Extreme Temperature Diary- Thursday December 28th, 2023/Main Topic: Biden’s Big Bet to Engineer Climate Friendly Flying

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The main purpose of this ongoing blog is to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉

Main Topic: Biden’s Big Bet to Engineer Climate Friendly Flying

Dear Diary. The most intensive carbon polluting industry beyond producing electricity from coal is from flying. I’ve come to the conclusion that our best scientists have engineered solutions for planes to fly by battery power and so called “carbon neutral fuels,” which will improve with time, but the vast armada of jet planes will need to be retrofitter or replaced to meet our climate goals. Many climate conscious people have sworn that they will never fly again and have pointed the fingers at private jets as definite climate non no’s. The Biden Administration through the Inflation Reduction Act is investing heavily on these new flying solutions, but like the false promise of ethanol from a couple of decades ago, will these efforts fall well short of carbon neutral goals?

Here is a new Washington Post article describing the latest obstacles to overcome to make flying climate friendly:

Biden administration announces tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel – The Washington Post

Is climate-friendly flying possible? Biden administration places a big wager.

Billions of dollars in new tax credits aim to cut jet emissions — but experts worry the benefits are exaggerated

By Evan Halper

Updated December 28, 2023 at 10:39 a.m. EST|Published December 15, 2023 at 8:45 a.m. EST

A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787 departs London’s Heathrow airport en route to completing the first 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel transatlantic flight, to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. (Peter Nicholls/Reuters)

The Biden administration on Friday unveiled the framework of its plan for achieving one of the most elusive goals in the fight against global warming: making jet travel more climate-friendly.

The proposal calls for giving subsidies to support the development of “sustainable aviation fuels,” capable of powering jet engines from agricultural products. Examples of such fuels include biofuels engineered out of soybeans, diesel made with animal fat and conventional types of ethanol.

Senior White House officials said the program would make the airline industry cleaner while bringing prosperity to rural America.

But environmental groups and some scientists expressed reservations about the plan, which would award subsidies based on a scientific model that has previously been used to justify incentives for corn-based ethanol. Studies have found the gasoline additive is exacerbating climate change.

The new tax credits, created through President Biden’s signature climate law, are meant to spur production of jet fuels that create no more than half the emissions of the petroleum-based product. Each gallon of such fuel qualifies for a tax credit up to $1.75 per gallon.

“The concern is they will end up subsidizing fuels that take an enormous amount of land to produce,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University. In addition to corn-based ethanol, he said, the new subsidy could spur massive new production of biofuels made from vegetable oil, with farmland currently being used to grow food replaced with crops harvested for jet fuel production.

That, in turn, could unleash more deforestation around the world as land is cleared to backfill food production displaced in the United States, Searchinger said.

Administration officials said on a call with reporters Thursday that they are carefully weighing such concerns. Agencies are in the process of updating the scientific model for gauging climate friendliness of jet fuels, they said, and it will be revised to factor in the emissions impact of cropland converted from food to fuel production. Federal agencies plan to complete their revisions by March 1.

“The sustainable aviation fuel industry is a potential 36 billion gallon industry that for all intents and purposes is just getting started,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on the call. “This is a big, big deal.”

The announcement thrusts the complicated politics of ethanol and biofuels into an election year. Subsidies for such products are hugely popular in some Midwestern swing states, and industry players are lobbying for maximum flexibility in what products could qualify for the new jet fuel subsidies.

Vilsack said the administration is eager to make eligible as many fuels derived from agricultural products as possible, including those made using nascent technologies such as “climate smart” agriculture and machinery to capture and store emissions. The effectiveness of such technologies is in dispute among scientists and climate economists.

“There are some who argue that when discerning the climate benefits of your fuel you should be allowed to take credit for carbon a crop absorbs and deposits into the soil,” said Mark Brownstein, a senior vice president overseeing energy transition work at the Environmental Defense Fund. “In theory, that make sense. But it turns out it is very hard in practice to document whether that is happening and the degree to which the carbon stays permanently stored in the ground.”

Jet travel is one of the most vexing climate problems. While it accounts for only 2 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, it is among the most stubborn of any sector. Those emissions are on the rise as the travel industry recovers from the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic.

Unlike automobiles, jumbo jets cannot run on batteries. The immense amount of energy they consume makes electrification possible only for small planes making short trips. So the industry has turned to jet fuels that can run existing engines but release fewer emissions when burned. These products, which are typically mixed with traditional jet fuel, are marketed as “sustainable aviation fuel.”

Last month, Virgin Atlantic made the first transatlantic flight powered entirely by sustainable aviation fuel. A company news release claimed the flight’s lifecycle carbon emissions were 70 percent lower than a flight powered by petroleum-based jet fuel.

But sustainable aviation fuel accounts for less than 1 percent of the jet fuel burned in the world. At the moment, much of it is made with waste products such as animal fats or french fry grease. But the supply of such feedstocks will be exhausted quickly as airlines shift away from petroleum to meet their climate targets.

The United States and other countries are scrambling to ramp up production of low-carbon jet fuels that can be produced on a larger scale, aiming not just to meet climate goals, but also to become dominant players in a fledgling industry with huge growth potential. Vilsack said there is a need for 36 billion gallons of the fuel, which is more than twice the amount of corn-based ethanol the United States produces annually. This new industry, he said, will support 400,000 jobs.

“You can do the math,” Vilsack said. “This is a tremendous opportunity.”

By Evan Halper Evan Halper is a business reporter for The Washington Post, covering the energy transition. His work focuses on the tensions between energy demands and decarbonizing the economy. He came to The Post from the Los Angeles Times, where he spent two decades, most recently covering domestic policy and presidential politics from its Washington bureau. Twitter

More on this aviation subject:

Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:

Here is More Climate and News from Thursday:

(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)

Today’s News on Sustainable Energy, Traditional Polluting Energy from Fossil Fuel, and the Green Revolution:

More from the Weather Department:

More on the Environment and Nature:

More on Other Science and the Beauty of Earth and this Universe:

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Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy”

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