Carbon Emissions from Planes Worse than Previously Thought
This grim news was released in a report that was produced by the US Department of Transportation, Eurocontrol, the Manchester Metropolitan University, and QinetiQ, a tech company.
The report showed that current carbon emissions from air travel is actually 20% worse than was previously thought. Carbon emissions from the airline industry are expected to reach 1.5 billions tons per year by 2025 with the growth in flights, particularly short haul. This figure is far worse than even the worst predictions that came from the most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It can be hard to understand what exactly emissions of that size mean, so to put it in perspective, it represents about half the emissions produced by the entire European Union.
The report was created for an aviation conference in Barcelona later this year, but not surprisingly was dropped from the schedule when the results were discovered. Only when the report was unearthed by the Aviation Environment Federation did it become public.
The airline industry is currently exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, which binds countries to specific emissions reduction targets. The reaction of the International Air Transport Association, a trade group that represents over 200 airlines, was rather expected. “With fuel costs doubling in the last year, airlines already have an incentive to work towards greater efficiency,” according to a spokesman for the group. He added further, “There has been a 70 percent improvement in fuel efficiency in the last four decades. Aviation is a benchmark of environmental responsibility for others to follow.” Hard to say if the spokesman actually believed what he sasid, but hard to believe that anyone listening to him did.
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