<em>The Weekly Planet</em>: The Only Way to Achieve Carbon-Neutral Flight, According to an Airline
There aren’t many good ideas about how to solve the climate problem of aviation.
Or, well, let me rephrase that: There are a lot of ideas. Some companies argue that business commuters of the 2040s will take short hops, such as from D.C., to Philly, on six-seater electric vehicles that take off and land vertically. But these vehicles—sometimes felicitously called “flying cars,” though their formal name is VTOL, for “vertical takeoff and landing”—can go only so far, and the most successful VTOL prototypes have barely gotten off the ground. For medium distances, such as from New York to Cleveland, Airbus says it is trying to develop a zero-emissions jet that uses hydrogen as its main fuel source.
But for long-haul flights? “There’s nothing on the drawing board,” Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, told me yesterday. You could try to make liquid fuels out of plant matter, but that would gobble up an enormous amount of land. Or you could look at the recent progress in technology that captures carbon pollution directly from the air andWhy don’t we just do that?”Why can’t planes stay on fossil fuels forever (or at least indefinitely) and pay to clean up the climate damage immediately?
