Flying
Flying
The emissions from one flight from Manchester to Barcelona are three times higher than driving a diesel car 10,000 miles. Today there are no passenger airplanes that run on renewable technology like batteries or hydrogen (though research is being conducted in this area). For the moment, it is much better to fly less or avoid flying and take public transport instead.
Globally , at any time of the day or night, 10,000 planes are in the air, carrying more than a million passengers. Shockingly, the UK contributes the highest share of international air travellers: 126 million passengers each year, or 8.6 % of the world’s total. Flying creates around 7% of UK emissions. For most countries, it’s less than a third of this figure. On an individual level, just one return flight from London to New York may emit more CO2 than running a small modern car for a year. Aviation emissions are rising and showing no sign of changing course. There is no simple fix for making air travel sustainable. A range of solutions have been proposed, including battery-powered planes, bio-fuels made from vegetable oils, synthetic fuels made from hydrogen, and ‘offsetting’ the emissions by paying companies that use machines to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, known as direct air capture. Meanwhile Airbus - a large multinational aerospace company - is currently designing and testing aircraft engines to run on hydrogen. Unfortunately, none of these technological approaches are advanced enough to start being used today. It will take decades for them to be used commercially, if they work at all. For now, it is almost certainly better to avoid flying whenever possible - particularly so because releasing greenhouse gases into the high atmosphere has a stronger global heating effect.