Philanthropist and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates says aviation remains one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize, but avoiding warming contrails could provide a relatively inexpensive way to reduce the industry’s climate impact.
Bill Gates Says Contrails Make the Planet Hotter
In a thread on the social media platform X, Gates said that aircraft contributed to climate change by carbon emissions from burning fuel and by Condensation Trails, or contrails.
“Those are the lines you’ll sometimes see forming behind a plane as it flies, and there are a lot of misconceptions about them,” he said, referring to people calling the lines “chemtrails” that emit “toxic chemicals,” but the lines were nothing more than clouds, Gates said.
“Persistent contrails are responsible for about half of the temperature increase caused by aviation,” Gates said. The philanthropist added that the Earth could “eliminate up to two percent of all global warming” if contrails did not exist.
Rerouting Flights
In an article released on the Gates Notes website, the Microsoft co-founder said that eliminating contrails would require flights to alter their flight paths to avoid areas that can help form Contrails, which are Cirrus clouds that are a common type of naturally occurring clouds that help the Earth “regulate its temperature,” he said.
“Contrails reflect sunlight entering our atmosphere and absorb heat before it can leave,” Gates said, which may lead to temperatures rising at night as contrails trap heat.
“To avoid the majority of warming contrail regions, we would need to adjust the routes of just five percent of flights globally,” Gates said, adding that flights could fly slightly above or below the contrail zones.
The billionaire also addressed fuel cost concerns as the Iran war-induced energy shocks continue to drive prices higher. “While it’s true that rerouting to avoid contrails may burn more fuel, the reality is that it uses such a minuscule amount,” he said, adding that rerouting would burn “0.1 percent more fuel” across all flights.
World’s Largest Battery-Electric Aircraft Takes Flight
Amid the contrails idea, aerospace manufacturer Heart Aerospace, in early September, demonstrated that its X1 battery-electric aircraft flew for 27 minutes using $5 worth of electricity in August under a special Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airworthiness certificate. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) and Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk hailed the flight.
Meanwhile, investor Cathie Wood-led ARK Invest invested millions of dollars this week in electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft manufacturers Joby Aviation Inc. (NYSE:JOBY) and Archer Aviation Inc. (NYSE:ACHR).
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Photo courtesy: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock.com
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