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There is no techno-fix, for flying

My colleague on Norwich City Council, Steve Morphew of Labour, had a letter in the INDY a couple of days ago (you can see it here: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-israel-and-gaza-790495.html ), in which he suggests massive reductions in the amount of CO2 pollution generated by airplanes in order to make flying ‘sustainable’. Sounds great! Only one problem: It simply can't be done, except by flying less. The most optimistic predictions of improvement in the efficiency of air transport in this century is a reduction in CO2 emissions of about 30%. We would need 90-95% efficiencies - within the next few years! - for the rapidly-expanding air transport sector to become sustainable.

Research from Norwich’s Tyndall Centre has shown that air transport is the one sector of our entire economy where, in order to prevent ourselves from permanently destabilising the climate, we are going to HAVE to simply tighten our belts.

There is no biofuels-based techno-fix either. Reports of recent peer-reviewed science papers in the _Independent_ have shown that biofuels are mostly more climate-dangerous than the petrofuels they pretend to replace.

For the sake of all our tomorrows, we are just going to have to fly less.

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