This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Climate tech to save the planet: How to keep flying

Audio clip
(Aircraft engine sound)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pilita Clark
I’m Pilita Clark. You are listening to Tech Tonic and we start this episode at an airport in the UK on a very hot summer day.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
These aircrafts are doing all sorts of crazy manoeuvres. You wouldn’t imagine a big commercial liner doing really sharp turns, really steep take-off. It’s not done this kind of rollercoaster loop. Not a loop loop, but a kind of sharp up and then down.

Pilita Clark
That’s our producer, Josh Gabert-Doyon at the Farnborough International Airshow just outside London earlier this year.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
There’s tons of people out here. It’s kind of the main event of the day. Everybody taking pictures. Massive Airbus over here. People are geeking out out there. You can hear it. (Sound of aircraft flying)

Pilita Clark
It’s a big trade show. Think airliners and fighter jets performing stunts over the runway while aviation companies hype their latest planes and equipment to industry bigwigs and journalists down below. But among the shiny new planes and latest flying technology, there was another thing on visitors’ minds this year: climate change. And that’s not least because the show was taking place in the middle of a massive heatwave.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
About 10:00 in the morning, 28 degrees Celsius. Lots of very sweaty people. It’s super hot.

Pilita Clark
In fact, that day in July was the hottest day in the UK on record. So Josh, it doesn’t sound like the kind of day you’d want to spend on the hot tarmac of an airport.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, it got up to 40 degrees at one point in the day, which actually felt quite dangerous. The heatwave had caused a lot of traffic and transport disruption. So there was a line of aviation industry people in these sweaty suits walking through suburban Farnborough to the airport.

Public address system
During this period of hot weather, you’re reminded to protect yourself from both the sun and the heat. Apply sunscreen regularly. Wear . . . (Sound of aircraft flying)

Josh Gabert-Doyon
And amid this sprawling air show, there were these air-conditioned luxury cabins, complete with food and wine, where executives could watch the planes fly overhead.

I’ve done a few interviews now and it is just absolutely so hot. I’m going into interviews just drenched in sweat and the sun is blazing down here. (Sound of aircraft flying)

Pilita Clark
But for the crowds of people staring up at the planes above them from the burnt grass below, climate change isn’t just a matter of sweltering heat. It’s an existential threat to their industry. Right now, aviation only accounts for about three and a half per cent of global warming caused by humans. But it’s got two big problems. More and more people are flying and the industry is doing a bad job of decarbonising. In other words, it’s on track to becoming a much more serious problem for the climate. So the question for the industry is, can it change that? Can it cut the carbon out of flying? I’m Pilita Clark and this is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times, a podcast series about how technology is changing the world. Scientists say that the next few years are critical if we want to get a grip on global warming. We need to nearly halve global carbon emissions by 2030 and bring them down to virtually zero by 2050. A lot of people say we can’t do that without a lot more new technology. But is that really true? The aviation industry is certainly trying. When I was covering it for the FT more than a decade ago, it was already boasting about new technologies that were being invented to cut its emissions. But ten years later, none of them have really taken off. So if nothing happens soon, could we end up being forced to cut back on flying altogether?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pilita Clark
So, Josh, you braved the heat of Farnborough this summer to find out what the industry is doing to cut carbon emissions when it comes to flying. What kind of tech solutions were people talking about there?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Right. So walking through this big marquee exhibition tent, there were all these different scale models and futuristic-looking prototypes and a couple of big ideas for how to make the industry more sustainable. The first idea is to develop new aircraft that don’t run on fossil fuels at all. I asked Kevin Craven, who heads up the industry group ADS — they actually put on Farnborough Airshow — about what he was most excited about.

Kevin Craven
There’s probably two that I would point out: electric and hydrogen-powered aircraft. We are beginning to see demonstrators and we’re beginning to see these technologies mature. And I would point to Vertical Aerospace. The VX4 is a really exciting, really sexy aircraft.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
The sexy aircraft he’s talking about there is a prototype by a company called Vertical Aerospace that has propellers so it can take off vertically like a helicopter, but fly horizontally like a plane. And it’s powered by batteries. So it’s electric. The problem is that the batteries only work for very short flights because they’re too heavy for long haul. There are also hydrogen-powered planes, which was something aeroplane manufacturers were excited about. I talked to Glenn Llewelynn from Airbus, one of the world’s biggest aircraft makers. I asked him about a hydrogen plane model the company had on display, and this was a little scale model.

Glenn Llewelynn
It’s a model of one of the concepts we’ve revealed of the zero-emission aircrafts. This one in particular is a flying wing. So it looks like a wing from tip to tip that can carry passengers inside.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
It looked like one big fat boomerang, very strange-looking prototype aircraft.

Glenn Llewelynn
It’s a very high-performance hydrogen-powered aircraft because inside this shape you have lots of volume and hydrogen requires extra volume in order for it to be stored compared to kerosene.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
OK. So the problem with hydrogen is that it takes up so much space you’d need to radically redesign long-haul aircraft to make it work.

Pilita Clark
Right. So the world’s biggest aircraft makers are working on cleaner planes, but they’re not ready yet. But the other approach the industry has been talking about for years is keeping the planes we have now, but switching to greener fuel instead of CO₂-emitting kerosene that’s used today. In fact, I remember reporting on experimental flights more than a decade ago that were using biofuels made from plants, things like coconut husks and cooking oil. But now they’re talking about synthetic fuels that are supposed to be even greener.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, that was definitely something a lot of people at Farnborough were very excited about. They really wanted to talk to me about this. I spoke to Paddy Lowe from a company called Zero Petroleum who make what they say is a synthetic fuel that’s carbon-neutral and that would be used in place of kerosene.

Paddy Lowe
This may well be the first chainsaw powered by synthetic fuel.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
They were demonstrating it at the air show, using a chainsaw and a block of ice.

Right in front of us is a big fuel canister. And there’s an ice sculpture. Oh, and we have a chainsaw now. It looks like it’s about to be started.

Paddy Lowe
Can we start it Deb, Deborah? We need to start it . . . 

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So the idea is that the fuel being demoed was powering a chainsaw, cutting through this big block of ice. But it could, in theory, be used in planes.

(Sound of a chainsaw running) This man is getting on his gloves. He has a chainsaw. It’s a bit of time crunch here because the ice is melting. I can see water coming off of it. (Sound of a chainsaw cutting ice, block of ice hits the floor) That was a block of ice. There’s water and ice spray going everywhere. (Sound of a chainsaw running) Photographer just got wet.

It was quite a demonstration to be watching on the hottest day of the year. We were standing in this small aeroplane hangar and Zero Petroleum were handing out ice cream and trying to generate some buzz around synthetic fuel at Farnborough.

Paddy, how are you feeling about this? Watching on . . . 

Paddy Lowe
Yeah, it’s just so cool. Yeah.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
There’s a lot of a, there’s a lot of water and ice kind of splashing everywhere. It’s a really hot day out here.

Paddy Lowe
You know, what’s wonderful about synthetic fuel is that we use fossil fuels everywhere in our daily lives, in so many things that we take for granted. And the point of synthetics is they can replace all of that. Anything you think of, whether it’s a jet ski or a chainsaw or a plane, a tractor, they all need these fuels. You know, it’s just wonderful to see.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
It smells just like normal gasoline. Is that right?

Paddy Lowe
Well, that’s the point. It is normal gasoline, it just didn’t come out of the ground.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah.

So Paddy told me it does emit carbon when it burns, but the idea is that it’s made using direct air carbon capture: you suck carbon out of the air and use that carbon to make new jet fuel. So you’re not adding any new carbon to the atmosphere. And you might be wondering why is it being used on a chainsaw and not a plane? And that’s a question I put to Paddy. And the answer basically is cost. He says they need government support to make the fuel cheaper.

So why aren’t all the planes here at Farnborough today using this synthetic fuel?

Paddy Lowe
Because we’re still at an early stage of commercialising this type of fuel. There are a number of companies doing it worldwide. We’re the only one in the UK. And this is why the SAFs around us at the moment are those biomass or waste-based fuels because they don’t yet use the carbon capture process yet.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
The airlines and other aviation companies are just not buying this fuel. Is that, is that part of the issue?

Paddy Lowe
Well, the price will be an issue initially, and I think this is why we’ll see obligations emerge. I know Britain is likely to, to create a sustainable aviation fuel obligation within the fuel mix, and I think that will be the mechanism of creating a fair market for all the players involved. (Sound of a chainsaw running)

Pilita Clark
We’ll get back to Josh and the air show in a bit. But let’s talk about this idea of sustainable aviation fuels. So they can be made in a number of ways, from plants, in the case of biofuels, or chemically in a lab, in the case of synthetic fuels like Zero Petroleum’s. They all emit carbon when they’re burnt, but the idea is they take carbon out of the atmosphere when they’re produced. In the case of biofuels, plants take CO₂ out of the air as they grow. And in the case of Zero Petroleum, fuel is made from carbon captured directly from the air. So in theory, they’re carbon-neutral and you can see the attraction of this kind of solution for airlines. If a system of carbon-neutral fuels works, you can keep your fleet of planes. You don’t need to change the engines or experiment with hydrogen fuel cells or heavy electric batteries. You can keep flying as often as you like. Taken to its extreme, you could even build a sustainable supersonic jet.

Audio advertisement
So you’ll be able to travel a mile . . . every 3 seconds.

Pilita Clark
That’s right. A new Concorde-style jet that would run on synthetic aviation fuel.

Audio advertisement
The phenomenal Concorde from British Airlines.

Pilita Clark
Because, you know, if you can just keep flying forever with sustainable fuel, why not fly faster than the speed of sound? That’s what a US start-up called Boom is working on. And Blake Scholl is Boom’s CEO.

Blake Scholl
We have two choices, right? We can, we can say, “hey, look, sustainability is a challenge. Let’s travel less. Let’s stay at home. Or, you know, more, more Zoom, less Boom”. And I think that’s a, not only is it a depressing future for humanity, I think it’s unnecessary. And the alternative is to say, let’s overcome the challenges. Let’s build aeroplanes that are faster, more affordable, more convenient, more sustainable. Let’s do the work to scale sustainable aviation fuel. Let’s build a better future for the planet and for all of us living on it.

Pilita Clark
Scholl’s vision for sustainable supersonic travel has helped Boom raised more than $200mn, and its backers include big Silicon Valley names like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. And Scholl’s done this even though he’s by no means an aerospace expert himself.

You know, you’re a software engineer, not an aerospace engineer. I wonder, does that matter when you’re trying to do something as ambitious as make the world’s first supersonic net zero carbon aircraft?

Blake Scholl
Well, you know, I think a lot of people hear that and at first they think it’s, it must be a disadvantage, because my, yeah, my background is software and tech, not in aerospace. But in reality, I think it’s turned out to be an advantage. I look in the mirror and feel like I was very lucky to grow up in a world in tech where everything was getting faster and better. And innovation and progress were the norm.

Pilita Clark
Boom says its first commercial supersonic jet will be ready by 2026. It’ll run on sustainable fuel and use much less fuel than current supersonic jets. The message seems to be that with better technology and different fuels, you can fly around the world at supersonic speed and save the planet.

Blake Scholl
I think it’s especially poignant to look at it now, you know, as we are coming out of a pandemic where we’ve all had Zoom fatigue and we’re starting to see that travel is roaring back. And it’s because life happens in person, whether you’re travelling for, for business or for pleasure, to see a loved one. That in-person human connection is incredibly valuable. You think of it as not just where you can open a remote office for work, but even who you can fall in love with.

Pilita Clark
It’s an optimistic vision and it’s attracted a lot of interest. The company has orders from the likes of American Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic. But there are some big challenges. The plane itself hasn’t been built yet. Boom’s deal with engine maker Rolls-Royce has fallen through. And when we spoke to Scholl, it wasn’t clear who would replace it. And supersonic flight isn’t the most efficient way to get around. It uses much more fuel, sustainable or otherwise, than conventional air travel. And anyway, is there really still a market for supersonic flight? Concorde, the last commercial supersonic airliner, stopped flying nearly 20 years ago.

[SOUND CLIP OF AIRCRAFT FLYING]

But the real problem with this vision of a bright future for air travel, supersonic or otherwise, is that so much of it is predicated on the success of these sustainable fuels, whether they’re biofuels or synthetic. And right now, there’s nowhere near enough of this type of fuel to power the tens of thousands of commercial airliners. Despite all the enthusiasm, the reality is that these greener fuels are estimated to account for less than 0.1 per cent of global aviation fuel used today. Hardly anyone is making them and they’re really expensive when you compare them to the kerosene that planes burn today. Biofuels are at least twice as expensive as regular jet fuel and synthetic fuels, like the ones that Zero Petroleum make, are up to ten times more expensive. In other words, the economics just don’t work for airlines. It should be possible for costs to come down, as they have for other green technologies such as solar panels. But that’s clearly going to take years. And in the meantime, we need to reduce carbon emissions urgently. So if we’re years away from hydrogen- and battery-powered planes and cheap, sustainable jet fuel, does that really mean we’re going to end up just needing to fly less?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

At the Farnborough Airshow, that’s a question our producer, Josh Gabert-Doyon, put to some of the aviation executives he met.

Josh, I’m gonna bet that they didn’t exactly leap at the idea of people not flying as much.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, it was not really an idea they were ready to consider.

Chris Raymond
I mean, if we look at our commercial market outlook or we look at, you know, the history of aviation, I think it’s always been resilient. It’s always had pretty steady demand as economies develop, as GDP increases, people want to fly.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
That Chris Raymond, who’s chief sustainability officer at the airline maker Boeing. I spoke to him from a nice air-conditioned cabin on the tarmac.

Chris Raymond
80 per cent of the people in the world probably have never taken a flight. And so I personally think we’re gonna continue to see the demand for air travel, because I think it’s integral to modern life. I really believe that we now connect the world. We’ve gotten used to this in the world and those 80 per cent of the people should get to enjoy it too. That’s why I think it’s, the demand is going to be there for air travel.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
And then there’s airlines who are happy to keep offering more flights. I spoke to Lauren Riley, who’s the chief sustainability officer at United Airlines.

Lauren Riley
Travel should be celebrated. It’s a necessity. We don’t want to hamper travel. I think the question is how do we make that happen sustainably, which is exactly what United is focused on. Whether it’s your local distance flying or your long haul or other, we are really looking at those permanent solutions because we want you to get on that aeroplane and be proud to fly on an airline that is really committed to doing the right thing, which is what United is focused on.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So that’s why it seems the aviation executives I spoke to are so keen on things like sustainable fuels. There are all these concerns about carbon emissions, but no sign that passengers are about to cut back on flying or that the airlines necessarily want them to do that. Here’s one last exec for you, Jane Ashton, who’s sustainability director at the budget airline easyJet.

In Sweden, there’s this idea of flight shaming that’s become pretty popular. Do you think there’s some justification for that? Do you think that we should be flying less?

Jane Ashton
Our challenge is balancing the very real benefits of travel and tourism, particularly aviation, with the impact on the climate. Aviation and travel and tourism connects people. It drives massive socio-economic impacts, beneficial impacts. And so our focus has to be on decarbonising the industry, not on focusing on curtailing people travelling.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pilita Clark
So the aviation industry wants to keep on growing, but it’s also under more and more pressure to solve its climate problem. And in some ways, that perfectly encapsulates the dilemma that this series is looking at. Will climate tech let us keep on doing what we’ve been doing for decades in a highly connected, globalised world without wrecking the planet? The aviation industry says it can do this with greener fuels and aircraft. But the thing is, it’s been promising meaningful climate action for years. The airline industry itself has set lots of targets for cutting its emissions. How have they fared at actually meeting those targets?

Leo Murray
They fared very poorly.

Pilita Clark
That’s Leo Murray. He’s the head of innovation at Possible, a climate campaign group.

Leo Murray
I’ve been following this, this area for long enough to have seen many of these targets just sort of come and go. Now they come with great fanfare. They come with, you know, a lot of press releases, a lot of press hype. The industry is very good at doing it. And so what we did was we actually went through all of the targets which have been set by the industry on climate change since the turn of the century. So specifically, we looked at fuel efficiency targets and targets for the uptake of sustainable aviation fuels. They haven’t met any targets! There were 50, 50 targets that we looked at, specifically on, in those areas. Only one was met. It was a relatively unambitious easyJet target on fuel efficiency, which was not, not aligned with climate goals. You know, it wasn’t aligned to Paris. They did manage to meet that. But every, in every other instance, the targets were not met and usually they were simply quietly shelved.

Pilita Clark
And when the industry eventually came up with a global climate agreement in 2016 called Corsia, it was based on the increasingly controversial use of carbon offsets, which a lot of people worry are not going to be a real answer to the climate problem. Leo Murray is by no means against new technologies that would help cut flight emissions in the future. But he says what needs to happen right now is for the number of flights to be reduced.

Leo Murray
Everybody that looks at this, every independent expert body that isn’t a material interest in the aviation sector itself, reaches the same conclusion, and that is that demand needs to fall. There are no scenarios where we can just cater to all projected demand growth in future with magical zero-emission unicorn planes. You know that’s not going to happen. And . . . 

Pilita Clark
Well, does that mean that flights have to become more expensive?

Leo Murray
It does, fundamentally. Well, you can see that even with the within-sector solutions, flights are gonna become more expensive, absolutely unavoidable. There’s no way of doing this that doesn’t mean the costs of air travel are going to rise.

Pilita Clark
Some governments are already looking at taxing the airline industry more or making greener train trips more attractive than short-haul flights. But climate campaigners like Leo Murray are pushing other ideas, such as taxing frequent flyers.

Leo Murray
I’ve had all these years of doing head-to-heads with aviation industry lobbyists and the media, and they would always use the same attack line, which was, “who are you to tell people they can’t, you know, to tell ordinary working families they can’t take an annual holiday?” Then, when I looked at the, what the data shows about who is flying, it became very clear that annual family holidays are not the problem here. The problem is people who are flying very, very routinely as part of their lifestyles. You know, 15 per cent of the UK population taking 70 per cent of all the flights. And at a global level, that inequity is, is even greater, right? So, in fact, this is an easier problem: reducing demand for air travel is an easier problem to solve than it might at first appear.

Pilita Clark
Murray hopes the money raised from a frequent flyer levy would fund the development of new technologies. But it’s a question of time.

Leo Murray
We know what we need to do to avoid global warming just becoming unmanageable and, you know, destroying civilisation. That is literally the trajectory that we are on now. We know what needs to be done, and it’s simply not plausible that technological solutions are going to materialise at the scale and speed which is necessary to meet those targets.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pilita Clark
So where does this leave us? The aviation industry has been promising to tackle its emissions for a long time, but progress has been slow. Governments have also been slow to bring in policies to hurry things along. There are some really exciting tech innovations on the drawing board, and I think they’ll probably become realities eventually. But as with all the climate technologies we’ve looked at in this series, they’re still years away from commercial viability. And given how quickly we need to nearly halve global emissions, it’s really hard to see how they’re going to help fix the climate problem any time soon. But if you think the aviation industry is running into problems when it comes to tackling climate change, next week, we’re going to look at hydrogen power — a technology that promises to transform our energy system, if the engineers can just make it work.

Dr Graham Cooley
Frankly, the question is an existential one. If we can’t do it, what’s your solution?

Pilita Clark
You’ve been listening to Tech Tonic from the Financial Times with me, Pilita Clark. If you like what you’ve heard, leave us a review and don’t forget to subscribe. I’ve also put links in the show notes to more climate tech reporting from my colleagues at the Financial Times. Credits go to our senior producer Edwin Lane, producer Josh Gabert-Doyon and executive producer Manuela Saragosa. We also had production assistance from Leo Schick. Our sound engineer is Breen Turner with original scoring by Metaphor Music. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s head of audio.

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