Top aviation lawyer Ken Quinn shares his thoughts on what it will take to make air transport carbon net-zero.
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Rush Transcript
Karen Walker:
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week Air Transport podcast. I'm ATW and Aviation Week Network Air Transport editor-in-chief, Karen Walker. So welcome on board.
It's a real pleasure this week to be joined by my guest, Ken Quinn. Ken is a partner at Clyde & Co, and general counsel to the Flight Safety Foundation in the US. Ken has a very long and certainly distinguished career in aviation that includes posts as FAA chief counsel and counselor to the US Transportation secretary.
So, Ken, I'm absolutely delighted to have you onboard this week. Thank you so much for joining me.
Ken Quinn:
Thank you, Karen. It's a real pleasure to be with you and with Aviation Week, and all of your wonderful supporters and listeners all over the world.
Karen Walker:
Thank you very much.
As you know, I asked you if you would join Window Seat this week because you've written a great and very topical editorial that's in Aviation Week this week indeed, on the subject of the airline industry's goal to be carbon net-zero by 2050. You make clear in that op-ed that it's the right thing to do, but also make clear just how hard it will be to achieve. You draw an analogy with the US mission to put a man on the moon, with President Kennedy famously saying, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And you say the airline industry needs its own moon shot to combat climate change.
So, Ken, this op-ed really caught my eye. I was at the IATA AGM in Istanbul last month, and you were there also. It was at the AGM just not that long ago in 2021 in Boston that the airlines made that 2050 commitment. What struck me this year at the AGM was a feeling of far less optimism about how that goal was going to be achieved. And you referred to that into your editorial.
So can I just start off by just asking you, what was your take at that AGM in June?
Ken Quinn:
Well, obviously, Akbar threw a little bit of a wrench in the gears because he dismissed it as a bit of a PR exercise. And so that conflicts with what Willie Walsh was trying to do and what they're trying to representing to the industry about the great strides the airlines are making in becoming sustainable. But I think what we're finding is a little bit of weariness on sustainability, and to some degree, even DE&I, and more of a return to a focus on profitability and safety, and security. But also some skepticism by world-leading experts about the ability of the airline industry to meet its aspirational goal of being net-zero by 2050, given existing aircraft are going to be flying for another 20 years, and given the state of technology, whether it's lithium-ion battery design, or whether it's sustainable aviation fuels, and the very, very limited production capability that they have out there today.
Karen Walker:
I've been many to AGMs, and as have you, and you can all count on Akbar, that's Mr. Al Baker, CEO at Qatar Airways, and of course is on the Board of Governors at IATA, you can always count on him to make the controversial statement. And Willie Walsh, the IATA director general who was there in '21, that was his first AGM very much being very public on this whole net-zero goal, and agreeing that, yes, it's going to be hard, but that doesn't mean that it's not achievable.
I think it's interesting what you just said about there remains all these other issues that of course are very important. Safety right at the top there still. But the conversations, it's not just at the AGM. I mean, at the Paris Air Show and the Farnborough Show before that, lots and lots of talk about mostly there talking about the partnerships and things.
So why is it, do you think, that there is this sort of more pessimistic conversation right now about the net-zero goal?
Ken Quinn:
Well, we only have SAF approved up to 10 to 50% of going into jet fuel. We have SAF also being three to five times more expensive than jet fuel. And airlines are in a very hard to abate status from being able to turn to EV, unlike automobiles or even rail cars, or even going with hydrogen vehicles. It's just a hard to abate industry. Our problem is really at altitude, and 80% of it is in wide-bodied fleet flying internationally.
Electric aircraft are great, and they're clean, and that's fantastic, but they're going to fly at low altitude, and they're going to go 100 to 150 miles short haul at best. They're not going to solve aviation sustainability issue. And when you only have 0.1% production facilities and capabilities for SAF that really leaves one of the question, where's all the SAF going to come from? Great Britain, as I mentioned in my piece, I think, the Royal Society estimated that if they were using full-on SAF just to power existing UK airlines, it would take up over 65% of the agricultural land in the United Kingdom. I mean, you can't threaten human feedstocks to that degree.
And so if also demand for fossil fuel starts going down because of the increased use of EV for automobiles, which are easy to abate now, I think relative to airlines, that price difference could well be much bigger between SAF and fossil fuel. And we're still pursuing, or the oil and gas industry is pursuing, major production facilities and spending billions of dollars in opening up a new production. The United States wants to spend more to become kind of independent, and they're making good progress on that.
So the fossil fuel supply continues to increase with the price stabilizing or maybe even going down, and it's going to be very hard to reach a sustainable aviation fuel or go to hydrogen or go to batteries because of the weight and heat and safety characteristics of that.
Karen Walker:
Right. So we've got, well, I was going to say two. I think actually, it's probably three. Three issues here, three main problems. One is the technology. And the technology could ultimately be there, but it's far out in terms of sort of a realistic answer to the world's air transport system. We've got sustainable aviation fuel, pricing and availability. And as you say, the conflict we're now seeing where you can't just create another eco problem in the world, as you say, by taking people's feedstock away. And really, what I would then argue is that there's a time issue here, isn't there? 2050 is starting to look actually very, very close.
Ken Quinn:
Oh, it is. And today's production aircraft are going to be flying for the next 20 years. So if you take one alternative, hydrogen, I mean, there's multiple problems with hydrogen and the transport of hydrogen [inaudible 00:07:50] issues with [inaudible 00:07:54]. With using hydrogen, you have to bring it down to negative over 250 degrees Fahrenheit and freeze it, to take it from a natural gas state to a liquid form. But when's all that going to happen? It's not going to happen for probably another 20 years. So these new aircraft are going to [inaudible 00:08:15] to make it by 2050 and any of that. And if there are safety issues, oh my gosh, [inaudible 00:08:22] we need to address them prior to certification. And so the FAA and ASA and other certification authorities are really going to need to identify all the safety issues. And those got to be somewhat in competition and affordable. There was a guy at the [IATA] AGM, an expert from one of the SAF facilities, he said he thought you need a trillion dollars of investment. Well, where's that money going to come from?
So we need the moon shot, as I call it, to have government make some massive investments and massive financial impacts, incentives for alternative energy supplies and sustainable aviation fuel to make all of this anywhere near able to happen by 2050.
Karen Walker:
Yeah. Because now we've been seeing some very large new aircraft orders, including the wide-bodies. We saw at Paris, people are starting to buy wide-bodies again and are planning for long-term growth. And as you say, those aircraft will be coming in for a long while, which won’t change the technology.
Ken Quinn:
But those aircraft will take sustainable fuel and all that. I mean, that's great when you have new aircraft, and quite often you can get an order of magnitude of 15 to 25% greater fuel efficiency, and that's where the industry justifiably should point to very responsible sustainable efforts. We've decreased noise, we've decreased emission, and we're doing that by making multi-billion dollar in investments in new aircraft that are employing largely new engine design, that are getting these kind of fuel efficiency. And of course, we can also get it for air traffic control. As you have ADS-B, as you have more precision approaches to pull, you have more linear approaches and greater efficiencies in the air. All these things are going to make aviation more sustainable.
But is it going to be enough? Are we going to be carbon-neutral? Can we say we're carbon-neutral? Well, be careful. We're in the crosshairs. We've got more enforcement, more litigation, more rule-making on the immediate horizon. Be it agencies and some of the environmental groups are ready to pounce. And they want to go after airlines who are making comparisons, saying they're sustainable today. But that's one of the other things I said in the piece was, word to the wise, pipe down on your environmental claims. Just be factual about what you are doing. Don't say where you are or where you're going to be, it is an aspiration goal. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be out there. It is an existential threat. And it should be out there.
Karen Walker:
So am I hearing you right, Ken? I mean, do you believe it was right for IATA to make that 2050 commitment when it did, even if it's, as you say, aspirational?
Ken Quinn:
Yeah, I think we have to set targets, and President Kennedy addressed 30,000 people at Rice University and said, "We want to go to the moon within this decade," and seven years later, they've made it happen. It was an enormous scientific and human feat. And so putting that goal out there as something to achieve is the right thing.
Again, sustainability's the right thing to do if you listen to the IPCC and others telling us about the threats of global warming to whole economies, to whole populations, to hurricanes, to water levels rising in the world, it's the right thing to do for our children, grandchildren, and beyond. And even though we're only 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, if you take the industry's growth of 3% every year and automobiles and others are going to be getting less impacted, we could constitute a very significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. So, our duty is to set those goals and to try like hell to achieve them with the government. I think is vitally important.
Karen Walker:
Absolutely. So as you say, the challenge is so much harder for this industry compared with most others. It's not all others, to be honest. And also, I would argue through everything I've seen, no other industry has actually already tried as hard to address this relative to other industries, again.
But I do wonder if the airlines haven't sometimes fallen into that trap of congratulating themselves, but not getting the message where it really needs to be heard and understood, which is the customer, the corporate customer, but of course, governments.
Ken Quinn:
Yep. Although a lot of these enforcement agencies are looking and doing investigations right now around the world, the Consumer Competition Commission, or CCC, and they're doing investigations, as is the new case with the Advertising Standards Authority, ASA, and they are going after airlines, and what they're determining is a lot of customers are starting to make conscious travel decisions based on what they know of the differences among airlines and their environmental sustainable efforts. And once they do that, then you can have people try to bring class action lawsuits in the United States.
So what we're kind of telling a number of our clients is be careful about saying you're better. Try to cooperate more with each other, not compete more. Don't say you're greener, don't say you're bolder. That's what got Etihad into sanctions by the ASA and the UK. Try not to say you're the most sustainable airline or you even are sustainable today. Unless you can measure it, unless you can verify it, unless you can authenticate it, you're going to find yourself in hot water. But the real problem is door number two, I think. And that's the approach of France I think is taking, with banning flight from under two and a half hours if you have trains that are available to meet that demand.
And believe me, airlines are not alone. In business aviation, folks that are concerned about fossil fuels also have added to the argument against business aviation, and they're saying they’re worse than the airlines on a per capita basis. And so you could find bans on business aviation, and you can find bans on short haul traffic. And two and a half hours, well, that'll get you from DC to Chicago, so watch out if the French approach becomes a door number two that's available and implemented by other countries.
Karen Walker:
Right. So that also points to what you were saying earlier about the importance of collaboration. The importance, really, in terms of organizations like IATA and ICAO fronting this, as opposed to, as you say, individual airlines going out and saying, "We're the most sustainable airline that you can fly with," yes?
Ken Quinn:
Yeah. It was important for IATA to get something out there, and ICAO. Because we also know door number two from Europe is going to be a reintroduction of the emissions trading scheme, and try to the apply that on an extraterritorial basis. And it would've been a mess. And we're also learning there's a bit of mess with the offset program. A lot of folks are saying they're environmentally sustainable because of offset programs, but some of them are of suspect origin. Sometimes consumers will trace carefully what are you doing and is it really providing reforestation? Is it really used products, waste oils that you're using? Or is palm oil that actually contributes to deforestation?
And so offsets, and there are some that argue are kind of license to pollute, but we'll feel good about it because we're going to give you something to help and maybe do carbon capture. And other things that are in the industry that I think people like Scott Kirby at United are rather skeptical of offset programs. So we're learning through this whole process, but having that out there as a marker helps more radical proposals, but it won't be long until they see we're not making enough progress, then these more radical solutions are going to be imposed. That's quite troubling for the international aviation industry, I think.
Karen Walker:
Yeah. So with carbon offsets, it's the quality of those offsets. Are they audited, and are they, as you say, actually helping, not hurting? But this is also the bigger thing here that I think you're pointing to, that this whole sustainability effort for airlines has really got to be measurable, quantifiable. And that's another big issue to address in all of this, correct?
Ken Quinn:
Yeah. It is. And sometimes you'll have an alliance here where an environmental group will come forward and say, "Well, we'll do an accreditation, and you can give us money to do an accreditation to give you good marks." Well, are those good marks really based on a scientifically reliable, data-driven approach, like aviation is in so many other areas? And it can be difficult to quantify impact.
When I listened to the MIT researcher that was at the IATA AGM, and we're still trying to understand fully the effects of contrails on climate change, and to be able to figure how to mitigate those, and particularly from an air traffic perspective to avoid scientific And it becomes very difficult, I think, for people to scientifically understand and authenticate and measure, and we don't have any real standards that are out there, at least that I've been able to identify so far with great, great credibility that someone can turn to you and say, "Ah-hah. This is what you're doing."
But what you can do is tell people, "I'm investing this much for new aircraft, an engine design that are X amount of fuel efficient, and we are doing these other things, recycling these other things that are helping the environment." But it's a difficult challenge. For one, I think, again, we are the inheritors of this wonderful legacy, but we've got to take into account that we can't kill international aviation. That's important to society too, right?
We bring jobs. We bring trade. We connect cultures. We connect people. And to some degree, only half the world's population is really flying. Are we going to stop and say well, we people get a chance to enjoy aviation, but we're not going to give you that same opportunity to travel around the world like the rest of us? I don't think so. So there's a balancing to be done. In some respects, the World Economic Forum was starting to look this way. But I think the oil and gas industry too has an obligation to contribute; they have been making billions of money off fossil fuels for a long time, and they are continuing to invest billions of dollars in production and exploration. Why can't they contribute in a more meaningful way for the search for non-fossil fuels to provide energy for the airline industry and some of the others?
Karen Walker:
Totally agree with you. They're very important points there. It makes me so angry when you hear people talking about air transport like it's inherently a bad industry, while totally ignoring other industries that you can easily point to being bad, and not really doing anything on the planet. But certainly, I absolutely agree with you. How can you morally sort of say, "Yeah, we in America," or, "We in Europe have had it great with all this air transport, low-cost carriers, et cetera, but we don't think anybody else should benefit from." Because it gets people out of poverty. It's huge in medicine and trade and everything you want to talk about.
You mentioned France and some of the political activity there, like I say, in trying to close down short haul routes, force people onto the trains. So I think you and I both agree that's a bad approach to aviation sustainability. I think that's where Willie Walsh at IATA stands too.
Can I ask you, the US Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by the Biden Administration last year, and that includes a tax credit for SAF development, the so called blender's credit. Do you think that's a good model for what other governments could follow?
Ken Quinn:
Yeah, and I'd just note the European Commission recently approved the French approach to banning aviation that's two and a half hours if there's a train access. So it's quite troubling the direction they're going in. And I think they're also going in a bit of a forced model of saying you have to have X percentage of SAF by this date and Y percentage by this date, without really fully taking into about is it available? Is it the right thing to do? Is it something that is economically affordable? Is it something scientifically proven?
But certainly a lot of us are looking to the Inflation Reduction Act as being a very useful economic model to stimulate the demand and supply for sustainable aviation fuel, as well to explore battery design. the battery manufacturers, lithium-ion battery design, and a lot of people are seeing with lithium-ion as being very good, but really used in very limited ways for gate pushback and some other things that work. It's not powering flight. And so we might be reaching the limits of lithium-ion battery design, and they can be very heavy to really power a long flight, and can have heat characteristics that have safety consequences. So there's a lot to be done in the research and development area of battery design. For whatever reason, we haven't seen the same kind of development of batteries that you would see in semiconductor manufacturing chips, where it's always been faster and less expensive and more powerful over a period of years. And so I developed that in the paper that says we've got to somehow stimulate advancements in battery design much more.
But clearly, electric aircraft would be not just cool, but clean. Completely clean. But to power an existing electronic aircraft today to go 150 miles, you're talking about, I don't know, half the weight of the aircraft just being in batteries. So there's a lot there, and I think we've got to spend more to develop that kind of research and development activity to get at SAF production, to get at battery design, to explore hydrogen, ammonia, you name it.
Karen Walker:
Right. So what you're saying here is, again, governments everywhere have a role to play in this. They could help massively to fast track those sorts of initiatives, whether it's about getting more SAF or getting new types of technologies like batteries.
To go back to your moon shot analogy therefore, at the end of the day, you're right, that motivated people and it got industry behind it, but it was an American initiative. Is it possible, do you believe, that that similar sort of type of moon shot mission could be achieved globally, which is what has to happen for a transport to be net-zero?
Ken Quinn:
You know what? I think that's exactly right. And the moon shot analogy was put out there to be not as an American project. And it's unfortunate, I think, the state of relations between the United States and other superpowers right now, with China and Russia in particular having very difficult relations with places that have huge aerospace capabilities and a lot of resources. And yet, China has mined coal very aggressively, and they're extracting a lot of minerals from mines around the world.
As you know, the former Soviet Union had some of the best aircraft design bureaus and brilliant engineers, people who got Sputnik out in space first, before the Americans. I'd love to see an approach with our former adversaries or even current economic adversary to set aside competitive disadvantage, and focus more on what the scientists are saying, which is this is an existential threat to civilization. And as such, we need to pool our resources and our minds and look to the oil and gas industry and the smartest people in the world to come up with answers, joint answers, not compete with each other, frankly to save our planet.
Karen Walker:
And to be fair, the airline industry, the global airline industry, has a very, very good example in that, that regardless of political situations, safety, everybody's always a long time agreed that when it comes to aviation safety, everybody needs to be safe for anyone to be safe, and they've worked together on that. So is that the pathway for sustainability for the aviation industry to address it like that?
Ken Quinn:
I think in part. And we've often turned to, as you know, the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, where safety concerns, political concerns are separate, and we check political concerns at the door. Obviously, the last general assembly did not do so, and kicked Russia out of the council, and became very contentious and cantankerous.
But we need more than a UN organization to lead the way, clearly. We need the governments of the developed countries, who frankly are not the ones that are being impacted by climate change as much as the developing countries. So there's an interesting dynamic there where developed countries are the ones most contributing to climate change. And so it behooves, I think, the developed countries that have benefited from fossil fuel for a long time, and again, those companies and industries, some of which are state-owned, are sovereign wealth funds, and in particular, the Middle East, to pull those resources toward this new moon shot for aviation.
Karen Walker:
One last question I do have to ask you at the end of this. Like I say, I really enjoyed the op-ed. Are you optimistic about that 2050 goal, seeing what all you're seeing at the moment?
Ken Quinn:
I would say I'm hopeful. I'm not optimistic. I think I'm hopeful that people recognize how serious this is. And I think as every year passes, and we might be, again, seeing more aspects of climate change happening, there's going to be what I would call, or the White House used to call an action forcing event. When you see not just a bunch of scientists warning, but you see the actual effects of climate change for ice cap, on fires, on thunderstorms, on lots of things that are going to cause people problems. But we've got to think further ahead than to wait for those impacts.
And so I'm hopeful, but I think we need to ring these bells right now, and that's why I decided to try to ring it louder. I’ve been with the Flight Safety Foundation and this industry for 25 years, and am trying to reflect on that and give back a little bit, to try to get our clients quite focused too. Because they've got to brace for impact because, like I said, the door number two is not a good one, and even before we get there, there's going to be a lot more enforcement, litigation, and government rule-making, and they need to be ready for it.
Karen Walker:
Well, good for you for doing exactly that, and thank you again for joining me and sharing your thoughts. For our listeners, I highly recommend you read Ken's op-ed. It's called The Plain Truth About Aviation's 2050 Sustainable Goals, and you'll be able to find that at aviationweek.com. So thank you, Ken. Thank you also to our producer, Andrea Copley Smith, and of course, thank you to our listeners. Make sure you don't miss us each week, by subscribing to the Window Seat Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
Now, next week I'll be joined by a panel of our Aviation Week editors and analysts to discuss the new ATW World Airline Report, and how the changing airline fleets around the world gives an indication of shifting growth areas of focus for the air transport industry, so please join us for that.
Again, Ken, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Ken Quinn:
It's my absolute pleasure, Karen. And thank you very much for Andrea as well, and everyone at Aviation Week. It's a great public service, and I'll be interested to follow all your topics.
Karen Walker:
I hope you'll join us again. This topic on sustainability isn't going to die anytime soon.
Ken Quinn:
Absolutely, sure.
Karen Walker:
So, thank you. And so this is Karen Walker, signing off from Window Seat.
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