There’s just one problem. The claims crumble under scrutiny. Ryanair (RYA) has a history of running provocative and misleading adverts, of course. This one really pushes the boundaries of environmental spin.
Hardly clean and hardly green
The inconvenience faced by all airlines is that theirs is a high emissions industry. Carbon dioxide is just one of the pollutants jet engines produce. Others include heated water vapour, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, unburnt hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and soot (admittedly in smaller quantities). At higher altitudes, these non-CO2 gases persist longer than at ground level and have a greater (global) warming potential. Ethical investors already avoid shares in tobacco, alcohol and gambling companies. Funds are being lobbied by the more active of their members to sell out of fossil fuels. Airlines could be next.
Some time ago, The Independent newspaper ran a headline pointing out that Ryanair was “spewing out nearly as much CO2 as Cyprus does”. That was in 2012, when it produced 7.5m tonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2018, this had risen to 9.9m tonnes – a growth so fast that, for the first time, a European Commission report ranked Ryanair as the 10th largest European polluting entity. The nine above it are coal-fired power stations. So Europe’s self-proclaimed “cleanest and greenest airline group” is, in fact, just the opposite. It pollutes more than any other European airline.
Ah, but that’s not what we meant, Ryanair claimed in its response to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The reference was to CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre. Ryanair’s aircraft have a “higher seating density” (limited leg room, in other words) and a “higher passenger load factor” (filling almost every seat) than most other airlines. Its newer aircraft pollute less.
It produced a chart from Brighter Planet, a provider of carbon and energy calculations. This ranks Ryanair as the most efficient airline. The ASA wasn’t buying that. What’s the date of this chart? 2011. Had it not occurred to Ryanair that such an old survey was “of little value as substantiation for a comparison made in 2019”? And, the ASA went on: “Some well-known airlines did not appear on the chart, so it was not clear whether they had been measured.” Some might pollute less.
Ryanair referred to another bar chart, this time from Eurocontrol, showing the percentage share of CO2 emissions and air traffic from 27 (unidentified) airlines in early 2019. Ryanair divided one bar into the other to work out that it must be the most efficient. The ASA replicated this. It found that some other carriers appear to have similar, if not lower, ratios.
The adverts were running in 10 countries across Europe. Earlier this month, the ASA required Ryanair to pull the ones in the UK.
Grounded
At this point you might think that Ryanair’s 11 non-executive directors would insist that Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, corrects his company’s information. Yet, go onto its website, click on the environmental policy and the unsubstantiated claims are still there. It trumpets that it produces 66g CO2 per passenger km, which apparently “is 23 per cent lower than the average of Europe’s other four big airlines”. Who are these four? easyJet (EZJ), British Airways, part of International Consolidated Airlines (IAG), Air France-KLM (Fr:AF) and Lufthansa (Ger:LHA). What’s more, Ryanair says its target is to cut its emissions to 60g by 2030, which will widen the gap to 30 per cent. This estimate relies on Ryanair’s own calculations, and presumably on Boeing sorting out its problems with the 737 MAX 200s, which Ryanair has on order.
Ryanair’s environmental policy commits it to address climate change, although “aviation is the most efficient form of mass point-to-point transport, accounting for just 2 per cent of EU man-made CO2 emissions”. It’s been pulled up about this as well. Some of its destinations named as major cities (such as Paris, Frankfurt and Barcelona) could land passengers in provincial airports over 50 miles away. That 2.4 per cent figure (relating to global CO2 emissions) is often quoted, but it excludes the impact of infrastructure and further transport links. And, according to the 2013 IATA technology roadmap, also quoted by Ryanair, emissions are expected to increase at a remorseless rate. This roadmap suggests that globally a drop will only be possible from 2040 onwards, and then only provided that low-carbon fuels come on stream.
Mr O’Leary says that Ryanair would use these fuels if they were cost-effective, but there must first be a consensus on “international standards and sustainability criteria”. In other words, it’s up to governments and fuel suppliers. That may be so, but others are doing more. Virgin Atlantic is supporting a project to scale up the recycling of carbon from industrial waste gases to make low-carbon aviation fuel. And British Airways has co-invested in a plant to convert waste destined for landfill or incineration into jet and road fuel.
He also believes that Europe could cut its CO2 emissions by 10 per cent if routings were made more efficient. To achieve that requires a Europe-wide integrated air traffic control system. Over to governments again. But who’s going to pay for it? Well, not Ryanair, apparently, for Mr O’Leary believes that higher aviation taxes “are not the answer”. Ryanair expects to pay €630m in environmental taxes in its 2020 financial year, which is just 11 per cent of the cost of its fares. Of these, €150m will be from buying additional carbon “allowances” for polluting too much – exceeding the cap on its greenhouse gas emissions under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). The unfairness here, he says, is that ETS currently does not apply to flights to or from non-EU countries (so presumably Brexit will let its UK flights off the hook). The UK catches Ryanair with €383m of Air Passenger Duty (APD).
The push to make polluters pay
Mr O’Leary, no doubt, welcomes the government’s APD review (announced as part of the Flybe bail-out), for he argues that such taxes “disproportionately affect regional/peripheral economies that rely heavily on air connectivity to maintain tourism and growth”. He also claims that they deliver no environmental benefits and favour inefficient airlines, but then he’s renowned for being provocative.
Some say that APD needs to be higher. It’s a proxy for a tax on aviation fuel (which, yes, is untaxed). Julian Allwood, professor of engineering and the environment at Cambridge University, estimates that “taxing aircraft fuel at the level of the UK’s current road fuel tax… would make flights up to four times more expensive”. Professor Allwood is part of a multi-university group, whose report ‘Absolute Zero’ concludes that there are only three ways for airlines to achieve their target of net zero carbon by 2050: “Invent new electric aircraft, change the fuels in existing aircraft or take emissions out of the air.” The aviation industry is pinning its hopes on the first two; the academics see this as unrealistic. The only solution, they say, is to cut back on the number of flights, or better still, to stop flying. In short, that 2050 zero-carbon target needs to be pursued, but it’s an empty promise.
Ryanair also argues that environmental taxes penalise the lower paid. A perspective on this is provided by the European Aviation Safety Agency. Based on a typical two-engine jet during a one-hour flight with 150 passengers, it says that every kilogram of aviation fuel burned churns out three kilograms of CO2. Whether passengers are highly paid or poorly paid, the pollution is the same.
Carbon offsets
Like most airlines, Ryanair enables customers to donate conscience money to offset the environmental impact of their flight; 98 per cent haven’t bothered. Over the past two years, 2 per cent have donated €2.5m. This has been spent on buying cooking stoves in Uganda, helping to restore a Portuguese forest habitat, on extending a native Irish wood… and on studying whales and dolphins off the Irish coast. This last one is a worthy cause, but Ryanair has yet to explain how it offsets its carbon footprint.
Contrast this with the £25m a year that easyJet spends on its sustainable travel policy. Forget voluntary contributions. EasyJet pays them for everybody and claims that it’s the first major airline to do so. “We know carbon offsetting is not perfect, but right now we believe it’s the best way to address the carbon emitted from flying,” it says. Its money goes to projects that meet internationally recognised carbon-offsetting accreditation. But it stresses that its primary aim is to reduce emissions per passenger. Like most airlines, it aims to do this by investing in larger, quieter aircraft and filling them more to capacity. And to seek less-polluting take-off and landing processes. Already, many planes now taxi on one engine, for example.
Inconvenient truths
David Bonderman has been chairing Ryanair for over 23 years. He’s due to be succeeded by a fellow non-executive, Stan McCarthy, this summer. The hope must be that Mr McCarthy tightens the board’s attitudes towards its environmental, social and governance responsibilities. The directors’ challenge will be to tame Mr O’Leary’s apparent delight in courting controversy for the sake of generating publicity. They could start by insisting that the ASA’s “missing airlines” are included when Ryanair compares itself to others. Wizz Air (WIZZ), now worth over £3bn, has a similar operating model to Ryanair, and competes with it on some routes, although its focus is eastern Europe. Last month, it announced that its CO2 emissions for the whole of 2019 averaged 57.3g per passenger kilometre. Now, what was Ryanair’s again? 66g.
What’s more, Wizz Air’s emissions are already almost 5 per cent lower than Ryanair’s target of 60g for 2030. Some might conclude that Ryanair is guilty of believing its own publicity about its pollution record. Compared with Wizz Air, it appears to be at least 10 years behind the curve.
