The aviation industry says that it is cleaning up its act, but the green lobby is far from convinced, writes Anthony Harrington
BY THIS stage of the game, autumn 2008, it is clear that business has, by and large, shifted its ground and is now taking green issues seriously. If there is one area, however, where business and the green lobby remain fundamentally opposed to each
other, it is in travel, and specifically in low-cost air travel.
Nor is it easy, at this point, to see how the interests of the two can ever be precisely aligned, short of the aviation sector coming up with a jet engine that runs on water or the green lobby deciding that, what the hell, the planet doesn't really matter that much after all. Neither outcome looks particularly likely.
This is not to say that the aviation sector is not, by its own standards, taking green matters seriously. The industry is trying to mitigate its environmental impact and is busy with any number of projects, from biofuels for jets at one extreme, to finding more fuel efficient ways of arriving an departing from airports at the more humdrum level – not to mention the continual search for less fuel-hungry engines.
However, since it is an industry, it is driven by the profit motive and by the idea of increasing shareholder returns. This means that it will always be on the side of the third runway at Heathrow, or the second runway at Stansted, or Edinburgh.
The fact that the aviation sector is always to be found unanimously supporting the expansion of air travel means that for the green lobby, all the aviation sector's environmental initiatives can be debunked, at a stroke, as just so much "greenwash". In fact, this is exactly how Greenpeace campaigner Anna Jones puts the matter: "Any airline lobbying for a third runway can't claim environmental credentials. What they do in this regard is just greenwash, covering the fact that their future plans include increasing emissions massively," she says.
Virgin Group spokesman Nick Fox disagrees. "It might not be possible to appease the green lobby entirely, but there is certainly much we can do to work towards making airline travel more sustainable," he says.
He cites the recent journey taken by a Virgin Airlines jet on the London to Amsterdam route, where it proved that one engine could run on a mix of biofuels. The engine performed normally and the experiment was judged by Virgin to be an important landmark, though there was no attempt to suggest that this one off-event represented a commercial solution. "The work goes on," Fox says.
For Jones, the realities of the matter are much closer to the line spelled out in a recent New Scientist article, which argued that for the aviation industry's 2007 consumption of jet fuel to be replaced by biofuels would take an area the size of Ireland if the fuel source was algae, and three times the size of Germany if the fuel source was biomatter.
"There is no prospect of this being an economic reality in the near term, and biofuels are extremely worrying anyway, because they divert land away from food production and also push the price of arable land beyond the means of some poorer farmers," she comments.
Jones makes it clear that what Greenpeace and the green lobby are calling for is a cap on all further expansion of airports across the UK. "We say no to all of this," she says. Jones points out that businesses are already taking a responsible attitude to business travel and are doing a great deal to replace physical journeys with video conferencing, for example. The case for airport expansion, she argues, is in reality being driven by the airline industry's low fares policy which has fuelled a massive boom in leisure air travel.
The point here, she says, is not to build more and more runways to accommodate what is ultimately an unsustainable boom, but rather to educate people so that they make environmentally responsible choices about their holidays.
"UK hotel operators are very against a further expansion of Heathrow as they see the low cost air travel phenomenon as taking people out of the UK and so taking business away from them," she says. "Organisations such as Travelodge and Cooperative Travel have already made their opposition to a third runway at Heathrow clear."
The full article contains 746 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
