The purest piffle about aviation and climate change

We’ve touched, recently, on the subject of aviation and climate change emissions. There’s now someone in The Guardian spouting the purest piffle on the subject:

Britain is boiling – and the government wants to dramatically expand UK aviation

Leo Murray

Its ‘jet zero’ strategy relies on the invention of pie in the sky technologies to tackle dangerous airline emissions

The first point is about scale. Currently aviation is some 2% of emissions. The UK’s share of that is about the same as that of global GDP. 2% or so, around and about. Us all going to Benidorm is perhaps 0.04% of the global problem. This is a rounding error. Even if we accept that in the future aviation might become 20% of all emissions that’s because all other emissions decline by 90%. Making the effects of the residual, again, a rounding error.

Aviation simply isn’t an important part of the problem, however much weight we might want to put on there being a problem in the first place.

This doesn’t stop people like Mr. Murray aiming to ration flights so that we all gain less of what we desire. Presumably to provide some sort of bansturbation pleasure from doing so. As one of us put it a couple of decades back in The Times:

One candidate is the verb “to bansturbate” (origin, Harry Haddock, who blogs at nationofshopkeepers.wordpress.com). The word – a fusion of “ban” and the term for self-abuse – refers to both the public abuse of the rights of the citizenry as things that some people simply disapprove of are made illegal, and the near-sexual frisson of pleasure gained by those who pass such laws.

But while such sumptuary laws might give that sexual frisson to some - and who are we to argue with how some gain their jollies these days? - the real problem is that it’s based upon gross, gross, ignorance:

Then there’s so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” or SAFs. These are usually nothing of the sort – because burning huge amounts of biomass or waste is also extremely detrimental to the climate. The “jet zero” strategy also relies heavily on greenhouse gas removals to balance the books. This concept would allow airlines and airports to continue polluting for decades, putting off real action to cut emissions now with the hope that unicorns will arrive some day to suck those millions of extra tonnes of pollution out of the sky and store it underground.

The truth is there is only one method for reducing aviation emissions that we know works, but the government refuses to do it: reduce the number of flights.

No. We already know how to make sustainable aviation fuels. Not already know, people (our example here is Shell but they’re not the only people) are already doing it. If you’ve got green hydrogen, which renewables and electrolysis can easily - if not as yet all that cheaply - provide, then the chemistry of moving up to synthetic jet fuel is not just simple it’s been known for a century.

The Stern Review tells us not to try to plan, in any detail, our response or solution to climate change. This is wrapped up in the usual economic strictures about the paucity of information available to the planners, the inefficiency of central direction as compared to market forces and so on.

What is actually meant is that we don’t want planning because we’ll end up with plans of the most perfect piffle as a result of the gross ignorance of the planners.

Mr. Murray, the door is over there. Don’t let it tap your tushie on the way out.