ICAO members reach historic agreement on climate change

Since the world began there has always been climate change, not due to mankind, but because the energy output of the sun varies. If you look backward over these changes you quickly realise the periods of glaciation outnumber warmer interludes. So there will be change, but more probably colder, which means a lot of greenies will be upset!
Some greenie ideas are right, but for the wrong reason. Self sufficiency, and make & mend built America, they are good virtues.
Perhaps if we got back there America could get out of China's pocket, industries would prosper and unemployed queues would shorten.

In 1972 the US made an agreement with Saudi Arabia to assure that all oil in the world would be sold in US dollars. The petrodollars halp to back the American economy avoiding inflation. The more oil is used better for the American Economy. Europeans don't have oil so they want to reduce how much is used. This has nothing to do with climate change. It is all about money.

Oh well, so that's all right then - the aviation industry loves ICAO and together they will save the planet.

Not so, I'm afraid - not even close.

According to IATA's valedictory press release, the ICAO resolution calls for:

"Improving fuel efficiency by 2% annually to 2050" - but even if a 2% figure can be acheived, a target questioned by the UK's Committee on Climate Change recently who estimated a 1% annual gain as an ambitious but realistic outcome over the next 40 years, emissions growth of 3/4% annually outstrips this "aspirational" goal and aviation's greenhouse gas impacts simply get worse over time.

"Striving to achieve a collective medium-term aspirational goal of capping aviation’s carbon emissions from 2020" - 10 years more delay is in the only vital statistic the reader can glean from this fact-free paragraph. Climate change is the single biggest global environmental threat facing us all - urgent action is what's needed, not another utterly irresponsible decade of delay from a major polluting industry.

"A global CO2 standard for aircraft engines with a target date of 2013" - worthwhile but only if an ambitious standard for each class of aircraft is the outcome, one that drives rather than follows already-available technology. ICAO frankly has a poor, lowest common denominator history when setting technology performance standards.

ICAO is simply unable to deal effectively with complex multi-faceted environmental issues that carry global political overtones and will always endorse the thinly-disguised "business-as-usual"
option the industry demands. Imagine the outcry if, say, the World Health Organisation had been captured by the tobacco industry in this way whilst trying to control tobacco-related diseases? ICAO is, I'm afraid, the aviation industry's poodle.

Industry's in-built bias simply confirms the belief that ICAO's mazy, all-over-the-shop output is the positive "green" outcome they wanted and that it might too all somehow work as an effective programme, an interesting display of cognitive dissonance. Of course,it's all spin - just have a close look at the nonsense from the industry folk quoted in the article above.

There is, sadly, zero content that might actually reduce gross emissions from air transport by 2050 in any meaningful way, just a massive, carefully crafted emissions reduction avoidance scheme.

There is, however, another route - but only if the sophisticated and entirely reasonable European Union Aviation ETS is adopted by ICAO as the global gold standard. I've looked through all the ICAO resolutions but this bit's missing, I'm afraid. I wonder why?

Jeff Gazzard
Aviation Environment Federation