US DOT Aviation Climate Plan
I am currently on the Amtrak Cascades line between Seattle and Vancouver, returning from the awesome SeaGL 2025 conference at the University of Washington. I decided to cancel the US leg of my flight home because of the airport chaos caused by cancelling 10% of domestic flights. But it got me thinking that reducing air travel by 10% could have a huge effect on the USA’s greenhouse gas emissions.
My best estimate from the US Greenhouse Gas Inventory is that aviation emissions are about 125Mt annually. If we assume that the air traffic reduction will last about 1 month, that month would normally account for about 10Mt of emissions. A 10% reduction would thus make up about 1Mt of emissions.
For scale, that’s about the annual emissions of around 54,000 Americans. Not a bad reduction! It’s kind of a small percent of the total 6343 Mt the US puts out every year — about 0.016% — but I guess every bit counts. Given how tepid other climate action, even unintentional, has been in the US this year, we should probably congratulate the US DOT for its bold climate action.
