Grace Peng serves as natural resources director for the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles County. She is an interdisciplinary scientist with a doctorate in chemical physics who has worked as a weather and climate data analyst and specialist at various national laboratories.
It’s an accepted fact in Los Angeles: Our airport is too small and needs to expand, especially with the Olympics in 2028 and the World Cup next year. For travel to the upcoming mega-events to go smoothly, we need more of everything, the thinking goes – more parking, more lanes into the dreaded LAX “horseshoe,” more gates.
But this strikes me as a reckless, almost intentional acceleration of climate change – a kind of climate arson, if you will. To me, a scientist, the point is obvious: Aviation is a potent source of carbon dioxide, and increasing air travel is going to make climate change worse.
So it is good and prudent that Los Angeles World Airports, the city agency that owns and operates LAX, recently hit the pause button on building additional terminals, a move that comes after nearly two decades of gate expansion. At the same time, however, construction is underway on another climate-killing project: more roads (and therefore more cars) into Los Angeles International Airport.
Adding more terminals and roads to LAX is like adding more lanes on the 405. Induced demand – the increased use of something when more of it becomes available – is real. Sizing LAX for mega-events such as the Olympics is an unforced error of even greater monumental folly. If we build it, we have to use it in order to generate taxes to pay for it.
We can greenwash the push for endless aviation expansion by talking about so-called sustainable aviation fuel derived from non-petroleum sources. But while biofuel can have a better carbon footprint than fossil fuel, making and burning it still releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (Environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie has done an excellent two-part explainer on her “Sustainability by Numbers” blog here and here.)
Aviation is a classic hard-to-abate case. Batteries simply don’t have the energy density required to haul a million-pound jumbo jet across the Pacific or even to the East Coast. Smaller planes might be able to electrify, but most of the decline in carbon intensity per passenger mile of jet travel has come from putting more people on larger planes.
Still, there’s a whole industry of making calculations to guide policy making and to sane-wash or greenwash ideas, and commercial aviation is no exception. For example, one widely cited paper assumes that carbon dioxide from burning “sustainable” biofuel will be processed and stored by plants – and therefore contribute minimally to climate change – while emissions from fossil fuels won’t be. This is ridiculous: A tree won’t reject a CO2 molecule from fossil fuels but accept one rendered from animal fat or vegetable oil.
There’s no getting around the fact that we have hit the limit on how much CO2 the Earth can absorb annually. We need to burn less of everything now, whether it comes from a car’s tailpipe or the engine of an airliner.
Paul Thornton
And things are moving the wrong way. We’re seeing Jevons paradox – the idea that making a resource more efficient to use leads not to a reduction in its use but to an increase – play out in aviation. In 2019, people flew four times as many passenger miles as they did in 1990. Goods that used to travel by ship and rail are now sent by air.
While we can produce more biofuel from today’s agricultural waste, it would be more justifiable to use it to run mass transit or to power long-haul trucks than jet airplanes. A world in which the rich continue to fly while the poor starve because farmers grow fuel rather than food is neither politically stable nor physically sustainable. We simply need to reduce the amount of flying.
What can we do? Policy makers should plan for a future of fewer flights – or at least no growth. Can we wait a couple of weeks for a container ship of non-perishable or frozen goods instead of flying them? Can we reduce the volume of perishables sent by air freight? Can we take fewer flights? Yes, and there’s evidence we don’t have to give up much to do it.
Around the world, trains offer convenient, frequent and efficient travel between city centers, reducing the public appetite for air travel. The success of recently electrified Caltrain in the Bay Area proves that you can reduce carbon emissions, speed up urban rail and attract more riders. Imagine what a network of electric trains on dedicated tracks (not shared with freight) can do.
If there’s any place these ideas should take hold in the United States, it’s California, the state that thinks of itself as a global climate leader. And it’s failing that test at LAX.
