Air New Zealand has abandoned a 2030 goal to cut its carbon emissions, blaming difficulties securing more efficient planes and sustainable jet fuel.
The move makes it the first major carrier to back away from such a climate target.
The airline added it is working on a new short-term target and it remains committed to an industry-wide goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
The aviation industry is estimated to produce around 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which airlines have been trying to reduce with measures including replacing older aircraft and using fuel from renewable sources.
There’s no path for a commercial air carrier to do this, nor is there any point as we’re all well and truly fucked.
No matter how fucked you are you can always get that much more fucked
That is the thing: Mitigating climate change does not have a boolean result (we mitigated it or not), it is a scale, without a relevant upper limit. So, if you think “fuck this, we can’t stay even within 3 degrees warming, so it doesn’t matter what we do from here” you are wrong. Even if that is the case, at least try to mitigate 4 degrees and so on. Basically there is a difference between “we are fucked”, “we are super-fucked”, “we are mega-fucked” and so on! Getting complacent is not an option here!
We’re already mega fucked.
That is my point though: No matter how fucked we are, it could always get worse. There is no “we reached the limit anyway, so no need to worry about anything anymore”