Will Business Aviation Be the First Victim of Climate Adaptation?

The summer of 2022 could be “just an average one” by 2040, according to an eminent climatologist, one of the leading IPCC experts: repeated heat waves, droughts with severe water restrictions and rivers with no flow, wild fires, violent storms and associated chaos, flooding and building destruction, have been saturating the news in Western and Southern Europe since June.

And opinions, on who to blame, on what to do, on what should have been done for a long time, you name it, have not been far behind, in mass media and on social networks. In the complex period we live in, post-pandemic, with an enduring war raging in the East, the two combining to raise inflation to double-digit figures, unseen for several decades, rising inequalities are a standard feature in the aforementioned opinions, opening the season for scapegoat-hunting.

The latest victim of the hunt for extra-large polluters and energy wasters, in France, is business aviation. Users of, actually, ultra-rich, CEOs and celebrities equally blamed for an insensitive over-utilization of business or private jets, “flight-alone-shame”, in fact for not sharing the burden of the efforts we are all nudged, possibly, soon, required by regulation, to make in order to:

• first, save energy, in view of a harsh winter, not necessarily temperature-wise, but from an energy-supply point of view (natural gas, and diesel, from the East, electricity from climate-impacted generators),
• second, mitigate the effects of climate change.

As for the first objective, of course, natural gas does not feed airplanes, but Russia is a major supplier of middle-distillates, kerosene and diesel, for Western Europe. So, every barrel does matter, as the prices of the two middle-distillates influence each other, and diesel is quite an important bill for households that have to drive from exurbia to and from work in the cities: back to inflation control, a potentially explosive social topic for politicians under the threat of populists. Definition of Populism: airing the voice of the people, and when many people use diesel in their cars, the voice can be loud and the political subject serious.

As for the second objective, we are talking here of the symbol, but what about the impact?

Business and private jets do not consume significant quantities of  aviation fuel. In France, only second to the UK for business jets usage in Europe, we are talking of 2% of the aviation fuel nationally supplied, so, banning this segment would save 2% of GHG emissions of air travel. Of course, every saving counts, but there may be more obvious targets for frugality.

The problem is not in the volumes, it is in the lifestyle (next in line: super-yachts, private swimming-pools, golf courses, but not soccer pitches, though). The carbon footprint of a business jet user is something like ten times larger than when using a commercial airline (reverse economy of scale when considering energy efficiency, measured per passenger per kilometer of an airplane). To add insult to injury, more than 50% of the trips would cover less than 500 kilometers, the magic figure used by the promoters of rail transport to advocate for a modal switch, from air to rail.

Taxation, regulated usage, all these solutions could bring a modest redistribution of the wealth of the point something percent top-earners, but an obvious short-term response to the first criticism above is Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF). Most business jets can take at least 50% SAF, if not 100%, with minor modifications that are certainly within the financial capabilities of business jets users.  With a reduction of GHG emissions by 80%, the extra carbon footprint vs using any commercial airliner could be halved, if not down to a factor two, and the difference would then not be that different from what is observed on the roads, between a high-power sports car or SUV and an urban small sedan, each capable to take you 500 kilometers from home.

Sales of high-power sports cars are booming this year and are not on the “name and shame” list, yet! Coming back to the above-mentioned volumes of aviation fuel used by business jets, wouldn’t SAF full, at least, large, usage in this segment play the same role the European Commission intends with its 2% mandate in commercial aviation in 2025, i.e., kicking-off SAF production and commercialization?

As for the more societal issue of lifestyle, we should be wary of this type of finger-pointing, a telltale of future eco-totalitarianism (or eco-fascism, “Green Khmer”, damning names abound)? History teaches us that the two totalitarianisms of the 20^th century were not that omniscient with regards to the well-being of their flocks, so, why would an eco-totalitarianism be, in the 21^st? Democracy is about healthy debate, even if fraught today by fake or alternative truths, and social justice, so important for the acceptability of solutions to what a dire future holds for most of us, even in the West, which does mean effort-sharing, deserves to be properly debated about, and not blazed and rushed about in the inflammatory headlines of media courts.

Philippe Marchand is a Bioenergy Steering Committee Member of the European Technology and Innovation Platform (ETIP).