From the New York Times:

“The pandemic upended commercial aviation. One way to visualize the effect of lockdowns on air travel is to consider the number of passengers screened on a daily basis at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.

“Traveler screenings plunged in March before hitting a low point on April 14, when 87,534 passengers were screened — a 96 percent decline as compared with the same date in 2019.

“Numbers have risen relatively steadily since then, though today the screening figures still sit at less than half of what they were a year earlier.

“According to the International Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, global passenger traffic in 2020 fell by 65.9 percent as compared to 2019, the largest year-on-year decline in aviation history.”

As for the Co2 emissions:

“According to figures from Carbon Monitor, an international initiative that provides estimates of daily CO2 emissions, worldwide emissions from aviation fell by nearly 50 percent last year — to around 500 million metric tons of CO2, down from around 1 billion metric tons in 2019.”

Notice the difference between a 69.5% drop and a 50% drop. That’s because the planes that were flying had less people in them—on average—in 2020.

There has not been any large-scale reckoning on what to do with the insane-emissions aviation industry post-Covid. There has been a deafening silence from the top of all of the tops. Too much of the world’s money flow depends on people boarding flying cucumbers for politicians to even get close to taking a stand on this one: tourism, the aviation and aeronautics industries, and all the jobs that go with them.

Hot potato!

As Greta would no doubt say though, this is a choice we are making as a species. And choices have consequences.

And this planet that keeps us alive is increasingly walloping us back when we slap it on the backside.