For us not to travel means staying in Toronto through the winter. With both my wife and I getting older and less mobile, remaining in the winter cold is not appealing. And frankly with fewer years left to us as septuagenarians, the chance to travel while we are still able medically is not something we would willing give up. So the least we can do is pay the carbon offset.
Carbon offsetting which we personally are practicing is predicted to become a multi-billion dollar business by 2025 according to Citigroup with the costs being absorbed by airlines and passed along to customers through increased airfares. The projected amount in offsets is expected to grow to $6.2 billion annually by then,
In personally choosing to pay for carbon offsets, we hope to reduce our collective carbon footprint regardless of the actions or inaction of the airline we fly.
What’s driving us to pay for the carbon we produce may be far different from what is driving airlines to look at carbon offsets. In their case it may be flight shaming.
When Greta Thunberg chose not to fly to the United Nations conference in New York, from Europe, she made of point of shaming the airline industry for its CO2 contributions to global warming. Thunberg chose to book passage on an ocean-going zero-carb0n catamaran which sailed across the Atlantic to land her in New York.
Ideally, it would be great to get to zero carbon for every sector of the global economy including aviation. But the likelihood of getting there soon for the airline industry seems next to impossible. Fossil-fuel powered commercial aircraft would have to be replaced by models powered by hydrogen, or electricity. They would have to be capable of long-distance travel carrying passenger loads equivalent to today’s aircraft.
If you look at aviation development then, shouldn’t we see the first prototypes being built? Nary a one in sight at the moment. Instead, we have small-load, short-haul demonstration technology at present and are probably a decade or more away from zero-carbon replacements to current passenger air fleets. That’s why for the duration it appears that the offset strategy is the route to go to give airlines a bit of reprieve before non-fossil fuel alternatives can emerge.
Among the early adopters of carbon offsets is the U.S. carrier, JetBlue. The company last month told investors that carbon emissions are “a clear and present danger” not just to the aviation industry, but the planet, and announced plans to become carbon neutral to address customer concerns over commercial flying’s impact on climate change. The airline announced:
Stated Robin Hayes, CEO of the airline, “Air travel connects people and cultures and supports a global economy, yet we must act to limit this critical industry’s contributions to climate change…We reduce where we can and offset where we can’t. By offsetting all of our domestic flying we’re preparing our business for the lower-carbon economy that aviation – and all sectors – must plan for.”
The alternative to offsets as advocated by some pundits is to stop commercial aviation entirely until zero-carbon technology can be put in place. Imagine the impact that would have on tourism, and commerce across the planet. Would the vast majority of us support such a move? I think not.
Among them was the Boeing 737 Max 8 grounding after two accidents which killed 189 and 157 respectively. Boeing tried to blame pilot error until it was revealed that the redesign of the 737 airframe to accommodate larger, more fuel-efficient engines changed the airplane’s aerodynamics requiring compensating automatic pilot software called MCAS, for which human pilots were never trained.
Then there was environmental activist pressure on the aviation industry to accelerate decarbonization.
Among new technologies being introduced was the first electric-powered commercial aircraft.
While passenger volumes continued to increase with more commercial aircraft in the air than at any time in the past, accountability and sustainability concerns became part of the conversation in the boardrooms of avionics and airline companies.
Aerial taxis and in and intercity autonomous air vehicles appeared in trials of an entirely new type of air passenger service.
Drones continued to make aviators nervous as these tiny airborne robots grew in numbers explosively.
Commercial supersonic air travel was once again in the headlines with NASA promising a silent successor to the ill-fated Concorde sometime in 2021. No more sonic booms meant these aircraft could fly over land without restriction.
Scramjet hypersonic transport was in the planning stages with companies like Airbus working on prototypes.
Sabre, Reaction Engines hybrid hydrogen-air rocket plane moved one step closer to becoming the first powered space plane to fly both in the atmosphere and space using a combination air-breathing jet and rocket engine.
And in the regulatory environment, significant problems emerged in light of the two Max 8 crashes and what rot was exposed subsequently in the fallout at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In what in hindsight is seen as a mistake, the FAA had given Boeing a larger role in overseeing the safety of its aircraft, passing along its own engineering reports to the regulatory body which then provided a rubber stamp. Many countries’ aviation authorities took FAA recommendations in good faith. A big mistake!
On the military side of avionics, the rise in autonomous aircraft represented the early evolution of robotics replacing human fighter pilots.
Rather than confined to speculation and science fiction, weaponized drone swarms came closer to becoming a reality in 2019.
New fighter jet models revealed and in planning stages from the United States, Europe, Japan, and China featured more autonomy, more firepower, and more stealth.
Russia introduced a hypersonic weapon designed to evade any existing anti-ballistic missile system, potentially ushering in a new space arms race.
The United States launched its new military arm, the Space Force, increasing the likelihood that the United Nations’ conventions agreed to by most nations on the planet about the peaceful use of outer space would soon end.
And in the world of commercial rockets and satellites, a burgeoning industry continued to reveal that national space programs were overpriced and under deliverers when it came to getting satellites aloft.
The NASA commercial space crew program continued to lag behind the timetable originally established to put Americans into low-Earth orbit and on the International Space Station. Instead, NASA continued to purchase seats on Soyuz rockets and capsules, a technology some 5o-years old and showing signs of aging with a near disaster in one launch.
And junk continued to fill near-Earth space with no solution to begin the cleanup available until the mid-2020s. How bad has the space junk problem become? Several times in 2019, the International Space Station needed to move its orbit to avoid collision with pieces of debris from past missions and moribund satellites still circling the planet.
