this site is UNDER CONSTRUCTION (March 3 2010). This is the landing page.
Government and industry do not talk much about aviation emissions in Australia, often repeating the reassuring figure that it makes up about 2% of global emissions. In fact, flying in Australia already produces much more climate change – perhaps between 5 and 10 percent of our national greenhouse gas emissions, about as much as our car fleet. And it is set to double within a couple of decades.
The government say aviation emissions annually are about 6 million tonnes of CO2-e. This figure is vastly underestimated because it does not count fuel used in any international flights, and ignores over half of the climate change impacts of the domestic aviation fuel it does count.
A more accurate estimate for domestic aviation is about 15 million tonnes of CO2-e emissions if the ‘non-direct’ effects of flying (like nitrogen oxides and condensation trails). About 60% of the fuel sold in Australia is for outgoing international flights, so we should really count another 15 mt of CO2-e for that… that brings us to 30 mt per year, about 75% of what all our cars produce annually (42 mt CO2-e).
What is worse, the government expects flying to double by 2030, which seems to be an underestimate. We already have the technology to considerably reduce emissions from all other areas of our ecomomy by 2030 – with flying, nobody really knows how to do that, so the doubling of flying will come to be an ever-bigger share of our emissions, perhaps as much as 25% by 2030. It is the one intractable problem.
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By that time our other emissions will hopefully have reduced considerably, but great fuel efficiency gains cannot be expected in the aviation sector – so it could account for 25% (????) of our national emissions by then.
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The Australian government says that “Civil aviation contributes about two per cent of global carbon dioxide” and that “the carbon footprint of aviation has been growing at a rate of about three per cent per year” in recent decades when airline efficiency gains are taken into account.
Current Australian airline emissions total between 30 and 60 million tonnes of CO2-e and air passenger movement are expected to double by 2030… so with efficiency improvements we can expect a 150% increase ???? of fuel burn, to between 45 and 90 million tonnes… so by 2030 aviation may contribute almost half of our government’s 2050 total national emissions target of 161 million tonnes. END OF CURRENT RAVE…..