requires special handling and storage. Ammonia is only slightly better and batteries are far too heavy.”
And that’s exactly what the environmentalists want. The true nature of their agenda, whether they realize it or not, is to send us back in time to the “eco friendly” time of the Dark Ages. Next thing you know they’ll be advocating the horse drawn carriage to get around.
“France does have coal, a lot of coal. It can gasify its underground coal in north France or strip mine its coal in la Nièvre. But the French nuclear lobby wouldn’t share its cake. That’s why shale gas drilling has recently been banned (yes, banned !). It’s all politics, or more precisely political capitalism, sometimes with the serendipitous aid of greenies.”
France’s choice of mostly nuclear has lead them far in away to have the cleanest air in the region. Coal is dirty and polluting, and mining it is dirty and dangerous. Germany’s attempt to ditch nuclear has actually lead them to build a large number of new coal power stations and refit their older stations for higher capacity (ie burn more coal). Less nuclear = more coal.
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