Every Time You Fly, You Trash the Planet — and There’s No Easy Fix

When the latest international Climate Conference wrapped up in Lima, Peru, last month, delegates boarded their flights home without much official discussion of how the planes that shuttled them to the meeting had altered the climate.

Aircraft currently contribute about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.  That might not seem like much, but if the aviation industry were a country, it would be one of the world’s top 10 emitters of CO2.  And its emissions are projected to grow between two and four times by 2050 without policy interventions[pdf].

Left unchecked, aviation emissions could help push global warming over the 2 degrees celsius line.  But cutting aviation’s impact poses a daunting challenge.

“Aviation is a global industry.  People want global solutions,” said Daniel Rutherford, an environmental engineer at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), an independent nonprofit.  Planes often take off in one country and land in another, making country-by-country regulations impractical.  For this reason, the task of addressing aviation’s climate consequences has fallen to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the United Nations agency in charge of negotiating aviation agreements.

Planes don’t just release carbon dioxide, they also emit nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and black carbon, as well as water vapor that can form heat-trapping clouds, said Rutherford, who serves as a technical observer to ICAO’s working groups on climate issues.  These emissions take place in the upper troposphere, where their effects are magnified.  When this so-called radiative forcing effect is taken into account, aviation emissions produce about 2.7 times the warming effects of CO2 alone, according to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Atmosfair, a German organization that sells “offsets” for people looking to compensate for the flights they take, offers a calculator that takes radiative forcing into account.  Its calculations show that a roundtrip flight from, say, Denver to New York produces the equivalent of nearly a year’s worth of emissions from a car, and more than the annual emissions of an average person living in India.

Read more at Every Time You Fly, You Trash the Planet — and There’s No Easy Fix