About this episode
Impacts of Air Transportation on Climate Change
Air transportation is a major contributor to the fossil fuel economy: studies have shown that aviation is responsible for 3.5 percent of all drivers of climate change from human activities. Planes use immense amounts of kerosene—a flammable liquid used as fuel—in order to travel. When kerosene burns, it releases greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and black carbon. Also, planes create contrails: “line-shaped clouds produced by an airplane’s hot engine exhaust interacting with cold humid air several miles above the Earth’s surface.” These are the lines of white you see behind a plane as it flies overhead: small water particles from the plane’s engine exhaust that have frozen to become visible ice crystals. Because these are essentially clouds, when they persist past a short period of time, they have the potential to trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to a warming effect with many negative climate change consequences.
Advanced Air Mobility as a Climate Solution
In order to combat these negative effects of air travel—and to keep up with increasing demand for shorter distance air travel—researchers have begun looking toward opportunities for low emission options that can be more widely applied. This concept has been coined Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), and seeks to develop transportation technologies which are: “highly automated, electrically powered, and have vertical take-off and landing capability.” One main goal of the project is to develop Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in order to connect underserved communities within cities and rural regions.
Ideally, Advanced Air Mobility will be an environmental improvement because it will use cleaner forms of energy to fuel the transportation, from electricity to hydrogen. According to Adam Cohen of UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, there are several different potential uses for the cleaner energy technology, including air taxi services, small package delivery, emergency services, or aeromedical use cases. Airports in particular are confrontin
