Translation: “We’re gonna try to keep our fossil dependent jobs.”
Fuck 'em. They’re saying that because saying otherwise might affect their bonuses.
Looks like that to meet our climate goals we are going to need to eliminate executives.
“Because we’ve realized there will be no consequences* if we fail to meet that goal.”
*no consequences for us
Aviation industry: We tried nothing, and we are all out of ideas.
He said that governments had, through ICAO, targeted a 5% emission reduction by 2030 by using SAF. However, he cautioned: “To be blunt, there is no path to meet that outcome.”
The 2050 goal seems far enough away that success or failure can be hand waved away, from the perspective of the goals being announced in 2021. But they set a goal for 5% by 2030, and it is concerning that we haven’t seen sufficient advancement in scaling up production of sustainable aviation fuel.
I’m most interested in fuel production being an energy sink for excess solar power. If we can set up a system where we overbuild solar electricity capacity far more than what we’d need on any given day, but divert some of it to storage (for use at night) and use some of it to produce chemical fuels with stored chemical energy, a large enough operation might be able to support demand for solar panels without jeopardizing the grid with too much waste electricity (and the economic side effects of producing something fleeting that nobody wants to pay for in that moment).
Thing about biofuels for aviation is that it’s probably not possible to produce enough unless people stop eating meat
Sustainable aviation fuel doesn’t need to come from biomass feedstocks (even if those are by far the most popular). There are pathways for purely synthetic hydrocarbon production, but most sustainable fuel comes from organic sources (crops, organic waste, or fossil fuel sources). Even some of the synthetic methods tend to still get stuff like syngas from processing coal or natural gas.
Still, developing the processes and the scale to bring prices down is important, and can be built upon with an eye towards replacing the biofuel feedstocks with CO or CO2 feedstocks, and can still spur on demand for more renewable energy (without the risk of the return on investment collapsing).
Yes, but those synthetic fuels approaches are far more costly than fossil fuels. Currently around $45/gallon, might be able to do $15/gallon at greater scale and with technical improvements.
There will be far less air travel at those prices