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By Jo Nova
And the flavor of the month is “failure”
Air New Zealand announced this week that it would not be able to cut its carbon emissions by 29% by 2030. The levers were “outside their control”, they lamented, which was the polite way of saying there isn’t enough sustainable jet fuel in the world, electric planes die after a few weeks, and no one has invented a low emissions plane yet. At the moment the only kind of Net-Zero-flying is not to fly at all.
Current supplies of sacred sustainable fuel are rapidly growing but barely 0.5% of total requirements. Even though production is expected to triple this year to 1.5 Mt of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, the industry needs 200 times what is currently available.
If someone could just invent an anti-gravity machine, or a nuclear jet…
Air New Zealand pulls the plug on 2030 climate targets
By Charlotte Graham-McLay, Associated Press
Air New Zealand has pulled the plug on its climate targets saying the resources needed to meet them are unaffordable and unavailable.
In a statement the airline said it was removing its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and will […]
Image by Ritu Rawat
By Jo Nova
It’s just another wake up call in the Green fairy fantasy land
It’s a nice idea to think we can store electricity in liquid fuels and effectively run our planes on wind or solar power, but the numbers are not your friend. The chief of Europe’s second largest airline presumably thought it was time to remind our planetary saviors that aviation really needs Avgas. There is no realistic option to decarbonize flights.
German airline Lufthansa says it would consume half of Germany’s electricity if it were to switch to green fuels
By Prarthana Prakash, Fortune
…while Lufthansa has tried to do its bit to adopt sustainable practices, the company’s chief says that switching the airline to green fuels like e-kerosene could come at a big price—half of Germany’s electricity supply.
“We would need around half of Germany’s electricity to create enough of the fuels,” Lufthansa’s Carsten Spohr said at an aviation conference Monday, Bloomberg reported. He added that while green fuels made using renewable energy sources would help Lufthansa decarbonize its fuel consumption, the […]
By Jo Nova
Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
The P-Volt made by Tecnam
Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights
Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we […]
By Jo Nova
It is in effect: If there is a train and it’s less than a 2.5 hour trip, in France you can’t fly — unless of course, you own your own private jet, the most “polluting” kind of plane (according to the EcoWorriers). How does that make “carbon sense”? Are we saving the planet, or just stopping the riff-raff from traveling?
It’s one rule for you, another for the Feudal overlords.
Private planes make 5 to 14 times as much CO2, but they are “good to go”?
by Valentina Morando, Impakter
… numerous studies demonstrate that private jets are much more impactful to the environment than other modes of transportations.
They are about “5 to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes (per passenger),” a report published by the Transport and Environment group in 2021 states.
According to a recent study, “only 1% of the population causes 50% of global aviation emissions.”
Right now there are only three routes in France that will be banned, Paris-Orly to Bordeaux, Nantes and Lyon affecting only 2.5% of all domestic flights. The original plan was to ban five more routes, but the […]
F-22 Raptor
By Jo Nova
It’s unconfirmed, but there’s a possibility that the US Commander in Chief used an Air Force F-22 fighter jet that costs $80,000 an hour to launch a $400,000 sidewinder missile to shoot down a $13 hobby balloon.
President Biden has been industriously shooting down balloons, almost as if he is trying to distract everyone from noticing how slow he was to deal with the Communist Party balloon, or the Pfizergate video, and the Nordstream leak, or something else. But no one is quite certain what they’ve shot down.
Meanwhile a hobby group called The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) have sadly reported their K9YO balloon has stopped sending messages. The K9YO picoballoon had been aloft for 123 days and was on its sixth lap of the world. It was last heard from at around 37,928 feet, south of Alaska and headed towards the Yukon. Whatever the mystery object was that got shot down was described as “foil” at 40,000 feet, so it’s in the right ballpark, but it’s still a big sky.
After all the attention starting to grow on this the NIBBB has clarified that even though they expected to hear […]
The low carbon idea is a frivolous fashion, but could airships take some freight from container ships? Seems unlikely but there are visions here of giant caravans of airships lifting into jetstreams and travelling perpetually eastwards. And there are already models competing for start up funds.
Airships use a lot less fuel than jets do, but a lot more helium, which is a point that gets a mention, but not much of an answer.
How airships could provide the future of green transport
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph
A Boeing 747 requires at least 70 tonnes of aviation fuel to cross the Atlantic. Mr Handley says his ARH 50 model has the same cargo payload but needs just five tonnes of fuel for the same journey, yet can still reach 300 km/h at high altitude.
Airships can land anywhere there is a flat space — they don’t need the runways and airports. They can get closer to their destination. Even landing on a river.
An academic paper from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis In Austria proposes using the Jet Stream to transport cargo on transcontinental routes without any need for power beyond the initial lift […]
Marvel at the science and engineering that keeps these planes flying, and remarkably safely:
Planes in the sky with half a million people in the air at any one time | Guardian & Flightstats
How many flights are in the air at once? NOAA estimates that 5,000 planes are in the sky over the United States. On any given day, more than 87,000 flights travel through US airspace… globally estimates seem to be that there are around 8,000 – 13,000 though I didn’t happen to find an authoritative source.
This youtube shows the dots in motion:
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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