The trend is clear and it's not pretty. The sooner we humans get our house in order, the sooner we can return to the climates of our forefathers and foremothers. Is “foremothers” even a word? It should be.

A great many things have to change and change fundamentally before we can say we've even reversed the direction of the trend vector of AGW, much less fixed things. Even after we've reached the point where we have reversed the trend direction, we have a lot of work and a long wait ahead of us before the climate stabilizes - if it stabilizes - at historical norms. Nothing is guaranteed. The law of hysteresis says it likely won't be exactly the same. Science is our only real hope.

To that end, I believe we in aviation need to start an annual award to recognize those who have made contributions to making aviation more environmentally sustainable with lower embedded energy materials, smaller carbon footprints, Green facilities, and the like.

Let me unpack that a bit

The rubric of sustainability covers a multitude of modalities. For us as human beings with first world problems - like fretting over Game of Thrones - to continue our lifestyles, our hard won quality of life, we must balance our activities with the capabilities of the entire global system. We have to balance our energy requirements, our water requirements, our food requirements, our basic biological drive to reproduce, with what our one small planet can support, or sustain. Those limits are set by our technology and by the resources available to us. Technology can be improved; resources, not so much.

We live in a mostly closed system. The sun sends us energy without which nothing is possible, but other than that, we're pretty much confined to what we can make happen here on earth. Star Trek is a TV show. We cannot emigrate to a new planet once this one is screwed up beyond economic repair. There is no “economic repair” here. It's win or die. To oversimplify just a little, without the earth, without the enormously complex web of life that covers it (the same web of life we are exterminating at historic rates), and the raw materials buried under it, we die. All of us. Yes, even the rich people, though Jared Diamond tells us they will die last. Sad.

What can we do?

To be sustainable, we need to look at a number of issues. First and foremost, we need to get off the petroleum train. It's going to kill us. If all of the carbon sequestered as coal and oil were burned back into the atmosphere, we die. The original atmosphere was abiotic. It did not support life. The original single-cell organisms that evolved in it - like the passenger pigeon - are no longer with us. I'm not sure we can recreate those organisms and I'm even less sure I'd want to live on a planet where they are required.

We in aviation need to roll back the amount of energy we put into our aerospace materials. There's not a lot out there that requires more energy to make than aerospace quality aluminum. I say this as a sheet metal structures guy. We have to either give up aluminum, or find a way to do it with a lot less energy. Industrial quantities of energy are expensive to build and maintain. The same holds true for our huge manufacturing and maintenance facilities, too. I know for a fact that some of them date back to World War II. Think of it as an opportunity to update, an opportunity to improve our brand image.

Carbon dioxide

The ugly part about industrial quantities of energy is the amount of carbon that is embedded in it's production. I don't mean carbon fibers or Bucky balls or diamonds; I mean burning paleo-fuels like petroleum and coal and shoving 40 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every single year. Yes, this is more than volcanoes (even undersea volcanoes) produce, which is somewhere between 65 and 319 million tons per year, depending - about two orders of magnitude difference. Carbon dioxide from volcanoes is a rounding error in terms of global CO2. While volcanoes can and do affect the atmosphere, it's due primarily to injection of sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere, not because they magically burped up a bazillion tons of carbon dioxide.

This same carbon dioxide acts to reduce the rate at which the earth re-radiates heat from the sun into space. To stay at a stable, comfortable temperature, we have to re-radiate all of the energy the sun gives us every day. We have already changed the rate of re-radiation and it's getting worse over time. Now, we need to stabilize that change and then reverse it.

Derp to one side, and we here in the United States have a great deal of it, reducing the embedded energy leads to a smaller carbon footprint, which reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which helps govern the rate at which the earth radiates excess heat. It gets more complicated as we consider more factors. This is not a primer on AGW.

We matter

Granted, this is a long path around the barn, but bear with me a moment longer. We in aviation use a great deal of petroleum-based fuel. Huge amounts per passenger, really, as compared to trains or ships or even buses. What we offer in return is time. We turn Jet-A into time for people, for families, for businesses, for economies. We are the best in the world at it. We really are. The best people I've ever met work in aviation.

Who are we?

Let me digress a moment with that thought. Dr. John Downer (now of Bristol University, I think) did a study - series of studies, really - some years ago on highly reliable industries. Basically the nuclear power industry and us. Know what makes aviation different than convenience store management or being CEO of ExxonMobile? In aviation, people follow the rules every time, even when no one is watching, even when they know they won't get caught. Aviation is different because we are different. There can be no incredible safety record in aviation without the incredible people who make it happen every single day, regardless of the weather. Put that on my tombstone. I'll wear it proudly.

We are awesome and we can do better. We can let our engineers loose on the problems we have and we in management can listen to what they find and we can figure out how to implement their solutions without bankrupting us or our customers. If we can't do that much, what claim do we have to being the best and the brightest?

What do we want?

We need to be the change we want to see in the world. Let us get together each year and pass out awards and heap praise upon those who have done the hard work of making changes. Nothing happens quickly, easily, or cheaply in aviation. Can I get an amen? But our lives are on the line. The lives of our children are on the line. The lives of children we'll never see depend on us doing the right thing now. I sincerely believe that an awards ceremony to mark the fact that we care and that we are actually doing something about it - not just talking - is important. We are important. In the words of the militarists, we are the tip of the spear.

I need some help to bring this into being. Let us work together to make it happen. I know of no better group of people to call upon.

Terry Drinkard is currently in engineering management in commercial aviation. His interests are primarily design: aircraft, drones, helicopters, interiors, etc. He has worked as an engineer, a marketer, and a procurement agent with Boeing, Gulfstream, and a range of other companies. He is an advocate for business activities in space, floating airports, and an intelligent approach to almost anything.

If you would like to share your views or comment on this topic, please write to: editor@blueskynews.aero

©BlueSky Business Aviation News | 19th October 2017 | Issue #435

.

BlueSky - your weekly business and executive aviation news - every Thursday

.