EasyJet will become the world\u2019s first major airline to operate net-zero carbon flights.<\/p>\n
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British budget airline EasyJet announced that it will immediately start\u00a0offsetting\u00a0fuel emissions from its routes.<\/p>\n
EasyJet, who\u00a0recorded 96.1 million passengers in 2019, has beaten\u00a0British Airways and Lufthansa in being the first airline in operating net-zero carbon flights. The move comes\u00a0after the\u00a0collapse of its major competitor Thomas Cook<\/a> and the mounting pressure that has grown inside the aviation industry as it rushes to address its environmental impact.<\/p>\n \u201cWe recognize that offsetting is only an interim measure, but we want to take action on our carbon emissions now (…) Aviation will have to reinvent itself as quickly as it can<\/strong>.”, <\/em>said\u00a0Johan Lundgren, EasyJet\u2019s chief executive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Since mid-November, the British company has been offsetting all flights, which is said to cost about \u00a325m in the next financial year through schemes to plant trees or avoid the release of additional carbon dioxide, according to reporting from The Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n New Scientist writes<\/a> that the innocuous white trails that criss-cross the sky may not be as harmless as they look. In fact, they might have contributed to more global warming so far than all aircraft\u00a0greenhouse gas emissions\u00a0put together.<\/p>\n High-altitude clouds like\u00a0cirrus\u00a0warm the planet by trapping heat. Contrail \u201ccirrus\u201d does the same thing, but the question is: how much? We know that contrails trap some extra energy in the atmosphere: their\u00a0radiative forcing\u00a0trapped 10 milliwatts per square metre (mW\/m2<\/sup>) in 2005, according to an estimate by the\u00a0Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>. That compares with 28 mW\/m2<\/sup>\u00a0trapped by all of the CO2<\/sub>\u00a0released by aircraft engines since the start of aviation. However, the IPCC estimate only took into account relatively fresh, visible vapor trails that exist for just a few hours. Afterwards they spread out and become indistinguishable from normal cirrus. In this form they may trap energy in the atmosphere for many more hours.<\/p>\n The sending of one\u00a0email\u00a0is estimated to produce 0.000001 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and while there are more than 3.8 billion\u00a0e-mail users worldwide<\/a>, this imminent\u00a0necessity when using the internet could be hurting the environment more than we can imagine.<\/p>\nPlane contrails: A big problem<\/h1>\n
Unnecessary emails, another problem<\/h1>\n