5 ways to reduce air travel's carbon footprint
Interview with
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, January is usually the time when we think about booking a holiday in warmer climes. However, for the most environmentally conscious of us at least, deciding whether to fly is usually a factor. Not only is it hugely expensive. But it also carries a big carbon footprint. UCL’s Mark Maslin has been writing about exactly that in The Conversation…
Mark - The aviation industry emits about 3% of global greenhouse gases. That's huge. But if you consider that concrete manufacturing is about 6% and actually 6% of oil production is actually used for manufacturing of plastics.
Chris - How does that compare, Mark, with say a data centre, the internet as a whole? Because we've got a huge investment and a big drive to use more AI and that sort of technology. That's incredibly processor hungry. So how does the internet stack up against aviation?
Mark - The big difficulty here is that you can have a data centre, or data centres, which are using huge amounts of electricity, but many companies are using renewable energy to make sure that they feed those hungry systems. So therefore you can have data centres that don't emit greenhouse gases or not very much. Whereas the aviation industry, we really do not have an alternative to aviation fuel or kerosene. Some of my competitors, you know, other universities are looking at 2040 and 2050, maybe hydrogen, maybe electric. But we don't have a solution now and that's why we set the centre up, the Center for Sustainable Aviation,. to look at solutions now we need to clean up the industry now to try and make it as sustainable as possible. So it joins the journey to net zero by 2050. There are so many things that we can do from engine manufacturing to building sustainable airports all the way through to the passenger experience, to how we actually fly the planes, all of which can contribute to reducing the amount of emissions that the industry produces.
Chris - Let's go through your recommendations then, because there are five of them. You've got a numbered list of these. What's number one?
Mark - So the first one is actually just planning where and how you fly your aeroplanes. If you actually optimise routes, firstly, you can reduce the amount of travel and therefore the amount of fuel you use. But also if you make sure the aircraft are perfectly lined up, they can land straight away. Because one of the real things that burns a huge amount of fuel is when of course the aircraft spins round and round for an hour, two hours, waiting for a landing spot. And of course this is where AI is gonna help to make sure that the planes don't get into traffic jams.
Chris - Are traffic jams a major contributor though? I'd never really thought about that. I know obviously there's a bit of stacking and that, but what fraction of the emissions then are just planes parked in the air effectively?
Mark - Well, unfortunately we really don't know because that sort of data isn't available. And this is why we are working very closely with the aviation industry and we're working with a very large number of airlines to say, look, give us your data. We'll find out. So you can then say, look, we have saved this amount.
Chris - What's number two?
Mark - Again, it's about making aeroplanes more efficient. So the really brand-new spanking-new aeroplanes are really efficient. They use all the tricks of aerodynamics to make sure that they use as less fuel as possible. But of course not all aeroplanes are like that. So we can retrofit older aeroplanes by making sure that they have sort of like winglets to reduce drag. We can improve sort of like how the cabins are actually sort of designed. And one of the interesting things is the weight distribution within an aeroplane. The biggest problem is you really want the weight at the back. You want the nose to be always being pulled up. The problem is we put the really heavy first class chairs or rooms in the front of the plane. So we need to actually think about how we design the inside of an aeroplane to make sure it's as efficient as possible.
Chris - And number three?
Mark - Ooh, this one is the switch to sustainable fuels. Now we can actually make synthetic fuels. So we can make artificial kerosene. You take water, you take CO2 out of the atmosphere and you use a shed load of renewable energy and you can create artificial fuel. But what we need to do is to share the SAFs fairly. We can't just have one airline going, Hey, we, we are cornering the market in SAFs and other airlines having to use sort of like normal kerosene. So we need sensible policies to bring in SAFs as quickly as possible. And of course it's about who has the know-how to actually be able to mix the SAFs into the normal fuels. So some airports already have invested in that technology and some haven't. And this actually may come to the next point which is point 4, which is about how do we make airports more eco-friendly? There are about 575 new airport projects around the world. So what we need to do is make sure that they are fully sustainable, make sure that they have all the actual technology that's needed to make sure that SAFs get onto the plane. Secondly, we make sure that all the airports run on renewable energy such as solar and wind. All those little vehicles that pull the food to the aeroplane that move the baggage around that even move the actual planes around. We need to make all of those electric as well so we can actually design airports which are eco-friendly and very, very efficient.
Chris - But what about being eco-friendly and very, very efficient to get to? Because the numbers that you are sighting capture the fact that you've got thousands of people in thousands of vehicle movements going to and from wherever they live to an airport that's all got a carbon footprint as well, surely.
Mark - Oh, thank you Chris. That's number five. Smart travel. We can rethink the passenger experience. And one of the biggest problems is we have people that start off at home with huge heavy bags. They then take a taxi or they take their car to the airport. Well, how about rethinking that? How about we have electric vans that go round for each flight and pick up all the baggage and efficiently take it to the airport. So all you have to do is take your hand luggage, get onto public transport, which hopefully is electric, and you get to the airport. We can also start thinking about whether you need to take your skis? Do you need to take your surfboard? Do you need to take the golf clubs with you? Do you need to take all of your toiletries and all the heavy stuff that you always have to take with you? Why not have those at the destination? So therefore people can pack a lot lighter. You probably have gone on those cut price airlines where they go, 'right, if you take a bag that's going to be an extra $40 or £40'. They're already trying to force passengers to think about weight.
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