Sustainable Aviation Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
The industry’s extravagant claims are just wild aspirations — its carbon footprint is more likely to increase than decrease in the decades ahead.
Sweet ride.
Photographer: Chona Kasinger/BloombergWhen the pandemic sent the world into lockdown and air travel ground to a halt, people stared out their windows at the quiet, blue skies overhead, and tweeted, tongue-in-cheek: “Nature is healing.”
In branding terms, that meme was a disaster for the aviation industry. A consumer business that makes the largest slice of its profits from an increasingly environmentally-conscious global middle class doesn’t want to be cast as a bad actor. Fixing that image problem is hard, though, because unlike power utilities and automakers, the aviation sector hasn’t got a carbon-free technology on hand to eliminate its emissions.