Travellers take lead on climate crisis

Some forgo flying as critics blast sustainable fuel as too little too late

Gideon Forman has sworn off flying.

“I’ve read so much about the climate emergency and I really want to take it seriously,” he said. “So I asked myself: ‘What can I do in my own life that will be up to the challenge?’ ”

Over the years, Forman, 60, a policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, has taken planes for work and pleasure, travelling to Israel, South Africa and Europe. In 2019, he said enough was enough.

Forman is part of a small but growing number of climate-conscious people who are eschewing flying because of the huge amount of greenhouse gases it produces.

A single ticket on a roundtrip flight between Toronto and Paris, for example, produces three times more carbon than it takes to heat an average Ontario household with natural gas all winter.

Collectively, while flying only produces about three per cent of Canada’s annual carbon emissions, it’s one of the few sectors (along with oil and gas extraction) where emissions are going in the wrong direction.

Carbon emitted by domestic and international flights has increased 25 per cent since 2012, when the federal government published its “Action Plan” to reduce aviation emissions.

Since then, the only climate commitment Canada has made about aviation is that it will be net zero by 2050, when the entire country is supposed to be as well.

To get there, airlines and the government are banking on sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), which promise to lower emissions produced by airplanes by up to 80 per cent.

SAF is jet fuel derived from recycled cooking oils, forestry byproducts and even garbage, refined until it’s chemically identical to jet fuel made from petroleum. This means it’s a “drop-in” solution that requires no modification to existing jet engines or airline infrastructure.

That simplicity has garnered a lot of enthusiasm. But critics say SAFs are a too-little-too-late solution that masks the only surefire way to reduce aviation emissions: reduce the number of flights taking off every day.

For the time being, SAFs remain more of a curiosity than a real option for travellers.

Last April, on Earth Day, Air Canada ran four commercial flights between San Francisco and major Canadian cities powered by SAF. In June, WestJet fuelled its first commercial flight with SAF — a co-ordinated demonstration of the technology with other airlines at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Unlike biofuels such as ethanol, which are made from crops that could otherwise produce food, SAFs are produced from waste and byproducts.

“Used cooking oil used to go down the drain,” said Theodore Rolfvondenbaumen, a spokesperson for Neste, a Finnish oil and gas company that transitioned to making sustainable fuels in the 1990s.

Now, Neste collects that oil from over 55,000 restaurants before filtering and refining it. The resulting fuel can end up as diesel for trucks, or as SAF, which is being used by musical acts such as Coldplay to cut the carbon footprint of their concert tours.

Yes, burning SAF still produces carbon emissions, Rolfvondenbaumen says, but the difference between it and fossil fuels comes when you look at the lifecycle of carbon in each fuel. Jet fuel made from petroleum takes carbon that had been sequestered underground for millions of years and releases it into the atmosphere. SAFs take carbon that was already in the atmosphere before it was briefly sequestered by plants and re-releases it into the air.

“Instead of digging up carbon, we’re using carbon that was already in the atmosphere,” Rolfvondenbaumen

says.

The only added emissions come from the refining process, he says, which make up 20 to 30 per cent of total emissions from flying.

With a current production of almost 130 million litres of SAF, Neste plans to ramp up to 2.3 billion litres by the end of next year.

This kind of exponential growth is what airlines are counting on. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), which represents virtually every airline in the world, last year committed to net zero by 2050. Two-thirds of those reductions are slated to come from SAFs.

Air Canada is investing $50 million in SAFs, which will replace one per cent of its fuel by 2025. The airline has committed to a climate action plan to reduce emissions by 20 per cent by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050.

WestJet calls SAFs its “big opportunity” and is actively pursuing partnerships to develop production in Canada. “This is in our view the best near-term, large-scale decarbonization option for the industry,” says Gareth Lewis, director of sustainability at WestJet.

But making flying climate-friendly will not be easy.

“Decarbonizing aviation is perhaps the most difficult engineering challenge that anyone faces,” Jim Harris, a partner at international consulting group Bain & Company, says in a video.

While there are plans to develop hydrogen- and electric-powered aircraft, these technologies are still on the drawing board and will likely only work on short- and mediumhaul flights, leaving SAFs as the only currently viable option.

“The challenge is there just isn’t enough available supply,” Harris says.

SAF production only represents about one per cent of global jet fuel demand, according to Bain, and scaling up cannot be done fast

enough. Production will only reach 18 per cent of demand by 2040, according to International Energy Agency projections.

To make up this shortfall, Bain says SAFs from alternative sources must be developed — from municipal waste and biomass — and production will need to increase by 400 times.

Currently, there is no SAF production in Canada, making it hard for Canadian airlines to procure it. And then there’s the cost: SAFs can be two to eight times more expensive than conventional jet fuel.

What’s more, current safety regulations limit SAFs to 50 per cent of the fuel mix in existing planes. While future jets will be able to handle 100 per cent SAF, the regulations drastically limit the emissions reductions achievable in the coming years.

“It’s going to take an enormous amount of capital to build the infrastructure and the green renewable energy to power that infrastructure,” said Harris.

This is why environment groups are hesitant to laud SAFs as a panacea for flying.

“There will be nowhere near enough SAFs to decarbonize the aviation industry,” said Greenpeace Germany’s Thomas Gelin. “This isn’t solving the problem whatsoever.”

“The reason airlines play this up is to counter the idea that we need to reduce the number of flights.”

The current growth in flights doesn’t mean more people are flying, just that those who fly are flying more. According to a 2019 academic study, one per cent of people are responsible for more than half of global aviation emissions, while almost 90 per cent of the world’s population doesn’t fly at all.

Despite being responsible for growing emissions, European airlines have no plan to comply with the 2030 Paris Agreement emission reduction targets, Greenpeace said. Instead, airlines benefit from free pollution permits for the EU carbon credit market.

In Europe, Greenpeace is calling for a ban on short-haul flights that can be reasonably replaced by train trips of six hours or less.

Back in Canada, more than 30 health and environment groups are similarly urging the federal government to move more quickly on reducing emissions from the aviation industry.

In an open letter sent to Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra last month, the groups, which include the Canadian Public Health Association, the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario and the David Suzuki Foundation, said: “Canada is lagging behind other countries — and its own airlines — by failing to commit to reduce aviation emissions in the near term.”

Citing Denmark, which has committed to making all domestic flights fossil-fuel free by 2030, and Air Canada’s 2030 pledge, the letter urged Ottawa to implement binding emission reduction targets of at least 30 per cent by 2030.

Transport Canada is set to release its new action plan for aviation emission reductions in the coming months.

Alghabra declined an interview request but said through a spokesperson the government is committed “to promote the development of sustainable aviation fuel, through international collaboration.”

Now that he’s given up flying, Forman says SAFs will not make him revisit the decision.

“We’re a long way off from really having zero-emission flights,” he said.

But that shouldn’t stop young people from going out and seeing the world.

“Do the best you can. Fly less if you can. Be conscious about it.”