The rise and fall of an alien industrial spy
On 11/08/2010, in Environment - Without hot air, by cleo
As soon as teleporting was perfected for the military in a far corner of the galaxy, the first assignment for the new system was to send an agent to Earth to check out the source of incessant radio noise and strange video images alternately showing humans killing each other or pairing in strange ways often involving acrobatics that the far off aliens could not fathom. Mr. Fa’reye’s (a name quite impossible to pronounce for Earthlings) was selected as the agent for the mission. He was instructed to observe and provide a comprehensive report.
When Mr. Fa’reye’s arrived in Earth orbit, he was amazed to discover the incredible amount of junk that was floating around… his teleport capsule needed all of its computing power to dodge the obstacles. His first scan showed what he discovered were parliaments where people apparently went to discuss things which were subsequently mostly ignored by most other people. A lot of talk was about the environment and it seemed this was a subject that could actually make many of the two legged creatures in the parliaments quite passionate. They seemed to be saving their planet from some future catastrophe… They did not seem to realize that it was already happening. But, sure enough, they voted to spend a lot of money on future projects with doubtful outcome while very little if anything was being spent on mitigating the damage already being caused by their changing climate.
To Mr. Fa’reye’s’ amazement, people were also being duped by something they seemed to call hybrid cars which, apparently, they thought were not producing any harmful emissions. Power stations belching smoke as they produced the electricity for charging those hybrids were usually out of site and the people buying those cars did not seem to connect the smoke with their “emission free” vehicles.
On his last scan, he spotted a company making airplanes and what he discovered there was truly incredible on a world that seemed to be so hung up on protecting their environment.
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A propos volcano – Are we preparing for the wrong things?
On 18/04/2010, in Environment - Without hot air, by steve
It is amazing how easy it is to bring aviation to its knees. An errant volcano on Iceland, winds blowing in the wrong direction and air transportation in Europe and beyond comes to a grinding halt as country after country closes their airspace to protect the traveling public. Volcanic ash is very bad news for aircraft engines and instruments… We are now into the third day of the almost total ban on flying with the skies over Europe empty and airports eerily silent. This is like a bad horror movie. Or is it?
Of course one may argue about the wisdom or indeed the need for such a total ban on flying on account of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. Test flights by KLM and Lufthansa conducted to check the theory have not shown any damage to the engines (when I first heard about these test flights, I was really surprised… who would risk a multimillion dollar set of engines to test such a theory… but then with their fleet all but grounded, the price of a few engines would be small change compared to the loss they were already making).
Whether the ban was justified or not, there is an important message here for the industry and the aviation business and it ties in with an article I have written recently, discussing how we are preparing, or rather, failing to prepare, for possibly catastrophic changes in the atmosphere. My focus was changes that may come about as a result of global warming and the current situation is the result of an old-style volcano, but the end result is the same: by assuming that the atmosphere in which we fly remains essential the same and a known quantity we ignore the need to prepare for the times when this assumption is no longer true.
And that time is to-day.
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Copenflop fall-out – what next?
On 16/02/2010, in Environment - Without hot air, by cleo
The Copenhagen environment conference was supposed to bring solutions to the problems nearer. The conference was a complete flop, certainly in
respect of aviation. Of course, trusting anything this serious to politicians is a bad idea to begin with, but this is the world we live in. We must trust them to get it right every now and again. Copenhagen was not one of their better days… But what will aviation be doing now?
Luckily, we are long past the initial arguments saying that aviation’s part in harmful emissions was so small, it was not even worth talking abut. The contribution is still very small but avoiding talking about it gets few friends for any industry… Aviation has built itself a reputation of environmental consciousness and as a source of innovative solutions, both of which were set as examples to other industries just before the Copenflop. That none of those ideas were used or even considered by the conference is not aviation’s fault….
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Energy, the environment and hot air
On 01/01/2010, in Environment - Without hot air, by phil
The book. Free!
Protecting the environment and using energy sustainably are both of great importance for Europe and the world. The SESAR Programme for ATM has, as one of its business objectives; “Reducing the environmental impact per flight by 10%”. Other European initiatives such as ACARE and Clean Sky aim at improving the efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of aircraft and engines. And Europe as a whole has set itself some very tough targets for reducing CO2. But what technologies should we be developing and what is physically possible? Far too much hot air is being talked by politicians and companies with vested interests who either don’t know the basic numbers, or who wish to become rich by selling their own pet projects.
Aviation is often victimised as one of the main offenders. Yet without aviation how well would our modern economy function? Transport is essential to the way we live, but what technologies should we use – biofuel, hydrogen, electricity or continue to burn hydrocarbons? We also need energy to heat our homes, our commercial buildings and to generate electricity, but should we use nuclear, solar, gas, clean coal, hydro-electric, wind, tide or wave? And in what proportion should these be used if we wish to live sustainably and as comfortably as we do now?
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Environment. The Copenflop – Is aviation better off now?
On 27/12/2009, in Environment - Without hot air, by cleo
We all remember how seriously aviation had been preparing for the UN environmental conference held earlier this month in Copenhagen. Led by IATA, the aviation industry arrived with concrete proposals and plans which were seen by several non-aviation experts as templates suitable also for other industries.
Once the conference kicked off, aviation experts must have felt like adults thrown into a kindergarten with a very poor teacher at the helm. Kids shouting all over the place, getting into fights, leaving the playroom when not granted their favorite toys… Those who ventured outside to escape the worst of the circus fared no better. There was another kind of kindergarten out there, albeit with destruction and tear-gas thrown in to increase the fun.
Of course the kids inside were the same politicians who are convinced that electric cars charged from a public utility produce virtually no emissions and also who had promised to shutter nuclear reactors while having no idea how to replace their generating capacity. It was no surprise to see them come together after having brandished the environmental flag at home and then fail to agree on the time of day, let alone actual environmental action.
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Put your 0.5 % where your mouth is
On 23/10/2009, in Viewpoint, by steve
The next big event on the environmental Agenda is the UN’s climate change Summit in Copenhagen in December. Since tackling aviation is high on the Summit’s priorities, the aviation world has been working frantically to get ICAO to agree on a set of high level emission goals to be put forward at the conference. For a time it looked like all efforts to the contrary, ICAO might go to the meeting with precious little to say. This would have been a total disaster because in the ensuing vacuum interests not exactly big fans of aviation would have tried to dictate the terms with regional differences and other spice added for good measure.
This danger is now past, the ICAO agreement is not only there, but it is more or less what the airspace user community and other partners in the industry wanted. IATA was key in shaping the industry position and also in advocating it in the ICAO machinery.
In the end, the industry found itself in the rare position of being praised by the Secretary General of the UN who said that aviation’s targets could be set as examples for other industries to follow.
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Bio is in…
On 17/09/2009, in Environment - Without hot air, by steve
One of the, perhaps not unexpected, results of the current world economic crisis is the explosive growth of corporate social responsibility. Part of this is in response to the growing demand of the general population to move from unchecked consumerism and predatory capitalism to a more sustainable and socially more equitable form of market economy. Protecting the environment while working on this change is a natural.
Corporations are responding because they have discovered that a more socially responsible attitude brings not only new sources of investment but also increased customer loyalty. Of course this is nothing new. Benjamin Franklin was on the same track when he was popularizing the idea of doing well by doing good… and that was quite some years before Lehman Brothers et al.
For some reason, air transportation has been a popular target of environmentalists and politicians alike who tend to attack the industry for being environmental morons who are also socially irresponsible. Since it is not really realistic (even for environmentalists and politicians) to suggest that airlines offer bicycles to their customers instead of aircraft seats, the elegant and simple solution of capping air traffic growth is being put forward instead by some.
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