How Green is our Sky? Unravelling the hidden costs of aviation | Filippo Drera | TEDxNantymoel
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvvCwuGM25k Video ID: UvvCwuGM25k ============================================================ Transcriber: Diana Alvarado Reviewer: Sadegh Vahdati Nia Well, imagine yourself in a nighttime flight. You are cruising at 35,000 ft, from London to Singapore. Your seat with your seatbelt fastened. Some passengers around you are sleeping. Some other passengers are just enjoying the entertainment on board. In the meanwhile, the cabin crew are quietly moving around the cabin, just in order to make sure everyone is happy, and everything is under control. Inside of the aircraft seems so peaceful. And then, without any kind of warning, it happened. An extreme turbulence shaking really violently your aircraft. This airplane loses more than 50m in less than five seconds. It's like a building of 15 floors in less than five seconds. As we said before, some passengers were just not wearing a safety belt out of you. They got literally to jump inside of the aircraft. Some luggages or items which were not secure, get all move around inside of the aircraft. Let’s imagine how a cabin can look like. Well, you can kind of guess what can be the feeling on an aircraft, when something like this happens? It’s totally under chaos. As a consequence of this, the pilot decided to make a diversion into Bangkok airport just to make sure everyone is safe and everything is going to be under control again. Once after the landing, over more than 200 people and 20 members of the crew, 100 were injured. And unfortunately, one passenger passed away. Well, you may understood this is not just a fiction story, but it truly happened. Last May, on a Singapore Airlines flight, SK 321, you may question why I’m telling you this story, and how this can be related to today’s theme: “How green are our valley”? According to the Singaporean authority who make the investigation after this accident the airplane was flying into a convective zone, which means a specific area within the temperature is going to change within a few seconds. And this temperature change may lead to the generation of a really dangerous turbulence, which is called, Clear Air Turbulence. So what does this turbulence have to do with global warming, or with the environmental point of view? Well, as research has demonstrated, this Clear Air Turbulence is a specific kind of meteorological phenomena which is linked to global warming; It is not only generated by global warming; however, is mainly affected by this. Since the temperature is changing between the North Pole and the Equator, this can lead to really huge and quick temperature changes within a specific region, which can therefore generate such a situation. Well, let's do one step back then. We say that this clear air turbulence is generated or affected, let's say, by global warming. Than aviation itself, flying above our head, is releasing carbon dioxide, which is one of the main reasons that global warming is generated. Therefore, ironically, we can say that aviation indirectly is harming her own safety. So the more we fly, the more that can be the possibility of generating such a situation. Well, let’s try to understand more about this volume of aviation, how much we are poisoning our atmosphere. Let's try to guess how many flights do we have on a yearly basis or daily basis, or in this exact moment, above our head? Well, on a yearly basis, we have more than 46 million flights all around the world which means 125,000 on a daily basis, which then means, mathematically speaking, more than 5500 flights on this exact moment above our head. Just to give you an idea, this is a picture of the radar on this exact moment, that’s how it looks like above our head. But what this means from a carbon dioxide emission point of view, and then, from a global warming. When we talk about carbon dioxide emissions, aviation accounts for 2.5% of the worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, which then leads to 4% from a global warming point of view. Well, according to the number that I gave before, this percentage seems quite small, isn’t it? However, when we consider aviation compared to all of the transportation methods, We have 74% of the carbon dioxide emission represented by ground transportation, such as cars, or trucks, and 12% by aviation. And the last 10% is represented by ships and rail system. The most important things on this number is that if for transportation, such as cars, or trucks, we have a possible solution. Isn’t it like electric vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, or trying to use more other kinds of transportation methods such as the tube or bus. For aviation, do we really have a solution, or at least a plan in order to decrease this number? This year, the United Kingdom government, in accordance with the airline companies and the authorities, just signed an agreement in order to achieve by 2050 as they call ‘net zero generation’, which means zero emissions in aviation by 2050. Wow. This seems quite interesting, isn’t it? And a nice plan. But how can we do that? How can this goal be achieved in such a short time? Scientists have found a new possible solution, represented by Sustainable Aviation Fuel. Sustainable Aviation Fuel represented by recycling oil, cooking oil, palm oil, household waste and even agricultural seeds that can be used instead of more conventional fuel into nowadays conventional engine. The main strength of this fuel, first of all, they can reduce up to 70% of carbon dioxide emissions , compared to a conventional fuel. Moreover, they can be easily implemented into nowadays refueling system in the airport, which is quite great since it doesn’t require any kind of hidden cost from any infrastructure point of view. Airline company doesn’t need to pay any more, or more money in order to implement such as fuel. Oh, that’s great, but how many airline companies actually are using this kind of fuel? Only 0.2% of nowadays airline companies are using sustainable aviation fuel instead of traditional fuel. Why this then? If there are so strong and they can literally change the aviation industry, why we are not using it? Well, the answer a lot of you may guess it is from an economical point of view. The implementation of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, it may leads to an increase of the fixed cost of the airline company, which therefore, may leads to a decrease of the general revenue. In order to avoid decrease of the general revenue and the profit of the airline company, they must increase the ticket. What may the increase of this ticket then lead to? Well, this may affect us as customers, doesn’t it? So Will we be willing to pay a ticket really more, in order to decrease our emission? So if in one side, airline company authorities are working, or has been pushed in order to achieve such a goal, We, as a customer, have our responsibility. So what can we do when our small part in order to achieve such a big goal? Well, first of all, we can maybe change our transportation philosophy, our way of traveling. Try to prioritize other kind of transportation methods that have a less carbon footprint compared to aviation. Try to avoid aircraft whenever it’s not necessary, or whenever is not the only transportation method available. However, I may understand sometimes, you know, aircraft is the best choice, or it’s the only choice. So what can we do in this case? Well, in this kind of situation, we can maybe try to look deeper, and try to understand which airline company is really active from an environmental point of view, is really using sustainable aviation fuel, or as any kind of environmental program in order to achieve the goal of the net zero generation by 2050. So, sometime let’s try to look smaller, or maybe closer to us. What we can do instead of always blame big corporates, big companies, let’s try to do one step closer in order to achieve this goal. We, as customers, have a specific power and a choice inside this bottle. And our choice matters in this war in order to make our sky greener. Thank you very much. (Applause)