Sustainability News

In December, we published a special edition devoted to the climate change (or ‘flight shaming’) movement and aviation.

At SimpliFlying, we believe that this is the issue airlines will have to deal with over the next decade, for the simple reason that any movement that seeks to stop people fying, obviously takes direct aim at what airlines actually do.

As a result, we’ll be running a regular feature in every issue of AMM looking at developments in this sector.

We’ll also be launching a number of training, consultancy and intelligence products in 2020 to do with sustainability. We’ll announce details of these over the next few issues.

JetBlue “prepares its business for a new climate reality”

In November, easyJet announced that it would be the frst major airline worldwide to introduce automatic carbon offsetting for all its fights.

This followed British Airways saying that it would introduce carbon offsetting on domestic fights from this year.

In January, JetBlue followed suit, becoming the frst US airline to offset the majority of its fights - for now offsetting is happening on domestic routes, with the airline exploring how to extend it internationally.

JetBlue says that it will carry on working with its offcial partner, CarbonFund.org. As a result of this, the airline says that its offsetting efforts will result in the annual equivalent of removing more than 1.5 million passenger vehicles from the road every year.

W hen we talked about carbon offsetting in our special issue, we advised any airline to follow easyJet’s lead in making clear that carbon offsetting isn’t a silver bullet, but is something that can be done now while wider decarbonisation happens.

easyJet for example is working with both Airbus and Wright Electric on the development of electric aircraft.

Similarly, JetBlue calls carbon offsetting “a bridge to other industry-wide environmental improvements like fuel with lower emissions.”

As a result, while easyJet is looking into the electric aircraft, a medium to long term endeavour, JetBlue has done something much more immediate in announcing that it will be fying with sustainable aviation fuel on fights from San Francisco from this year.

The company has agreed to purchase sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) from

Neste, the world’s largest producer of renewable diesel and a pioneer in renewable jet fuel,

Neste MY Renewable Jet Fuel™ is produced 100 percent from waste and residue raw materials. Over the lifecycle, it has up to 80 percent smaller carbon footprint compared to fossil jet fuel.

Meanwhile, JetBlue talked about the fact that it will be introducing newer more effcient aircraft, in particular the A220 and the A321neo. Of course, this is something other airlines are doing as well, and would have happened anyway, but it is an example of where sustainability and commercial goals align.

Norwegian partners with CHOOOSE

easyJet and JetBlue are the exception rather than the rule. Though over a third of airlines use carbon offsets, most offer it on a voluntary basis for passen-gers to buy.

The latest to do so was Norwegian. In December, the airline announced that it would be partnering with Oslo based CHOOSE, which invests in carbon offset schemes worldwide.

For now, Norwegian’s scheme is voluntary. And so far, voluntary offset schemes have had limited success, for example Ryanair claims the 2% of its passengers which pay for carbon offsetting is actually higher than the industry average.

presented as a cost, when airlines are already trying to squeeze extra money out of passengers from seat selection to ordering special meals to extra baggage allowance.

However, two things stand out about what Norwegian is doing.

First of all, the airline says it is the frst airline to sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) pledge, committing to become climate neutral by 2050. That means it’s already doing better than the accepted industry standard of ‘50 by 50’ (50% reduction by 2050).

Secondly, carbon offsetting is most often associated with planting trees, something many green

groups criticise as they (arguably not without justifcation) say that it takes a long time for the benefts from tree planting to be realised.

Instead of planting trees, Norwegian’s partner CHOOOSE is investing in projects that have both a short and a long term impact. This includes the Bac Lieu Wind Project, a clean energy development on the southwestern coast of Vietnam.

The project harnesses wind power to generate clean energy, supplying electricity directly to the local grid and displacing carbon-intensive fossil-fuels - meaning it works right now, and not several decades down the line.

Delta makes CES travel carbon neutral

The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas saw Delta boss Ed Bastian deliver one of the keynotes. In tandem with that, the airline announced that it would be making CES 2020 travel carbon neutral for its customers.

In concrete terms, what this meant was that the airline offset its fights to and from Las Vegas in the week of January 6th - signifcant, but obviously modest compared to JetBlue’s announcement, which happened at the same time.

Delta is one of the mass of airlines committed to ‘50 by 50’ (50% reduction by 2050). However Delta also claims to be the only US airline committed to voluntarily cap emissions at 2012 levels.

Words matter - Flight Shame or Flight Shaming?

Language matters and how something is framed in turn drives the wider consumer and media narrative.

Many aviation industry insiders are annoyed by the phrase ‘fight shaming’, as they feel it unfairly targets the industry - the best example of that is Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr calling it ‘fake news.’

However, many climate change activists think ‘fight shaming’ doesn’t actually go far enough. They’d like the literal translation of the Swedish ‘fygksam’ - or fight shame.

Why? Because the thinking goes that ‘shaming’ allows frequent fyers and victims to present themselves as the victims, when (according to some climate change activists) there should in fact be shame associated with having a huge carbon footprint.

Meanwhile on the aviation side of the fence, we noticed some industry insiders trying to use the phrase ‘fight pride’ as a way of pushing back against ‘fight shame.’

This came from a speech given by Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes vice president of marketing Randy Tinseth, where he said that in many parts of the developing world there is ‘fight pride’ among the middle classes.

This is not a phrase we’d advise airlines or airports (or indeed aircraft manufacturers) to ever use, given the wider context and debate. Also, we’d question whether for most consumers it’s about fight shame (yet) or fight pride - rather fights are a means to an end (to go on holiday, visit family etc).

IATA boss rows back on climate change comments

Meanwhile an industry misstep came from an interview that IATA chief executive Alexandre de Juniac gave to the New Scientist.

In the interview, he made a number of points that we would caution against from a communications and positioning point of view.

Criticising Greta Thunberg, he said “we are not the only polluter on the planet.” He then claimed that her activism would lead to a world where “everybody would stay in his own small village, behind his walls”

The wider optics of a white middle aged aviation industry CEO attacking a Swedish teenager (and Time’s person of the year) are not great. The whole tone also sounds defensive, and obscures much of his later comments on how the industry is trying to make a difference.

Our advice to any airline CEO would be to avoid criticising Thunberg directly. Here is what we’d recommend instead:

Acknowledge her wider concerns about climate change and her commitment to making the world a better place. Talk about how aviation has made the world smaller. Say that the industry wants Thunberg’s generation to beneft from the magic of fight in a sustainable way. And then give examples of how this is happening.

However, perhaps worst of all, the New Scientist claimed that de Juniac said “I’ve never been totally scientifcally convinced that it was the CO2 that was the key element for the climate change.”

IATA then had to quickly correct this in a statement given to Adam Vaughan, the journalist who carried out the interview, with de Juniac now saying “CO2 is the top contributor to climate change.”

Stobart Air - ATR visuals

We saw these images posted on LinkedIn by a Stobart Air (which is an Aer Lingus and Flybe partner) employee. This is a great example of how an airline is bringing the environmental credentials of its aircraft to life in a user friendly way, and leaving it in seat back pockets.

Creating visuals like this was one of the recommendations we made in our December report. The report includes very similar visuals which were mocked up by ATAG to show what an airline could do.

Etihad - Carbon neutral by 2050

When it comes to pressuring airlines, climate change activists are loudest in Western Europe. But that doesn’t mean that consumers elsewhere in the world aren’t concerned about the environment.

Indeed, in our special report we talked about a study that was done among the under 25s in a range of countries, including emerging markets, and the environment ranked highly as a concern everywhere.

Hence airlines worldwide need to be paying attention to this trend, something Etihad has recognised with its commitment to zero net carbon emissions by 2050.

This puts Etihad in the same bracket as IAG and Norwegian, who have the same target. It also means Etihad is far ahead of the mass of airlines who have signed up to ‘50 by 50’ (50% reduction by 2050).

At the end of last year, Etihad announced that it would be working with Boeing on an ‘Greenliner’ that would be used to test environmental initiatives.

Etihad is also a member of Abu Dhabi’s Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium (SBRC). The SBRC is working to develop commercial quantities of biofuel from saltwater-tolerant plants