Micheline Maynard reports for the Times from the Farnborough Airshow (official link to show here) that aviation manufacturers are trying to show their green credentials. It’s all well and good for Boeing to tell us that they’re working on algae as a jet fuel – but even without comparative energy figures (energy per passenger mile

From “The Wild Green Yonder“:

“It’s a matter for survival,” Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said at an environmental conference Wednesday.

With global air traffic expected to swell in coming years, government regulators, including the European Commission, are applying pressure to make planes quieter, cleaner and more efficient, and threatening penalties if they fall short.

“Our customers are under hellish pressures to come up with improvements,” said Tom Williams, an Airbus executive vice president.

There are no cheap or easy solutions. Lighter materials, new fuels and other innovations that promise to make planes more environmentally friendly mean more expense and development time. That includes the billions that engine makers are spending to develop new products.

All that could make it hard for the manufacturers to offer the discounts that their big customers have come to expect, potentially wiping out the savings that such planes might offer.

“It’s a bitter split,” said Mr. Williams of Airbus.

Mr. Bisignani said the industry was late to realize it needed to do more to stress its environmental credentials, leaving it open for attacks from environmental groups and threats of new taxes from Europe and elsewhere.

Read further – and you’ll find that aviation manufacturers are concerned that they’re being unfairly treated as other-than-green.

FuturePundit has a good analysis of comparative transportation fuel-efficiency – which relies in part on Jeff Radtke’s comparative table on Neodymics, “A Green Ride.“

No question that we’re going to have airplanes, no question that they need to be more efficient. But our objective needs to be to conserve energy and protect the ecosystem – not protect inefficient industries.