This isn’t what net zero means, Mr Monbiot
We’re told that we all have to stop flying and that’s that. It’s just horrible consumption, d’ye see?
If Heathrow expansion goes ahead, passenger numbers in the UK are forecast to rise from 299 million in 2025 to 491 million in 2050. As other sectors decarbonise, the proportion of climate breakdown caused by flying climbs and climbs, until planes account for almost all of it.
Which is to get that concept of net zero horribly, horribly, wrong. It’s to ignore that “net” part of it. The injunction is not that each and every activity must be non-emittive. Rather, that society as a whole should be so, on net. Thus the very concept itself contains the insistence that some activities, some sectors, will carry on emitting as long as the net effect across all is zero. It’s possible to imagine that grass fed beef locks carbon into soil and thus that’s negative emissions that can then be spent upon some activity that is positive. Eat a steak before your flight to Torremolinos - which has a certain joy to it, no? Note that that’s an example of the logic, not a statement that grass fed beef does etc.
But there’s more:
An analysis by the Royal Society found that meeting existing UK aviation demand (never mind future growth) with energy crops “would require around half of UK agricultural land”. That’s the opposite of sustainable.
“Sustainable aviation fuel” can also mean synthetic fuels made from captured CO2 and green hydrogen. But the Royal Society found that for existing aviation, we’d need to use between five and eight times the UK’s entire renewable electricity capacity.
Energy crops are indeed silly and we should stop all of that immediately. But the Royal Society did not, not really, find that. As we pointed out at the time:
Once we lift the requirement that Britain must produce the electricity to make the jet fuel - we could, say, import the jet fuel from places where they have more or cheaper renewable electricity, as we do already import jet fuel - then it becomes just a matter of how much the price must be higher to pay for it all.
As it happens the UK currently imports some 65 to 70% of aviation fuel usage in the country. So any insistence upon domestic production as a limitation seems more than a little odd.
What George is really doing is thrashing around to find some justification to stop all us little oiks being able to escape the country for a few weeks each year. Because, you know, we proles really ought to be doing what the haute bourgeoisie tell us rather than anything so lumpen as decide upon our own desires. An alarmingly large amount of modern politics runs on that basis. Pity, really.
Tim Worstall