Sky Gods | Storyteller

[NOTE: Sky Gods available until August 21, 2023.]

Airplanes are like Gods to us. They defeat the biggest things; gravity, distance, time, loneliness but Bernice Notenboom feels uncomfortable about flying so much. She is a climate reporter, flying has been a wonderful magic carpet to her, but her love of flying has a cost.

This dilemma, to fly despite its damaging effects is amplified when Bernice learns about the new science on contrails which are more damaging than C02. Together C02 and contrails account for 3.5% of the globe’s climate emissions. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but for aviation they have no real way to solve the problem and their growth is exploding.

The busiest air traffic day in history – 225,000 flights, 12 million passengers, all over the globe on a single day. In all of 2019, 4 billion seats were sold, twice those sold just 12 years before. Business travelers, new Chinese passengers and the flying Millennials are fueling this growth. It seems so normal to Bernice she feels that everyone flies …. but they don’t.

Less than 10% of the world’s population has never been on a plane. The inequity of flying hits home to Bernice. If aviation can’t decarbonize quickly, it will, by 2030, eat up a huge part of the carbon budget that we need to keep under 2 degrees of warming.

The aviation industry took notice. It decided to deal with its emission problem not by curbing growth but by making flying more efficient.

Efficiencies in fuel, aircraft design, and even in the way we fly can make some gains with cutting emissions but still, growth overtakes these gains. To keep the promise that by 2020 all its growth would be carbon neutral, the aviation industry plans to offset the rest of its emissions.

But at the end of 2019, as more people were wondering if we may be flying too much for the health of our planet, everything suddenly stopped. COVID 19 boarded planes and flew around the world, and the global pandemic decimated the aviation industry. What it meant not to be able to fly was instantly experienced.

Solving the aviation industry’s carbon crisis is emblematic of solving the whole climate emergency. The critical issue is that aviation, unlike most other industries, does not have a maturing technology available to manage the shift.

Hydrogen planes are the future but hydrogen planes with their emissions free promise are nowhere near ready. What could be developed now, to use in the planes we presently have, to solve aviation’s immediate emissions?

The climate emergency requires immediate action. In the shadow of the pandemic, airlines and governments are making pledges and regulations that expand the use of many kinds of what are called Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFS) because they can be used immediately in today’s planes.

There are many options. From the most basic organic SAFS, made from logging waste in Sweden, to more renewable SAFS like those planned to be made from wind and hydrogen in Groningen and Amsterdam, to the visionary Lanzatech company that lowers the emission costs of making fuel by taking carbon out of emissions themselves, the field is full of enthusiastic plans for vast expansion of industries that are still in their infancy. All must be pursued, because we can’t just offset the emissions growth of aviation or society; we must actively reduce the bottom line; and no single fuel can be made in enough quantity to be a single answer.

Yet technology is not the most critical part of that future. That key element is the force of human attitudes and choice.

From Sweden, where young people challenge the future with movements like fly shame and train bragging, to China, where vast numbers of millennials have not yet chosen how they will address a warming world, we see the powers of our Sky Gods to rule or ruin our world now reaching a point of critical choice. And the decision comes down not just to feats of technical invention but to the courage of the human heart.

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