Could hydrogen power turn air travel green?

Have you been scanning airline websites for exotic destinations to which your double-jabbed status might allow you to slip away in August? I certainly have, but I’ve ruled out the parts of Canada and the United States that are stricken by record-breaking heatwaves and forest fires — and I’m wondering what impact such extreme climate events will have on the aviation industry as it struggles back to life after the pandemic. Having survived a year of near-total shutdown, I suspect it will now face an onslaught of green rhetoric to which governments — positioning for November’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow — will be forced to respond.

A recent Financial Times headline, ‘Brussels targets aviation fuel tax in drive to cut carbon emissions’, was one indicator. In the UK, Greenpeace has been calling for a ‘frequent flyer tax’ — a graduated version of the existing Air Passenger Duty, rising according to the number of flights taken per year — to reflect the fact that 15 per cent of the population take 70 per cent of international flights. Such a virtue-signal might be popular because it would hit the rich first, but airlines say it would be hell to administer as well as raising the cost of essential business travel.

Economists point out that APD (introduced by Ken Clarke in 1993 as an extra revenue-raiser) was never conceived as a green measure, as which it is largely ineffective. Far better would be to penalise the airlines with the highest CO2 emissions per passenger kilo-metre, though most of the worst offenders turn out to be Asian carriers. And better still would be to learn from the electrification of the car industry, of which I’ve written much lately, and divert part of the £4 billion annual APD receipts to support faster development of clean aero engines.