Grounded

Yes, perhaps. But business is booming. As the middle classes of China and India take to the sky, the global airline industry expects passengers to double to 9 billion in twenty-five years. If this comes to pass, even aviation’s most optimistic expectation of further carbon emission cuts, admits Kelly, will be more than wiped out by humanity’s enthusiasm for air travel. It would seem Monbiot is pretty much on the money.

Where he may be wrong, however, is in taking the air industry’s growth projections seriously. Long before global warming punishes us for our sins, aviation will crash for a different reason: too little kerosene fuel. So say those who believe world oil production is very near, or at, its peak. On the other side of that peak, every barrel of oil becomes more expensive to pull out of the ground, even as demand rises. The result will be runaway fuel prices and, ultimately, the restructuring of our economies, whether we are ready or not.

Roger Bezdek — co-author of a famous 2005 report on peak oil for the United States Department of Energy, and president of Management Information Services, which consults with government agencies and power utilities — doesn’t believe the aviation industry’s “sky’s the limit” growth projections. “Officially, they have to say that to protect their stock values and equipment sales.” But some airline execs have confided to him they are working on Plan B: surviving the inevitable peak oil shakeout when fuel prices go through the roof and the industry shrinks.

“If people have to decide between driving to their jobs or taking a vacation, which will they choose?” Bezdek asks rhetorically. The ripple effect, he predicts, will beggar public treasuries and devastate communities. “Across North America and worldwide, every region, state, country, is betting the farm on the growth of the airline industry — financing infrastructure, business parks, convention centres. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.”

He expects, in twenty-five years, the “seedy” deterioration of hotel zones around overbuilt, underused airports. “Vegas is going to grind to a halt. Orlando, Vail, Aspen — destination resort areas will get a lot fewer customers.” If you aren’t rich, you won’t fly much, if at all. Priorities will be different, starker. More fossil fuel will instead be burned to “handle social dissension, unrest.”

The idea of a world without flight poses somewhat of a predicament to someone like Dr. Angus Friday of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island nation assumed to be below the main hurricane belt — until two massive storms wracked the tiny nation, in 2004 and 2005. In his role as chair of the forty-four-member Alliance of Small Island States, Friday flies around the world, urging action against climate change, and aid for countries like his in bracing for rising sea levels and increasingly violent storm surges. Yet the day I catch up with him on the phone from somewhere in India, he gently reminds me that jetliners bring the tourists to the beaches, and that tourism is Grenada’s main source of revenue, so he is in no position to instruct sinners to stay home. “The real challenge is to release some of the entrepreneurial forces that can create solutions to climate change.” And peak oil, presumably.

Friday prefers to place his faith in human ingenuity. He cites, as many do, Virgin Atlantic Airways owner Richard Branson, who recently proved one of his airliners could fly on 20 percent ethanol blended with the usual kerosene, and who has invested $1 billion (US) in developing alternative energy sources, including biofuels from non-food plant waste.

Growing crops for biofuels is one of those green ideas that seems to have come and gone in barely a year’s time. The pressure it was expected to put on agricultural land helped send food commodity prices soaring this spring. Studies reported in the New York Times find biofuel cultivation would actually accelerate climate change.At the far fringe of the field, some optimistic researchers have proposed creating vast algae ponds in empty deserts to make biodiesel from the muck. So far, Branson has been cryptic about what Virgin Fuel will be, except to boast, “It is 100 percent environmentally friendly, and I believe it’s the future of fuel. Over the next twenty or thirty years, I think it actually will replace the conventional fuel that you get out of the ground.”

“Richard Branson,” says James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, “is suffering from the delusion of techno-triumphalism. In fact, he is close to being off his rocker about this.” No airline is going to escape the “liquid fuels problem,” he says, referring to the fact that US civil aviation is expected to consume half the country’s oil production by 2030.

Kunstler suggests that Branson may have pulled off a small “stunt,” but that “it doesn’t scale.” Mass production of enough biofuel to feed aviation is just not possible. In any case, in a few years competition for access to every form of fuel will be chaotically fierce. Passing the global oil production peak will trigger, as his book foretells, “an unprecedented economic crisis that will wreak havoc on national economies, topple governments, alter national boundaries, provoke military strife, and challenge the continuation of civilized life.