Guest essay by Mark Carter, in The Multiplural World, Nov 26, 2024
Introduction by The Multiplural World:
This essay first appeared in the eclectic, Australian foreign policy journal Pearls And Irritations on Nov 25, 2024. Mark Carter is a researcher in Australia on global warming. He helped to establish Flight Free Australia and the ‘No Third Tulla Runway’ coalition (which campaigns against a proposed third runway at Melbourne Airport). In 2018, he published ‘The Elephant In The Sky: The Hazards Of Aviation Emissions And How We Can Avoid Them’, a 32-page research paper (pictured, find it here).
This essay amounts to a call to apply ‘degrowth’ principles to the world’s aviation industry, even if the term itself is not employed. The essay does end on an odd note, with a call for ‘zero emissions’ air travel by the year 2050. But that is the stuff of science fiction. Today’s world is facing an existential crisis as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and as the imperialist governments of the world are embarked on rising militarism and war. Their war course targets Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and so many other countries. It is precisely crafted to evade and avoid any serious action to reduce global greenhosue gas emissions. So far, the global environmental movement has fallen prey to the war course by failing to properly indentify and oppose it. Instead, the movement is lost and adrift amidst its deep prejudices against Russia and China and its failure to properly understand 21st century imperialism and how to fight it and replace it with an alternative, social and economic path for humanity, that is, a path of planned economy and social justice. (end introduction)
By Mark Carter
For the aviation industry as a whole in Australia, and for the country’s federal government too, ‘net zero 2050’ is just the latest layer of greenwash. The industry is a serial offender, having misrepresented its global warming impact for decades.
Qantas says it doesn’t buy political favours. But it has illegally sacked its workforce, short-changed its customers, and in 2023 it paid no income tax. Now it chould be found guilty of greenwashing its efforts to reach net zero emissions by 2050. That’s not even the half of it.
Focusing on the failures of the aviation industry to reach ‘net zero’ targets allows a dangerous deception to remain out of sight: the illusion that net zero emissions by 2050 as a whole is where we need to go to keep warming to the Paris Agreement target.
Qantas’s claims about its net zero actions have been recently exposed as misleading by Climate Integrity. The claims serve the airline’s higher purpose in diverting attention from the reality that even if its emissions were independently validated as truly tracking to a ‘net zero 2050 target’, hitting that target won’t limit global warming to 2ºC.
For Qantas, ‘net zero 2050’ has never been a way to effectively and rapidly stop its contribution to global heating. It has known all along that it can’t do that and stay in business. Rather, for Qantas, ‘Net zero 2050’ is about maintaining its social license. It’s about maintaining the illusion that net zero emissions by 2050 is a safe climate destination.
If we can be sold that illusion, then we’ll keep flying and new runways can be built, even though both will enable increasing flight emissions. So long as the industry and government keep us in the dark about the ineffectiveness of the ‘net zero 2050’ plans they spring, we won’t know that these will more than likely push global warming to 3ºC and beyond. So long as we aren’t told about aviation’s climate crash flight path, we won’t know how quickly we really need to stop aviation emissions to avoid the crash.
For the aviation industry as a whole, and, for that matter, for the Australian government too, ‘net zero 2050’ is just the latest layer of greenwash. The industry is a serial offender, having misrepresented its global warming impact for decades.
Back in the day, the industry told us its emissions were marginal at best and not worthy of global attention. Then under political and social pressure, it was forced to address its emissions. Which is when it started greenwashing its accountability for aviation’s contribution to global heating.
In 2015, the aviation industry successfully avoided having its biggest generator of emissions, international flights, being regulated under the Paris Agreement. It argued that assigning flight emissions to the country of departure would be way too difficult, and anyway, it was better for the industry to self-regulate its emissions reductions.
In 2017, the global aviation industry set up CORSIA, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation to address only emissions in excess of 2019 levels and to make any subsequent cuts to them voluntary, not mandatory. This allowed for 60% of Qantas flight emissions to continue unabated.
Now, four years after Covid19 forced global cuts to air travel, flights and emissions have returned to the pre-Covid norm of 4% growth each year, while caveats to actual emissions reductions abound.
Even the Australian government is in cahoots. Under the Safeguard Mechanism, Qantas is required to cut its domestic emissions in 2022 by 4.9% each year to 2030, or from 4.4mt CO2e to 2.9mt — way short of the 2.3mt required by 2030 under the Climate Change Act’s inadequate 43% cuts to 2005 emissions.
But don’t worry, we’re told in the government’s Aviation White Paper, aviation will ‘look to maximising its contribution to reaching net zero emissions in 2050. Elsewhere, airlines say they’ll ‘work toward’ reducing emissions using so-called ‘sustainable aviation fuels’. But these don’t cut actual inflight emissions and will not completely replace jet diesel for decades if ever.
The industry tells us its actions are ‘climate friendly’, ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘climate positive’. Chris Bowen, minister for Climate Change and Energy since June 2022 in the Australian government, tells us that what the government is ‘trying to do is avoid the worst’ impacts, even though warming is right now nudging the Paris 1.5ºC threshold, and, according to the IEA, emissions in 2050 will be only marginally lower than now.
Industry tells us not to worry because it is focussing on trying to get to a ‘low carbon future’, even though the IPCC carbon budget for a net zero 2050 target only ever had a less than 50:50 chance of holding warming to 2ºC.
‘Net zero 2050’ greenwashing is a dangerous fantasy. It’s magical thinking. Is it even psychotic thinking? If we want to be safe we should be looking for the emergency exit.
The dangerous, deceitful and delusional diversions away from the necessity of immediate & deep aviation emissions cuts must be called out. The perpetrators — the aviation industry and its federal government regulator — must abandon the industry’s flight path, land the plane, and, stay grounded, aside from emergency flights, until flying is emissions free.
Comprehensive news and analysis of the global warming emergency appears each day on the ‘Ecology news’ page of The Multiplural World in the form of headlines, original weblinks, and occasional commentary by the website editors. The website page draws from the best environmental writing in the world. It has an editorial focused on the imperative of a ‘degrowth’ strategy to avert the worst of what the global warming emergency, as caused by expansionist capitalism, has in store for all of humanity. Here is the latest entry there:
Utilities in Japan aiming to build batteries big enough to store the massive and growing quantities of energy they plan to produce, report in Washington Post, Nov 26, 2024 …After decades of development, the world has figured out how to make wind turbines and solar panels cheaply and at massive scale. They’re starting to make a dent in energy production, accounting for 15 percent of electricity globally, according to the International Energy Agency. But now, a few of the regions that have adopted wind and solar most aggressively are finding some of that energy goes to waste because they can’t store it…
