Jeff Gazzard of the Aviation Environment Federation is predictably scathing of the whole exercise, under the heading Stuntman? Or Saviour?. (See the text of their press release below as it doesn't seem to be on the web.) It's a bit of a rant frankly. But he does also reference a much more interesting analysis by someone called Almuth Ernsting of relatively new pressure group Biofuelwatch. Oh, and just in case there were any more vacancies for biofuel detractors, in the UK the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds took out full-page newspaper ads this week campaigning against it (though aimed at motorists rather than aviation.) More positively for Virgin, my somewhat distant colleague Simon Robinson, who blogs on biofuels for our chemicals group ICIS, is back from holiday and thinks the airline has contributed something useful.
February 2008 Archives
So the Virgin Atlantic Airways biofuel flight duly took place and everyone lived to tell the tale. Whether it will achieve much I'm not sure. You can read here in The Independent and here in The Guardian that not everybody is exactly overwhelmed. The World Development Movement is particularly scathing on the grounds that biofuels don't reduce CO2 emissions enough to matter, and that they displace the production of staple foods.
This press release from Imperium Renewables who make the stuff pretty much contains the positions of everyone involved. Imperium talk it up quite a bit as you'd imagine, but Boeing and General Electric are notably cautious in their comments.
Virgin says the fuel used doesn't compete with food or freshwater sources.
A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 is going to fly from London Heathrow to Amsterdam on Sunday 24th using a 20% blend of biofuel to power one of four GE CF6-80C2 engines.
IATA - the scheduled international airlines trade body - is going to help out an experimental programme to fly an aircraft around the world, through the day and night, using only solar power. The Swiss-based Solar Impulse team is due to fly the aircraft in the last quarter of this year and make the global voyage in 2011.
Phew, within minutes of launching the blog and wondering what on earth I was going to write about next, HACAN ClearSkies came to my rescue with a new report questioning key elements of the UK government's case for a third runway at Heathrow.
Essentially it's a rebuttal of at least parts of the Oxford Economic Forecasting-produced report on the claimed economic benefits of aviation which the UK Department for Transport uses to support the third-runway case. It was produced by Dutch consultancy CE Delft.
Well as you can see, the crack team of branding experts to which we have access here at Flight have finished their work and our blog about aviation and the environment is ready to launch. We're calling it "Aviation and the Environment" - pretty edgy I'm sure you'll agree.
Here's what we're trying to do:
- Quickly and conveniently comment on environmental issues
- Guide visitors around our own and other organisations' published material
- Host an objective debate about environmental issues
Our starting position is that a) air transport is broadly beneficial to humankind but b) it has a negative effect on the environment and c) the resulting issues are complex and require serious debate.
We do think the standard of debate is currently not all it might be. But we're not here to champion the industry, and we truly hope that we'll hear from all sides. We will post all comments received (within the usual bounds of taste and decency) and look forward to hearing from you.
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