Fly to green land with Nature Air

If we accept the analysis of ten leading climate scientists from around the world, we are truly on the brink of disaster and need to make immediate and drastic cuts in emissions to avoid a 70 metre sea-level rise, the loss of the inland glaciers that provide water to a billion people, the rapid expansion of the subtropical deserts, and mass extinctions. But all is not lost: we now have the "world's first carbon neutral airline".

Nature Air have always considered themselves less an airline, "more like a travel company with wings", whatever that means. While their site acknowledges that "the only way to slow or stop temperature rise due to man made activities is to restrict the amount of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere", that doesn't stop them making a rather remarkable claim of carbon neutrality. How do they achieve this? By planting trees... and ignoring the impacts of radiative forcing (which increase climate impacts by a factor of 2.7). Even if offsetting worked, Nature Air is offsetting just over a third of their full impact.

Furthermore their fuel company Aerotica (is this for real?) has launched Costa Rica’s only private bio-fuel filling station and as most children can tell you, the use of biofuels results in land being stolen from food producers, forcing them to... cut down forestry in order to grow food. Oxfam estimates that by 2020 the carbon emissions from such changing land use could be almost 70 times greater than the annual savings from biofuels!

If we are to make appropriate reductions in order to sustain life on earth we are going to have to re-evaluate our perceptions of personal mobility and no matter how prettily it may be dressed, air travel remains unsustainable. However the greenwash obviously works for Nature Air - they've grown 20% each year since 2001.