Can flying ever be green?

The soaring cost of crude oil works in mysterious ways: hard-up hauliers park their rigs along London’s A40, fishermen camp outside Defra with placards and motorcyclists ride noisy go-slows on the M62.

Airlines, however, are much less demonstrative. They simply go bust.

In the last days of May, the world opened
its financial pages to discover that Silverjet, the loss-making business airline with an ambition to be ‘carbon neutral’, had gone into administration. Squarely blaming the rising cost of aviation fuel, the company’s directors cleared their desks in the same manner as their counterparts at the airlines Oasis, Eos and Maxjet, all victims of the price of oil.

The episode paints one thing in extraordinary clarity – the vast amount of fuel used by the aviation industry. What this means is that airlines are at the top of two concern lists: climate change, for providing the biggest easily avoidable source of greenhouse gas emissions in most Western lives; and energy efficiency, for gobbling up refined crude oil at a rate that would make the eyes of a commodities trader water.

It’s fair to say that the industry has been trying. The fuel efficiency of...

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