can we continue to count on the development of aeronautics in the face of the climate emergency?
Think tanks are trying to answer the crucial question of the future of aeronautics in the flagship city of European aircraft manufacturer Airbus. The climate emergency context is mobilizing. Two texts, one by Supaéro, the other by associations, attempt to delicately advance this question.
A few days before the opening of the COP26 which will be held from October 31 to November 12, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland, the Copernic Foundation, Attac, Friends of the diplomatic world and the People’s University of Toulouse have just published a text that revives the debate on the future of aeronautics.
In Toulouse, the question is all the more crucial since the sector remains, despite the Covid crisis and the drop in air traffic, a key provider of economic development and jobs. Students and researchers of theISAE-SUPAERO, the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space, had published a few weeks earlier “Aviation and Climate Repository “, whose stated vocation is to constitute “an unprecedented scientific report to allow the construction of enlightened opinions “.
Climate emergency = immediate paradigm shift
In his text entitled, “Our children are sure to ask us what we were doing when the earth was on fire!“, a collective of associations of which the Copernic Foundation and Attac are part, affirms: “technical progress as a solution to the disorders created by the action of man on the world is no longer a credible paradigm. as in many other sectors, which is correct”.
“The displacement of hundreds of millions of human beings within the framework of mass tourism (the first vector, by far, for the development of air transport), which destroys ecosystems and, most of the time, only offers an illusory discovery of other peoples, cannot, and must not, continue. This awareness will accelerate with global warming and its consequences “.
Ashamed to fly
“The“ shame of taking the plane ”, born in the Nordic countries, big consumers of air travel, could be doubled by the“ shame of building planes. ”A multiplier and aeronautical companies will be confronted, in their factories and offices, having difficulty recruiting new skills “, predicts the text which calls on employees in these sectors to unite their skills to contribute, as a matter of urgency, to saving the planet.
The authors of this text explain that if the industrialists and the government announce the hydrogen plane for 2035, there is no solution for the fourteen years to come. Or, “almost all climate scientists agree that we have ten years, no more, to make the necessary decisions and act accordingly, before the switch to an unsustainable world that will endanger the ecosystem human with its procession of climatic catastrophes, pandemics, with the multiplication of zoonoses, exoduses of populations threatened by the rising waters, by the desertification of gigantic territories “.
Less traffic, fewer planes manufactured
For these associations, the aviation sector is not the only problem, but there is no responsibility for global warming. “We cannot continue to imagine the growth of air transport in the growth that we have observed for 20 years, explains Pascal Gassiot of the Copernic Foundation. A namely 4 billion passengers transported in 2025 and an increase which would lead, according to aircraft manufacturers’ requests, to 11 billion in 2050. “.
Hydrogen, a mirage?
For the signatory collective, the hydrogen plane is far from being a solution, it is even a “mirage”. “Behind the choice of hydrogen, it is, de facto, nuclear that is imposed on us. Why ? Because, to make hydrogen, you need a lot, a lot of electricity “. The authors of the text refer to a study by Atecopol, the Toulouse workshop for political ecology : “To cover, if only the needs of an airport like that of Roissy Charles de Gaulle, it would need 5,000 km² of wind turbines (between 10,000 and 18,000 wind turbines spread over the surface of a French department), or 1000 km² of photovoltaic panels, or even 16 nuclear reactors “.
“However, we see that this is the path chosen by Emmanuel Macron, who has just announced his choice to build” mini nuclear power plants “, notes Pascal Gassiot. Which raises the question of securing sites, concentrating production not to mention what to do with waste“.
Aviation collapse
The “Aviation climate referential” report that the ISAE-SUPAERO has just published has the ambition to provide data to invite “an in-depth democratic reflection on the place of air transport in a low-carbon world“. He begins with this observation: the Covid crisis has painful suffering and disarray, but climate change is a much heavier threat with these consequences on “the collapse of biodiversity, on human life in general, and on aviation in particular”.
Despite the improvement in aircraft energy efficiency, CO2 emissions increased by 42% between 2005 and 2019, solely due to the growth in air traffic. As the manifesto published by the associations mentioned above, it notes that only 10% of the world population flies each year. “And, in 2018, 1% of the world’s population was responsible for 50% of aviation emissions“.
What about biofuels?
The report carries 5 messages: aviation contributes to the accentuation of global warming, in particular via the contrails of which little is said. If we add up the CO2 and non-CO2 effects, commercial aviation represented 5.1% of the climate impact over the period 2000-2018.
The reduction of non-CO2 effects can be envisaged in the short term even if the techniques are not yet operational. She can not “to replace the efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the sector” for the signatories of the report. Or, in this area, the only levers are incremental improvements, that is to say improvements in the characteristics of existing aircraft, and the use of biofuels. But the signatories authorized that incremental improvements turn out to be limited. As for the availability of biofuels, it is in question: will there be enough? Will other sectors be a priority?
Political arbitration
“The decarbonisation of aviation fuels could be limited by the availability of low-carbon energy resources, note the authors of the report. Their massive use could then lead to a displacement of environmental problems, in particular related to land use. Generally speaking, there is a need for the transition of the aviation sector in a systemic manner, within the framework of planetary limits “.
The final report on the need for a political trade-off between the level of traffic and the part of the world budget allocated to the aviation sector. “The limits on the aviation sector’s ability to rapidly reduce its CO2 emissions mean that, if traffic grows at the rate envisioned by the aviation industry, then it consumes a larger portion of the carbon budget than its current portion of emissions, requiring as well as other industries have increased their emissions faster than average “.
The two texts agree on the need to reduce air traffic at the global level. For ISAE-SUPAERO researchers, the carbon budget must be respected by adapting air traffic to the progress made in low-carbon technologies.