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Is Delta really "Flying Greener?"
I recently got back from an international vacation. I don't usually read in-flight magazines, but I spied a headline while my neighbor perused his that made me pick mine up. Evidently, according to CEO Richard Anderson's editorial, Delta is "Flying Greener," (in the January magazine.)
He highlights their efforts to be more energy efficient -- laudable, but mostly profit-driven as fuel is a significant and volatile portion of airlines' costs. My favorite misleading sentence reads,
"On average, our fleet performs at 55 passenger-miles per gallon, better than a hybrid car transporting one person."
This may be true, but I wouldn't drive the 4,936 miles (as calculated by TerraPass) round trip to San Jose, Costa Rica for a 10-day vacation -- which is what I did with Delta's assistance. Flying facilitates travel miles people would NEVER consider in a car. The airplane/hybrid comparison is a red herring.
Delta also shared that their emission reduction since 2000 is the equivalent of 19.5 million cars from our roads (who came up with that measure, anyway?). How much of that is reduced demand in the bad economy?
He concluded by identifying external bogeymen that prevent them from further reducing the environmental impacts of flying -- the specter of emissions taxes, and the more justifiable outdated Air Traffic Control technology which he says requires inefficient traffic patterns.
Emissions taxes -- which would be passed on to consumers -- hold out the hope that increased costs of flying might encourage consumers to fly less frequently. And, I'm not an expert, but I can believe that updated Air Traffic Control could also produce improvements.
Flying is hard to give up -- and anything that defies the laws of gravity is never going to be "green." In the end, the most it can hope for is "less bad."
I have to say I especially agree with your last comment as it speaks to a vein of thinking that has hit a resonance with me in the last few months.
To wit...a short time ago a friend and I were (again) having a conversation about just what it would take to change our (the industrialized world's) unsustainable appetites. I stated that one of my biggest worries was that we are backed into such a corner at this stage that to make effective change we will have to give up or very much curtail behaviors that we in the first world take as just part of life (as opposed to things we find extravagant, which of course we will also have to give up).
The example I used was jet flight. I just said there is no way you can take something that heavy and launch that far up into the air to fly such distances at such speeds, and have it ever be efficient enough to be part of a way of life that can be sustained. I also pointed out that this was not a case of technolgies existing that could make this a reality that just were not being used and that in fact there was not even anything on the horizon that could make that promise. In addition, I stated the obvious observation that I just did not think people would be willing to abandon jet flight and so we had come to yet another impasse where our economic/political model comes into direct conflict with the ecological model that underlies life on this planet.
About two months after we had this conversation I heard (on NPR) about a study by a group of British researchers that basically reinforced every point I had made. Their unusally blunt (for researchers especially) conclusion was that if we were serious about addressing climate change then jet flight would have to end.
