Aviation Fuel Consumption Coming Onto Radar Screen

Pollution from commercial aviation gradually is becoming an issue. The Lex Column in Financial Times (UK) said October 31 that “air travel causes at least 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the UN. Although this is tiny compared with transport as a whole, which contributes a quarter of emissions, it is growing fast. The European Union estimates that, by 2012, the absolute increase in EU15 aviation pollution will counteract about a quarter of the emissions reductions required under Kyoto.”

The New York Times on October 30 ran an Eric Pfanner story, “New Culprit in Climate Change? Try Airlines.” The report includes this: “Eco-campaigners say air travel is one of the fastest-growing producers of emissions linked to global warming. But flying has been somewhat sheltered from their ire until recently—perhaps because of its popularity with consumers, businesspeople and environmental activists alike.”

And this: “With Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ focusing attention on climate, some politicians see an opening to start a public discussion on the environmental impact of flying. In Britain, for example, Conservative Party leader David Cameron recently said he favored a tax on short-haul flights as a way to curb the growth of emissions…Eurostar, which runs the high-speed train service linking London to Paris and Brussels via the Channel Tunnel, has started running ads in travel trade publications asserting that a journey produces only one-tenth the carbon dioxide emissions of a comparable flight. Some of the ads include a drawing of an airplane in the form of a burning cigarette.”

This week’s study chaired by Sir Michael Stern, former World Bank chief economist, should add to the “opening” referred to above.

Here in the US, even Amtrak in its 2003 condition (still with lots of express freight adding to energy consumption) consumed 18% less energy per passenger-mile than commercial aviation and 17% less than automobiles, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Imagine how much better those numbers could be if the US even modestly improved its commitment to passenger rail. (A passenger-mile is one passenger transported one mile; use of passenger-mile figures thus takes into account actual load factors, unlike “seat-miles”.)

—Ross Capon