by Mark Carter
Rising fuel costs and disrupted flight paths, a consequence of the unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran by Israel and the US, are not the biggest risk to Qantas’s business.
Its dependence on fossil fuel is. The harsh reality Qantas faces is that in less than five years it must cease flying completely if it is to stick to its stated aim of helping prevent 2ºC or more of global warming.
Nothing confirms the level of risk associated with Qantas’s "sustainable aviation" claims more than this threat to its ongoing operation, exposed in a new report from Flight-Free Australia, “Brace for impact! Qantas’s climate crash flightpath”.
The report explains how the "safe climate" goal posts have moved and why Qantas is now kicking out of bounds on the full. Its goal of net zero emissions by 2050 no longer aligns with its commitment to the Paris target of preventing 2ºC of warming.
Even an IPCC-aligned Qantas carbon budget — one, it must be noted, with an unacceptably high risk of failing — will run out before 2030.
On the Qantas "sustainable aviation" flight path, warming is projected to reach 2ºC before so-called "sustainable aviation fuels" (SAF) can ever be deployed at scale.
Today, preventing 2ºC of warming requires the rapid and permanent sequestering of drawn down atmospheric carbon, on top of stopping emissions. Yet SAF and offsets — the Qantas emissions -reduction response — negate permanent carbon sequestration by using drawn-down carbon to create and justify new emissions.
This is the "Paris-aligned" reality that Qantas now denies. That airport shareholders pushing for airport expansions, including Australia’s sovereign wealth Future Fund and the 15 Australian industry superannuation fund owners of IFM Investors, now deny. That our government denies.
Climate Change minister Chris Bowen recently said: “The answer to climate change is not for people never to go overseas again to see their families, or to travel. That is not a sustainable answer”.
Notably, he didn’t say the same thing in 2020. He didn’t say then, that preventing travel overseas was not a sustainable answer to the Covid pandemic. Flights were cancelled to protect Australians from serious harm to their health. That governments stopped flights to thwart the spread of the coronavirus, but see no need to stop the quickest way to fry the planet, confirms their denial of the reality we face.
The "sustainable aviation" story that Qantas, the government and the aviation industry tell the public is one of tech-fixes and market-based mechanisms. These result in slow and incremental cuts to emissions at a time when they must be rapidly brought to a halt. Qantas promotion of SAF has been called "future soothing", defined as “the projection of technological innovation and managerial competence [to soothe] public concern while preserving the legitimacy of continued expansion”.
Rapidly reducing flights
Emissions-free flight across the Qantas fleet remains a fantasy. The only serious hope for emissions cuts lies in rapidly reducing the number of flights. The bald arithmetic is intractable, even while climate change accelerates.
Through government regulation, flight emissions could be cut. The federal aviation minister mandates airport flight capacities, or the maximum number of flights allowed to land and take off from each Australian airport (except Sydney Airport for which flight numbers are fixed by legislation). It is within the minister’s capability to base their calculation of an airport’s flight capacity on flight emissions rather than the flight numbers. The minister could set a maximum level of emissions from all departing flights as the annual "airport flight emissions capacity".
Setting an airport flight emissions capacity cap to align with the Paris Agreement goal — reducing annually to zero within five years — would not breach the Chicago Convention or air services agreements, and it could be applied through the airport slot allocation process.
Finding the emergency exit
If Qantas, the aviation industry in general, and our leaders, are unwilling to halt the harm flight emissions create, what are we to do?
Even if we only fly for compassionate reasons, to whom are we being compassionate? The grandchildren who’ll be trying to survive in a 2ºC world we’ve helped create? And who of us has the privilege of expressing such compassion in the first place? The guest workers from the global south employed in the West, when their parents are sick back home? Flying "morally", unfortunately, won’t stop warming hitting 2ºC.
Can we choose to not fly? In a normal world, we don’t like being told we can’t fly. We value our freedom to do what we want. We tell ourselves that surely somehow our technical genius will continue to free us from any restraints. Like Icarus.
The usefulness of this challenge — to think about not flying — is that it puts us in the frame of mind needed to effectively respond to the climate crisis as a whole. It challenges our normal world preferences, values and thinking. The normal world thinking in which Qantas, business and our government are at the moment also trapped.
However, unfolding local and global events confirm that life is normal no more. And just as we do in any emergency to get to safety, in our climate emergency we need to do things we wouldn’t normally do.
Fighting in the Middle East, and its consequences, has us rethinking our flight plans. But in the fight against global heating far, far more is at stake.
Can we rejig our values? Can we show the restraint needed to restore a safe climate? Can we call out the Qantas SAF and offsets scam? Can we even boycott Qantas? Or do we value a holiday in Japan, Bali or Europe more highly?
Qantas’s sustainable aviation actions are not commensurate with those actions now needed to avoid catastrophic warming. They may help Qantas to sustain flights but won’t make aviation sustainable.
