It's Easy Being Green

Nigel Ash: Has the airline industry grasped the seriousness of climate change?

Lawrence Hunt: The aviation business is showing absolutely no initiative. Michael O’Leary [Ryanair CEO] is saying we should shoot cows while Willie Walsh claims British Airways is doing fantastic work when less than 1% of its customers offset their flights. BA offers offsetting on its website. If you can find it, I’ll give you a bottle of champagne! And then we have easyJet demanding that any carrier with planes older than 17 years should be shut down, which is convenient because its oldest aircraft just happens to have been manufactured in 1990. So all these airlines are jostling for position but not actually doing anything.

NA: So what is Silverjet doing?

LH: Silverjet is a socially responsible and public company. We can take a lead on this because we are small and innovative. We won the Condé Nast Award for Innovation this year on this issue. The solution is dead simple. It costs 90p per hour per passenger to offset a flight, which is not a big deal really. All airlines should be doing this and governments should be encouraging them; they should regulate it and make sure that money does go into verified offsetting projects around the world.

We commissioned the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to do an independent audit of our carbon footprint. It found that every time we fly across the Atlantic, we produce approximately 124t of carbon. We now offset every flight through the Carbon Neutral Company, one of the leading carbon management companies in the UK, which invests that money in a variety of projects around the world. We are buying solar panels for families in India, building a wind farm in New Zealand and capping and putting filters on disused coalmines in Pennsylvania.

Every time a customer flies with us, they earn carbon points, and they can choose where to invest them. The feedback we have had so far has been incredible. For example, we had the CEO of a major consumer company who has seven million air miles that he can never use because BA won’t allow him to travel when he wants to, and he asked me to write to Willy Walsh to see if they would convert those seven million air miles into Silverjet carbon points. The letter is about to go.

NA: Can the problem be solved just through offsetting?

LH: It sounds very straightforward, but offsetting is not a long-term solution – it’s just the first in a three-step plan for Silverjet: offsetting, emissions trading and investing in better technology, greener fuels and lighter aircraft.

NA: How close are other airlines to becoming carbon neutral?

LH; The aviation industry has buried its head in the sand on this issue for too long. The general response has been to duck the issue of carbon offsetting. Where is BA’s plan, for instance?

NA: How are statistics on airline pollution measured?

LH: The International Air Transport Association claims that airlines are responsible for just ‘2% of global emissions’. It won’t admit the problem. To me, they are just morons in ivory towers. The industry can’t afford to take this risk – it needs to pull itself together, act cohesively and admit the effects that its activity has on the environment.

NA: Do you think politicians might be thinking about limiting air travel because green issues will get them more votes than facilitating business?

LH: If BA wants to open up a new route, it just does it. It does not have to go through the kind of hoops that we have to go through. I don’t think the government limiting air travel is really feasible. You talk about vote winners, but if you stop people going on holiday, you will lose a hell of a lot of votes. And if you stop people travelling on business, preventing them from growing their company and getting deals done, then you are going to lose all the business votes as well.

I think that once they actually sit down and think it through– which they rarely do in this government, they do everything on the hoof – they will soon realise that it is impractical. I can’t see how they are going to do that.

NA: Well the only thing the government is going to do is add to the cost of flights and boost tax revenues, isn’t it?

LH: Which is what it has done already, and I think it will continue to do it. But this is very misguided. All it is doing is filling black holes in the government’s coffers. Taking another billion pounds out of the aviation industry in passenger duty is not doing anything at all to solve the problem of pollution created by the airline business.