Climate Solutions 2122 is going to blow your mind. Coming to you from 100 years into the future, the podcast tells you about the new technologies that are going to make it possible to beat climate change. And they’re already being developed as you listen to this podcast. Subscribe to Climate Solutions 2122 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and all other major podcast platforms. Find out how you’re going to survive.

We kick off with the sector that people think of as one of the biggest climate change problems. It’s also a sector where some of the coolest solutions are going to come through. Airlines.

You’re probably thinking that the days of flying around the world are numbered. Soon, you’ll be taking trains to your vacation destinations and maybe making a long-haul journey by boat once or twice in your lifetime. Well, you’re probably going to be more train journeys in the immediate future—that’s true. But in the long-term—say, once you get into the 2040s—there are solutions that allow you to get around in the air…over long and short distances.

If you want to make cars emit less carbon, you just make them electric. But you can’t make a jetliner run on a battery. The energy density of batteries doesn’t allow that. The battery would have to be too big, because a jet engine burns so much power.

That’s where hydrogen comes in. It has an energy-per-unit mass three times as high as jet fuel. It also produces more energy from a lower volume of fuel.

Airline climate solutions from the biggest aviation firms

Airbus and Boeing, the world’s biggest aviation firms, are working on this even as you’re listening. They’re taking different approaches.

Boeing is buying start-up companies that have good ideas about hydrogen technology. Airbus is working in-house, figuring out how to convert conventional aircraft to run on hydrogen engines. In 2022, it announced that it would use its A380 to test hydrogen technology. Airbus also said it would have hydrogen airliners in operation by 2035.

Of course, development of airliners is typically delayed by almost a decade, so don’t count on flying with hydrogen so soon. Still, it’s an amazing technological change that has a big potential impact on emissions. Because hydrogen is created through electrolysis. And if that electrolysis is done with renewable energy from wind or the sun, say, then there are no carbon emissions.

Vertiports as airline climate solutions

Now, that’s how things will develop for long-haul flights…

…But we’ll also have urban air travel.

What develops in the decades ahead of you is this: There are fewer major airports, but lots of small airports…some so small that they’re called vertiports and they’re little more than taxi stands. You fly long-haul on your hydrogen airliner and land at a big hub airport. Then you take a shorter flight on an electric drone craft with about nine or ten other people that takes you close to home. From there, you might even take another still smaller drone to a vertiport in your neighbourhood.

Airports will become a bit like train stations are today.

But we’ll talk more about trains in another episode.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Climate Solutions 2122 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and all other major podcast platforms. Find out the solutions to climate change…before they happen.