From net-zero to jet-zero: imagine a no-emissions lifestyle in 2050 - and resist the idea that technofixes can expand aviation in the 2020s
We enjoyed this article from New Scientist - you’ll have to subscribe to read in full - which imagines a story of a carbon net-zero day in the life of Isla, in 2020. Here’s an extract from the piece:
When the alarm goes off, the torrential rain outside is almost enough to send Isla back under her duvet. That’s unusual for a late summer day. Drier and much hotter summers have been the norm for years here in the south of the UK. Mind you, unpredictable weather has become a feature of life in recent years.
Fortunately, Isla’s home is the same steady 20°C all day long, comfortable and draught-free. The idea of a home where the temperature fluctuates constantly, like her parents used to have, is alien to her. She doesn’t even know what the temperature is. An algorithm learned the warmth she prefers.
Walking downstairs, Isla glimpses the unit in her garden that extracts heat from the air. Apart from some relatives in Yorkshire who still have hydrogen boilers from a big trial back in the 2020s, everyone she knows has a heat pump like this.
Making a cup of tea, Isla’s kettle looks the same as the ones her mother used three decades ago. But 95 per cent of the electricity it uses comes from wind and solar farms, a far cry from 40 per cent in 2020. The milk in her tea came from a cow. She knows that is old-fashioned, but still seeks it out in the boutique section of her online supermarket, despite the ubiquity of plant-based milk.
Today is a rare in-person day at the office. Unusually, Isla owns rather than shares an electric car – it is one of the reasons she never bothered getting a separate home battery. Charging it overnight when there is a glut of wind power sees prices flip, so firms pay to use it. Her battery stopped charging a few minutes ago, so it is warm and at its most efficient.
Driving out of town, she passes rows and rows of houses and offices with green roofs. They soon give way to a former industrial estate, now rows of boxes that look a little like jet engines, fans whirring away. They are machines to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air, fitted a few years ago by a big CO2 removal firm, Shell.
A brief journey up the motorway sees her whizzing past the lorry lane with its tram-style power cables that run above the trucks. There are more power pylons running alongside the road than when she was a child.
Back-to-back meetings at the office are followed by lunch out. Walking to a restaurant, she passes through the greenery of the Old Car Park, the wooded enclave that the local council deliberately allows to flood in winter. Isla and her dining companion both choose a burger. Not from an animal, obviously.
Beef is on the menu as a high-end rarity with lots of words expended to explain its husbandry and genetic editing to curb methane emissions. It is too expensive for this casual lunch. A plant-based burger is cheaper, and does just fine.
Sleepy afterwards, Isla takes a half-day and heads home for a walk to wake herself up. The first growth phase of the Great Southern Forest seems to go on forever these days, and it is a welcome refuge from the mid-afternoon heat fast evaporating the morning’s rain.
Emerging from the wood, she walks uphill through the looming elephant grass that will soon be harvested to make fuel for planes flying overhead. From the highest point, she can see a handful of cattle and sheep. She finds it hard to imagine that these rolling hills were once covered with them.
Later on, her home is still cool. Like most of her neighbours, she has no air conditioning, instead having automatic shutters for her windows, a big awning for shade and a natural ventilation system.
That evening, she calls her friends. One sits chatting with the sea behind her, the 236-metre-tall blades of the Hornsea Three wind farm just about visible. Another friend in London bemoans the second days above 38°C they have had this year.
Winding down later, Isla plans a holiday. She skims past the long-haul flights, which some of her friends still take despite the rising cost of mandatory CO2 removal and the moral opprobrium that flying attracts. Happily, as she scrolls on her phone before bed, she finds the perfect option to dream about: a luxury train tour of Norwegian vineyards.
More here (subscription required) for the hard science behind the vision of Isla’s world.
And while we’re on the topic of aviation, we won’t get to net-zero if we think we can have “jet-zero” - that’s a continuation of the rise in air-travel through the 2020s and beyond.
The Ecologist magazine has published a two-part post, 1: Jet Zero and the Politics of the Technofix, and 2: Jet Zero - a one way ticket to climate hell, which disassemble the current UK govts’ idea that technological innovation (electric flight, hydrogen fuel and other efficiencies) will allow an increase in aviation without a commensurate increase in carbon emissions.
The UK Gov’s Jet Zero consultation ended on 8th September, and the Ecologist writers take most of the claims to pieces. Their sections on ‘Alternatives’ and their conclusion are particularly worth reading:
Alternatives
Restricting aviation demand does not mean banning the annual bucket- and-spade holiday. In Britain 15 percent of the population take 70 percent of the flights, and in any given year 50 percent don’t fly at all. The average income of the 15 percent is £115,000 while the 50 percent are overwhelmingly working class.
Nationally and globally, it’s the rich who fly most. Introducing a frequent flyer levy, for example, would not penalise the once-a-year holiday in the sun. Instead, it is a fair way of taxing environmental damage and equitably restricting demand.
Most business communications can be conducted online - indeed, Covid 19 has exposed business travel’s great unspoken truth: much of it has nothing to do with business.
Some form of rationing will be needed, but it must be linked to progressive reform on other fronts. For instance, Jonathan Neale proposes, those taking a long-haul flight should be constrained to stay abroad for at least a month, but with employers obliged by law to permit lengthy vacations to accommodate this.
Likewise, if government forced employers to be flexible, slow-moving zero-emission ships could offer an alternative for some long-distance journeys.
The case for aviation contraction won’t be a vote winner unless linked to proposals that address popular concerns. If campaigners are to bring the aviation industry back down to earth, the vision must be of a habitable planet and of appealing travel alternatives.
To replace short-haul flights, trains, and electrified coaches - perhaps hooked to overhead power lines along motorways - should be subsidised, reliable, accessible and affordable for all - or even free.
Surveys consistently demonstrate that people prefer train journeys to flying. Where trains offer a viable alternative, such as between London and Paris, we see passenger demand for aviation collapsing.
While possibly suffering from a similar strain of techno-utopianism to that challenged in these articles, dirigibles offer an additional low emissions alternative to aeroplanes. Governments should revive night trains. Cruising at a modest 125 mph, a train from London could, with stops, easily reach Barcelona in eight hours, Moscow in twenty.
All these initiatives would create new jobs, for which workers departing the aviation industry should, in a just transition, be given priority.
Conclusion
To prevent a Hothouse Earth and the bleakest dystopias of climate chaos and species extinction, the fossil fuel economy must be rapidly shut down from both ends: supply and demand. In its place we need an economy that operates safely within planetary boundaries while also providing "a good life for all”.
Our critique of Jet Zero is not opposing investment in new technologies such as synthetic fuel, CCS or DAC. But if these remain essentially technofixes, neon green fig leaves to conceal the continuation of an insupportable ‘business as usual’ and to boost profit margins in polluting industries, they’ll be worse than superfluous.
As it stands, the airlines, hand in glove with government, are using these “solutions” to carve out space for an expansion of their operations. The aviation industry cannot be given free rein to grow based on false promises. Instead, it must be scaled down, and allowed to re-grow only if the life cycle of aircraft can be designed to avoid GHG emissions entirely.
As the IPCC recently stated, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented” change is required across all areas of society. Jet Zero is ignoring this advice—we must not.
More here. We keep tracks of the aviation debate in these archives