Working under public relations philosophy that it’s generally a good idea to put yourself in position to get lots of public credit and praise for doing what you’re going to have to do anyway, Delta Airlines on Friday scored big points in the public’s conscience by announcing that it will spend a whopping $1 billion over the next decade to become the first U.S. global airline that will operate in a carbon neutral way.
That is, according to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, his carrier will produce no more carbon dioxide in the year 2030 than it will produce this year. Furthermore, it will do so despite the carrier’s expected aggressive growth – probably 3% or more annually – over the intervening 10 years. And achieving that goal will require Delta, now in some respects the world’s biggest airline, $1 billion. That’s a seemingly big number even for a company that brought in $47 billion in revenue last year.
LIke most airlines, Delta is adding lots of more fuel efficient planes to reduce costs and C02 … [+]
Bastian, however, carefully avoided saying it would cost Delta an extra $1 billion. Nor did he provide details on how his airline will offset all that increased flying and all the attendant additional emission of CO2 over this decade.
That’s because it is possible, maybe even likely that Delta – like other airlines around the world that have the same, mostly as-yet-unannounced goal of holding their carbon emissions neutral across this new decade – will spend $0 extra to achieve carbon neutrality. Delta likely will spend that $1 billion on reaching carbon neutrality by simply shifting money it otherwise would spend on other items, or by making sure that money it needs to spend anyway as part of its regular business plan gets spent wisely in terms of the resulting environmental impact.
Most Americans are aware of the Paris Climate Agreement – from which President Donald Trump withdrew the United States last year – and smaller international agreements aimed at slowing the climatological impact of CO2 and other emissions on Earth’s environment. But few know that such an agreement involving most of the world’s airlines was agreed to in 2016 at a meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization. That’s an agency of the United Nations. Beginning this year and running through 2023, more than 70 nations, including the United States, voluntarily will report their annual airline CO2 emission totals to ICAO. They also will be taking “voluntary” actions to slow their total CO2 production from aviation. In 2024 all but a handful of the world’s remaining nations will join in the reporting of that data. And by 2030, all those countries and their airlines are pledged to achieve aviation carbon neutrality vis-à-vis their 2020 emissions. And if airlines fail to keep their CO2 emissions thereafter at or below 2020 levels – no matter how much bigger carriers grow – they might be subject to big fines.
So, give Delta a hand for seizing the opportunity to gain a P.R. victory, of sorts, over its competitors by claiming that it’ll be the first “global” U.S. carrier to reach carbon neutrality. Bastian says that beginning March 1 it will begin operating in a carbon neutral fashion as a way of reaching its goal.
Only thing is, it won’t be the only carrier to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, or necessarily even be the first to get there. JetBlue in January was the first U.S. carrier to publicly commit to carbon neutrality. It’s just that Delta doesn’t consider JetBlue, which has only a small amount of service beyond the U.S. border, to be a “global carrier.”
Other domestic or mostly domestic U.S. carriers, from giant Southwest to Allegiant, also could achieve carbon neutrality as soon as or faster than Delta precisely because most or all of their operations are domestic – and thus, shorter – than internationally-focused Delta’s many international flights. By their very nature, long international flights emit more CO2 than do shorter domestic flights. (By the way, international flights, which typically operate at the highest altitudes flown by commercial airlines, are believed by many scientists and environmentalists to do more damage per ton of CO2 released into the atmosphere than domestic flights, which typically are flown 5,000 to 10,000 feet lower. That’s based on the hypothesis that CO2 and other toxic emissions cause more net damage to the atmosphere when they’re released into the very thin air at very high altitudes.)
Plus, there’s nothing to prevent Delta’s two big U.S.-based international rivals, United and American, from moving faster to reach carbon neutrality before Delta, though so far neither has indicated they have any such intentions.
Delta perhaps also should be congratulated for publicly placing a $1 billion earmark for carbon neutrality on its budgets over the next 10 years. But it’s not like it has a choice. Delta merely has put a public number on what its management thinks it’ll have to spend meet its carbon neutrality obligation under the ICAO plan.
American, United and even Southwest arguably could spend as much or more. And proportionately, smaller carriers could end up having to spend more per plane operated, or per available seat mile offered to consumers. Such comparative calculations literally won’t be possible until, well, 2030.
Nor is it known how Delta is arriving at its $1 billion estimate for its spending to achieve carbon neutrality.
There are only three viable paths toward carbon neutrality for airlines. And no, switching to electric-powered planes is not one of those viable paths. Battery technology today is likely 50 years or more away from being able to power even a relatively small Boeing 737-sized jetliner on a short domestic route. Even then, the electricity used to charge such enormous batteries would have to come from CO2-emitting generation stations. And the rare earth minerals such as lithium used in making batteries require the heavy use of large excavating and refining machinery that currently produce more CO2 emissions collectively than the use of those batteries in commercial aviation likely would save.
So, the airlines’ three options are:
· Buy new planes that are significantly more efficient in terms of fuel burned per available seat mile flown. Burning less fuel in 2030 to fly the exact route flown today could save a carrier 15% to 30% in the amount of fuel burned and, as a result, in the amount of CO2 emitted (not to mention similar on the purchase of fuel)
· Buy alternative fuels that have much lower CO2 emission characteristics on a per available seat mile basis
· Buy carbon offsets – which almost exclusively means investing millions of dollars in the planting of trees so that over the lifetime of the billions of trees planted through such a program those trees will scrub as much or more CO2 from the air as the airlines’ planes would emit during their entire useful service lives
None of those are cheap options.
One will take lots of time and advance planning, and depends on continued growth in demand for air travel. That’s not something those environmental activists now promoting the idea of “Flygskam” (“Flight Shaming in Swedish) as a way of reducing travel demand, probably want to see happen.
A second option will require enormous technical advancements, financial investments by third parties, and complex regulatory involvement on a global scale.
And the third would continue and deepen airlines’ – and their customers’ – involvement with reforestation and other environmental “repair” schemes that increasingly are being called out for sketchy financial and ethical practices and dubious effectiveness.
The most direct way that airlines have of reducing their C02 outputs is by buying the most modern planes and retiring older, less efficient models. But commercial jetliners are 20-year assets with price tags ranging from $100 million to $500 million per plane. Big international range jets, which because of the very long routes they serve, produce the most CO2, cost over $200 million on average. Even the wealthiest of airlines can afford to add only a dozen or two such planes a year. And while it may reduce their operating costs and CO2 emissions to get rid of older jets, unless those planes go directly to the bone yard they will continue flying, either for the growing airline itself, or for other airlines around the world. And it will continue to belch out lots more CO2 in the process. Thus, unless big airlines like Delta are willing to swallow the high cost of fully retiring jets that have lots of service life left in them, shifting to new planes is a relatively slow way to achieve net global reductions, or even mere neutrality in CO2 emissions.
Alternative fuels, typically made from non-carbon sources like animal and plant fats, are a popular alternative – at least in the minds of those not knowledgeable about either technical aircraft operations or the relationship between the atmosphere’s composition and Earth’s vegetation.
But those who understand how sensitive jet engines are – and the critical pathways that fuels must follow to reach those engines in flight – are keenly aware that despite all the talk, few such fuels can be simply swapped in for the kerosene-like fuel called Jet-A that airlines use. Nearly all alternative fuels lack certain qualities needed for jet engines to create adequate power and thrust, so they must be mixed with Jet-A to meet engines’ operating requirements. Ideally the mix would be a 50/50 blend of alternative fuel and Jet-A.
But like the planes and the engines themselves, such blends of fuel must be certified for use by regulatory authorities like the Federal Aviation Administration in this country. That also means that plane and engine makers must be brought into the long and complex testing and certification process with each airline seeking to use those blended alternative fuels. It’s a daunting process, even before the industry begins to tackle the big infrastructure issues like where will such fuels be refined and blended, how will they be transported and stored at various airports around the world, and how can they be kept separate from conventional Jet-A fuel in airports’ storage and pumping systems?
Beyond that, there are significant issues to be dealt with related to the acquisition of feedstocks for alternative fuels. Using palm oil, currently a popular feed stock, is believed by many to be a significant factor in deforestation. Algae, which once looked promising, is just too hard and too expensive to grow in the quantities required. Wild grasses, wood chips, animal waste, and the carcasses of animals killed for their meat in slaughterhouses all are viable sources of feedstock. But the fuel produced from those feedstocks all costs significantly more than Jet-A costs today. And that’s before the logistics and costs associated with moving such materials around the world to wherever they can be processed are added into the equation.
And, finally, the purchase of carbon offsets is at least as costly, if not more so than the cost of the other solutions. And it plunges airlines and their passengers into an ethically and environmentally challenged world of paying what effectively are “indulgences” for the sin of traveling.
Airlines, especially those who operate extensively or entirely in Europe already spend millions of dollars annually on offsets that are little more than schemes to make carriers pay to plant trees, mostly in third-world areas beset by man-caused deforestation – not deforestation directly resulting from C02 and other toxic emissions. But the math used to calculate how many trees it takes to offset the carbon produced by commercial flights is, to be kind, uncertain. Charges of legalized piracy are frequently leveled at governments that require carriers to make such payments. But such allegations are not as frequent as complaints (both from airlines and from the environmental lobby itself) that airlines are being defrauded by companies, or even governments that receive such offset payments but fail to plant anything close to the number of trees promised.
More recently, scientists and environmentalists have begun challenging basic assumptions about the efficacy such carbon offset schemes. The new claim is that it takes years for freshly planted saplings to become big enough and healthy enough to scrub the amount of CO2 from the atmosphere that they’re intended to do. As a result, the critics fret that the negative effects of CO2 emissions continue for years unabated, creating a kind of negative compounding effect. In short, such complaints are based on the belief that CO2 offset programs are perpetually falling farther and farther behind the curve of the build-up of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere.
So, kudos to Delta for its P.R. win. But nothing else of much importance was achieved.
