Euronews.green tries to be chipper about “Slower planes and contrail coordination: New report lays out five-year plan to cut aviation impacts”. But it’s a no go. The issue is that “Current policies leave the aviation industry seriously off track in meeting its climate pledges.” Like so many corporations that bought the hype including from their perky younger staff and said they would do stuff that physics said they wouldn’t.

It’s all so easy in one’s study:

“Extending flight times by making planes fly slower could reduce emissions from aviation, according to a study from the University of Cambridge. It suggests that reducing flight speeds by around 15 per cent could decrease fuel burn by 5 to 7 per cent. Planes would likely have to be designed in the future to accommodate this reduction in speed. The study also notes that the downsides of this policy would fall on passengers – slower speeds could add up to 50 minutes to a transatlantic flight for example.”

Yes, and going by sailing ship could add a week. Though frankly it would be a nicer trip, you could get WiFi these days unlike those of the Susan B. Constant, and we suspect that anyone who insists they positively must rush across the Atlantic to rush back again is exaggerating the importance of what they’re doing or the fact that they’re the one doing it. (Say, John Kerry.)

Indeed, the story gives a perhaps inadvertent insight into the world of Homo conferensis when it notes that:

“While just 10 per cent of the world’s population currently flies, aviation already accounts for around 2.5 per cent of global CO2 emissions. If non-CO2 climate impacts are taken into account, its contribution to global warming rises to 4 per cent.”

We grant that if you want to vacation somewhere distant from your home, flying is probably the way to go. But of the astonishing 100,000 flights humans take a day, how many really beat a phone call?

Here we actually do digress. The point is, airlines were naïve or worse to promise to keep hurtling people through the air five miles up in the sky in sealed tubes and not burn a lot of gas doing it.

The same problem writ large explains why for all that corporate climate virtue-signaling, the Manhattan Contrarian wrote this spring:

“Three and a half years into the Biden Administration… Despite hundreds of government actions and initiatives in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkably stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and price increases have been relatively modest – far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called ‘primary energy’ (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming from fossil fuels has remained nearly unchanged. EIA data here for 2022 (latest I can find) show about 79% of U.S. primary energy from fossil fuels, barely changed since Biden took office, and indeed very stable for decades.”

It’s not just airlines. It’s pretty much everyone. And indeed the Contrarian then draws what is surely a very obvious conclusion, even if many have thus far avoided it:

“Perhaps this situation of stable energy production and consumption results because it reflects what markets and consumers want and need to satisfy their demand for energy. So do you think that the hyperactive regulators might just relax and let the consumers have what they want? Unfortunately, that is not how this works. Even as the energy producers and consumers have figured out endless workarounds to avoid the fossil fuel suppression that the Bidenauts attempt to impose, the little regulatory tyrants have been busy preparing new bouts of punitive restrictions. Last week saw a round of some of the most sweeping regulatory edicts yet. The regulators really plan to put the people in their place this time. In the new round, the regulators have gotten farther and farther away from anything realistic, anything consistent with the laws of physics or thermodynamics, anything that might actually work.”

Something similar is happening in Canada. But more with subsidies. Despite the hoary advice that when you’re in a hole you should stop digging, Canada’s Liberal administration is doubling down. It bet tens of billions of other people’s dollars on a particular kind of EV battery technology made by certain specific firms including Northvolt, which Blacklock’s Reporter now reports is slashing jobs because apparently the politicians misjudged the market, of all things.

So Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne anti-apologizes, insisting that:

“We have to rally around them and help them. I hope we all want them to be successful.”

Er, we wish everyone well in principle. But when it comes to a battery company, we want them to be successful selling good products to happy customers, not siphoning off our tax money via gullible politicians for things that aren’t worth the price of purchase. Which is where we are.

Unfortunately, showing his sublime lack of grasp of his portfolio, Champagne justified further public-fund extravagance by saying:

“Look at Tesla. It took 17 years before it was profitable so I mean there is something in that. Look at Uber, how long it took.”

Had it been a Canadian crown corporation, we are confident it never would have become profitable. And never is a long time. But not to Champagne:

“What’s important is we managed to get Québec into the automobile industry. That’s the big gain. Now are you telling me there can’t be adjustments? You’re going from a technology that we’ve been doing for 100 years and now we’re looking at the next 100 years.”

No prize for guessing where he’s from, or in which Canadian francophone province his party’s last bastion of support is to be found. But evidently he shuns such petty considerations; his starry, steely gaze looks “10, 20, 30, 50 years” into the future and sees what mere mortals cannot. While overlooking that, for instance, as Blacklock’s explains:

“Job cuts are not the first trouble with the Northvolt subsidy. The Department of Fisheries in a briefing note last December 15 said factory effluent at the company’s Saint-Basile-le-Grand plant may breach the Fisheries Act.”

Effluent shmeffluent. We’re here to save the planet. As the Prime Minister’s office chortled while hurling $1.34 billion of our cash at a Northvolt facility to make “the world’s cleanest batteries” at the expense of a few dopey fish:

“Powered by clean electricity, the batteries produced will be among the greenest batteries in the world. It’s a win, win, win for workers, for communities and for the environment.”

And he would know because… well, he sees things mere markets and mere mortals do not. Perhaps because they’re not there.