Aviation activities, according to IATA, produce about 3% of global CO2 emissions. Of that 3%, just over 1% are from the ground support activities that keep us all flying.
1 billion people travelled several hundred miles each for 3% of global CO2 emission. Calculations of CO2 emissions for the same billion people to travel in cars the same distance are frightening.
The idea that aviation is a high level CO2 polluter is understandable as an assumption but wrong in fact.
The aviation business operates on negligable margins as generally there is an excess of capacity on the supply side. This drives relatively small efficiencies on the cost side to create significant improvements in margin.
Technology advances such as the A380 or B787 represent examples of quantum leaps in cost efficiency, mainly in the area of direct operating costs. Of the 20% savings promised in seat mile cost by these types, 75% of that saving is represented by increases in lower fuel burn by using new engine fan blade and design technlogy.
Major CO2 contributors globally are power generation, factory emissions, and carbon burning vehicles. How many of these industries can show the 20% increase in efficiencies illustrated above? None. If they could, Kyoto emission targets would have been achieved.
So why are governments targeting aviation? In the EU there is even talk of an aviation tax to fund African development, with dark hints that African poverty is somehow caused at least partly by aviation emissions.
While admirable in their aims, their process is flawed. The real issues of reducing the root causes of CO2 emissions are both too expensive to politically contemplate or too unpopular to apply consumption tax to.
The answer if for governments to encourage and reward industries that cut emissions by such significant amounts as aviation promises to in the next 20 years. Instead we see punitive taxes proposed in an industry that has contributed far more to emission efficiency than most others that show little or no progress in protecting all our futures.