AWhen Greenpeace activists were convicted, on February 22, by the Bobigny criminal court, for having repainted a plane green, we, engineers in the sector, researchers and members of environmental NGOs, noticed that the public debate was diminishing. still too often a simple opposition, almost moral, between the “pro” and the “anti” planes, the arguments of some remaining inaudible to others.
Faced with climate change which accelerates with each new tonne of CO2 released into the atmosphere, we call on the aeronautical sector to break out of this impasse and become the pioneer of responsible sectors, first and foremost in its own interest.
To date, to meet the objective of achieving carbon neutrality in 2050, the sector is mainly banking on technology, optimization of operations, the abundance of low-carbon energy and compensation in sustained growth trajectories of the global traffic. We remember that the climate of 2050 does not depend on the level of emissions in 2050, but on the quantity of total greenhouse gases that we will have emitted between today and 2050.
Traffic growth at 3.6% per year
This is why this single long-term objective, even very ambitious and voluntary, is insufficient to respect the Paris agreement. Furthermore, nothing is publicly planned if the technological or energy hypotheses are not realized, or not completely. We therefore demand that the sector’s decarbonization roadmaps be reviewed to become consistent with the physics of climate and resources.
The dynamics of traffic growth are not questioned by players in the sector, who consider it a priority objective. Airbus table on global traffic growth of 3.6% per year (“ Airbus Global Market Forecast 2023 ), leading to a doubling of traffic before 2050.
With this development hypothesis, and by relying exclusively on technological levers, the sector finds itself dependent on considerable and uncertain energy needs, calling into question its ability to achieve climate objectives. The French aeronautics industry plans to mobilize 153.3 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity on a national scale to produce synthetic fuels, or the equivalent of the annual production of twelve EPRs.
An existential threat
Likewise, the General Secretariat for Ecological Planning (SGPE) warns of a deficit of 17 TWh of liquid biomass in 2030 for the supply of biofuels for all sectors, including aviation (“ Ecological planning in energy », General Secretariat for Ecological Planning, June 2023). Counting on strong growth is likely to reassure investors, but constitutes an existential threat for the sector in the longer term.
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