In my time, I’ve had something to do with maybe a couple of dozen business cases, most of which eventually ended up in front of assurance teams at the Department for Transport. It’s the job of these people to look at your Business Case from the standpoint of each of the standard five sections – strategic, economic, commercial, financial, management – all with endless appendices to add notes, tables, figures, references.
You get quizzed on your assumptions, what data did you use? What is your worst-case scenario if costs spiral or stakeholders just say no? And one of the first things you do is set out the options you’ve considered. What if you did nothing and the business case wasn’t approved? What would the impact be? What different ways have you thought of achieving your objectives? What are the pros and cons of each?
It was with this thought that I opened the recent Jet Zero consultation documents, which set out four possible scenarios for the UK’s aviation industry, with the ambition to ‘set out our plans … through a strategy to deliver net zero aviation by 2050, or Jet Zero’.
It came as a bit of a surprise to me, therefore, that none of the options they describe actually do that.
The scenarios consider five influencing factors:
(1) System efficiency (e.g. better designed, lighter aircraft); (2) SAFs (sustainable aviation fuels); (3) Zero emission flights (battery-powered or hydrogen-fuelled); (4) Markets and removals – e.g. use of carbon budgeting to influence markets; and removals – literally measures to extract carbon from the atmosphere; and (5) Influencing consumers.
According to the modelling, the business-as-usual option results in 36 extra metric tonnes of CO2 by 2050 that would need offsetting somehow or somewhere else to hit net zero.
From there, there are three other scenarios with increasing levels of hopefulness and finger-crossing about what could be achieved if the above factors – especially the techy ones – can only be made to work out. And even then, they still leave us with between 9 and 21 metric tonnes of CO2 thirty years from now.
For the avoidance of doubt, definitely not zero.
I’ve been trying to work out why it might be that this situation is just so scary that we can’t even write down what would be needed to hit net zero.
In part the aviation industry has obviously been hit hard by the pandemic, so it’s definitely not a winning argument to shrug your political shoulders at this unexpected carbon windfall.
However, I have another thought.
All of the Jet Zero scenarios assume that passenger growth will carry on increasing, resulting in an extra 60% more flights by 2050, so – the argument goes – what can the industry do except respond to this demand by increasing supply? This is the claim currently being used by seven of our regional airports to justify their expansion plans.
Now wasn’t this the same argument that was for decades (and still is in many places) used to justify motorways and adding extra lanes to the strategic road network, only to find that it filled up again a few years later?
Enter stage left ‘demand management’! Initially driven by congestion, air quality concerns and the desire to make best use of public transport, demand management in ‘surface’ transport is well developed.
It’s a harder argument, however, as congestion in the air is only obvious to a handful of air traffic controllers and a few pilots above Heathrow.
The limits are those we will need to impose on ourselves to address emissions, and this brings with it the need for fairness in how this is applied. According to the New Economics Foundation, ‘in the UK, 15% of people take 70% of all flights, while nearly 50% of the population do not fly at all in a given year. This is a hugely unequal division of the carbon budget for aviation (and a large share of the UK’s total carbon budget).’
If the aim is to reduce emissions, this seems to clearly indicate a changing taxation regime to influence frequent flyers to be less frequent. And given that much of the business world has survived on a diet of Teams and Zoom calls for 18 months, this is clearly possible even if not always desirable.
The other side of demand management is to provide alternatives. It cannot continue to be cheaper to fly from Manchester to London than to catch the train. Someone needs to consider – for instance – why air fuel is tax exempt but electricity for trains isn’t. Can’t remember reading anything to that effect in the Williams-Shapps Plan.
I’ve had my say as part of the consultation and you’ll find it here if you also want to feed back. Responses are due in by 8th September 2021. Feel free to comment below.