Air New Zealand has abandoned a 2030 goal to cut its carbon emissions, blaming difficulties securing more efficient planes and sustainable jet fuel.
The move makes it the first major carrier to back away from such a climate target.
The airline added it is working on a new short-term target and it remains committed to an industry-wide goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
The aviation industry is estimated to produce around 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which airlines have been trying to reduce with measures including replacing older aircraft and using fuel from renewable sources.
It is not the airliner which is the problem, it is the government. Compare it with the tobaco and alcohol industry: You can’t expect them to protect the health of their customers and to reduce their profit voluntarily, If you want to reduce alcohol consumption, you just need to make the stuff more expensive with taxes etc. A bottle of spirit would cost the same as a bottle of cola if the government would not interfere, it is the task of the government to avoid this danger to society. The same with air travel: To make air travel less attractive is not the task of the airliner but a task of the government. At this moment, airliners are pampered, get tax free fuel, can expand at the cost of the neighborhood, etc. so what do you expect?
The air travel industry doesn’t care much about fuel consumption. They still descent with flaps and spoilers out, instead of trading off altitude for speed slowly. They fly with speeds of 400+kts, but just like with cars, going slower saves fuel. And as long as the airliners demand fast airplanes, manufacturers keep designing them, despite the higher fuel costs compared to a slower plane. Again, making fuel much more expensive could cause the industry to rethink their strategy. There is a tipping point where customers accept a longer flight time for a substantial reduce in costs.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that aviation fuel subsidies must end, and train travel should be prioritized above all else.
That said, it’s not true that going slower saves fuel, for multiple reasons.
All you say might be true for the current design of airplanes. But it is like saying, “this formula 1 race car is really more efficient on the race track than in urban traffic, hence driving cars faster is more efficient.”. I agree flying higher is more efficient. There is however no rule that you need to get to 400kts in order to be able to fly at FL350. It all depends on the design of the airplane. In general, for every form of transportation, road vehicles, boats, airplanes, going faster always means “spending progressively more fuel”. I built my own airplane. And sure enough, flying it at 160kts instead of 140kts costs more fuel, at any altitude. And, not insignificantly, my small propeller airplane has a lower fuel consumption per passenger per mile than the airliners do, despite the latter flying higher and faster… What is the reason of that? There was also the Concorde. It could fly even faster, and higher, but… it used way more fuel. But this also doesn’t mean that flying the Concorde close to its stall speed would be more efficient. There is no way to fly the Concorde at the same efficiency as a 737, at any speed or altitude, because it is designed to fly high and fast, and burn more fuel to make that possible.
So, I’m pretty sure, if we would not optimize the design of airplanes for a certain speed, but for the lowest fuel consumption, you might indeed end up with airplanes that fly slower (and maybe lower) than the designs we have now, and we could have airplanes that use less fuel per passenger per mile.
An airliner is not an F1 car though, that’s a jet fighter. All I’m saying is that I think if Ryanair could get a plane that would eat less fuel but take twice as long to make a trip, they would jump at it. The Concorde shows exactly that, while some airlines might want the prestige, mostly they just want to provide the cheapest service they can get away with.
Are you carrying enough fuel while doing that to do a trans-Atlantic flight? Airliners do. Can you fly over the troposphere to avoid significant weather that, beyond having people throw up, would have planes divert and use a lot more fuel as well? Airliners can. There are other reasons, of course, but these are just off the top of my head. All that said, of course fuel efficiency is but one of the things airliners are optimized for, and there are other concerns, but speed is not really one of them for the sake of it.
As an American: Government? That’s scary and against the constitution.
I think even in the US there is more tax on your car’s fuel than on the airplane fuel. And I’m pretty sure there is some special tax on whiskey and other concentrated spirits, and tobacco, etc. Even in the US tax is used to direct social behavior.
Sorry, how do you figure? Cola is basically water, sugar, and flavorings/colorings. Mix it together, carbonate it, put it in a bottle, and ship it out. Super easy to scale up. Whiskey (for example) involves mashing grain, fermenting it to get alcohol, distilling that alcohol to get it more concentrated and less watery, aging it in a barrel for a number of years, and then bottling it and shipping it out. Each step involves big, specialized equipment (harder to scale up) and many involve losing product along the way. And yet, it’s because of government? Sure, there are higher taxes on alcohol and that contributes to the difference, but to blame it entirely on government is ridiculous.
I could give a long description about the process to make the sugar needed to make cola, and then describe whiskey as essentially just water and alcohol, and some flavors. Then there is that other kind of alcohol, methanol, for cleaning windows etc, usually sold in percentages over 80%. How much does that cost per liter? I stand my ground that spirits could be sold for about the same price as soda, if it would not be taxed with special exise, duty, tax, or whatever the special “alcohol tax” is called in your country. Which is exactly the reason that in practically every country alcoholic drinks are made artificially more expensive.
So it’s actually a lot more involved to make spirits when you don’t want to go blind over it, especially if you want it to taste good as well.
US taxes spirits at $13.50 per proof gallon at most (like income taxes, there are different margins). That means a gallon of 100 proof (50% alcohol by volume) alcohol spirits has a tax rate of $13.50. A 750ml bottle is .198 gallons, and .198*$13.50 is $2.67.
So… You sure about that?
If the government would not interfere, most companies would just label watered down cleaning alcohol as whiskey and sell you that. Point is that there are cost-increasing measures on alcoholic drink production from the govt beyond taxes.
I understand your point, but the original claim was that spirits and cola could be the same price. My argument was that spirits have a much more involved manufacturing process which raises the price. In my opinion, watered down cleaning alcohol has a different manufacturing process and wouldn’t count - whether government prohibits it or not. It’s a different product, made a different way, so of course it’s going to have a different cost.
Thinking of it another way, and trying to play devil’s advocate against myself to think this through, what if government said that cola needed to come with a side of premium caviar? It would raise the cost, and government would have caused it, but it would also be a different product. That doesn’t mean that if you got rid of government regulation, cola with a side of caviar would cost the same as cola without caviar, spirits, or diluted cleaning alcohol. It just means that the regulation alone wasn’t what made it expensive, because there are intrinsic manufacturing costs regardless.
Yeah, and I’m not disputing your point beyond that “no regulations” would be weirdly bad, not just normally bad.