Commercial air travel is likely not sustainable, jets are are some of the worst polluters, rail and sea travel is far greener, sea travel as in traveling on a freighter to get somewhere, not taking a cruise.

If you want an Alaska cruise, the Alaska State Ferry is better than any of the cruise ships, well unless you need 763 types of wine flown in, and to be waited on by badly exploited workers from Southeast Asia

These sorts of fuels are a good idea. We should also improve the rail system whenever practical (https://www.aawa.us/site/assets/files/7322/2006_washington_state_long-range_plan_for_amtrak_cascades.pdf) and use electric propeller planes for when it is not (e. g. Seattle to Spokane or Calgary). We should also discourage the use of air freight and private jets by taxing the hell out of them.

Glad to see this getting covered. The Port of Seattle is right to look into this technology, and we do need to pursue greener technology alternatives to jet fuel, even if the big carbon reductions are going to come from pursuing greener alternatives to air travel itself. Here I'm +1 with Ross @2.

With that perspective out of the way, I must admit the term "Sustainable Aviation Fuel" sounds oxymoronic and Orwellian to me. And to the extent it's the massive fossil fuel companies driving this, it sounds to me like a big exercise in greenwashing and in trotting out the next big,shiny object to distract us from the tough changes we need to make to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

Where I might disagree slightly with Ross @2: "We should also discourage the use of air freight and private jets by taxing the hell out of them." Taxing particular uses of jet fuel comes across as an attempt to selectively tax the other guy. As for taxing jet fuel in general more--I'm all for that.

New airport runways are just a very very very very bad choice.

Better to replace them with high speed rail and get real.

To the extent that the fuel is made from plants, the carbon that is released when the fuel is burned is the same amount that was in the atmosphere before the fuel was produced. So by definition that would be sustainable as in it is not contributing to elevated CO2 concentrations. I don't think it is accurate to say that the resulting carbon becomes "someone else's problem." Now, reality is not going to be quite that rosy. There will be some net energy cost to making and transporting those fuels, and they will make some net contribution to global CO2. But it surely seems like it is worth exploring ways to emit, say, 20 or 30% of what we are emitting now.

As to the complaint that large oil companies are driving some of this, I'd be shocked if they were not. They can see the writing on the wall for the fossil fuels they are now selling. And while most of them are assholes (if corporations can be people, they can definitely be assholes too), they are already pretty good at refining, purifying, and transporting large volumes of liquid fuels, which would have to happen with "sustainable" fuels as well.

@2 - totally agree on the electric short-haul planes. Just like electric cars, they'll give us the chance to run transport on clean energy, and they automatically get cleaner as the grid does. For routes that don't get a ton of traffic I would not be surprised if the overall energy cost were less than that of constructing new rail lines.

dvs99 @5 exactly this could be more of a closed loop, and if the energy to produce and transport biofuels is itself renewable, an entirely closed loop. Scientific advances could let all of us including developing economy peoples have sustainable comfort and scale it to the world but our political and economic institutions aren't up to the task so billionaires get all the gains and hundred billion dollar corporations that benefit from the status quo run the show. We are at best reactive to short term environmental problems not proactive about the long haul.

Merchant Seaman @1 space available passage on a freighter is not an option for more than a handful of people.

I once lived in a small village full of isolated nationalist homophobic people. Airplane travel a-woke'd me to our common humanity. Freedom of travel and movement for all should not be a privilege of the elite nor does it have to be, but you are right, with today's energy production and economic systems we are all screwed.

We sure will tell ourselves pleasant-sounding nonsense right up to the end, won't we?