News / Scant room for sustainable growth in aviation, says watchdog T&E

Plans for the growth of aviation’s cargo and passenger flights are ‘diametrically opposed’ to EU targets, according to activist group Transport & Environment (T&E).

Boeing announced in November it anticipated a global fleet of 3,900 widebody cargo aircraft by the early 2040s, while Airbus predictions from the year before saw the market increasing by 108% within the same time frame, driven by e-commerce.

Despite a growing hostility by regulators toward Chinese e-commerce giants Shein and Temu over de minimis – the loophole that allows tax-free imports of sufficiently small parcels – air cargo has been “firing on all cylinders” recently, with e-commerce accounting for two-thirds of air freight out of China.

Meanwhile, both aircraft manufacturers anticipate that the number of passenger flights will roughly double between the 2019 benchmark and 2050, meaning that, with just 42% of flights powered by SAF, as stipulated by EU law, there will be around the same number of fossil-fuelled flights as today.

“The numbers leave you speechless… the aviation industry’s plans for growth are completely irreconcilable with Europe’s climate goals and the scale of the climate crisis,” said Jo Dardenne, aviation director at T&E. “In a year, the sector will have exceeded its carbon allowance.”

Recently, the UK’s Royal Society calculated that to provide enough bio-based fuel for just the aircraft operating within the UK would require more than half of the nation’s crop-land, while producing sufficient green hydrogen to make synthetic fuels would require more than three times the UK’s 2020 wind and solar energy output. Assuming the industry grows as predicted, some 24.2 million tonnes of e-kerosene will be needed, requiring more than 506TWh a year.

Passenger and cargo aviation requires enormous amounts of fuel and is liable to take an outsize share of the synthetic and bio-based fuels mix, leaving little for other transport modes like trucking and shipping, Ms Dardenne highlighted.

“A paradigm shift and real climate leadership are needed now to address the problem, or Europe’s planes will be eating everyone else’s resources. The credibility of the sector is on the line.”

On top of this, the provenance of SAF is far from certain, with four in every five litres being derived from questionable feedstocks, says T&E. This has led to perverse incentives: throughout Malaysia, carbon-sink forests are being cleared to make room for palm oil plantations; and at restaurants in South Korea, the recipe for Chimaek fried chicken is changing to generate more ‘used cooking oil’ for downstream biofuel production.