Comparing the Carbon Footprint of Transportation in Canada

By Mark Brooks The Pandemic is ending, you’re vaccinated and looking forward to travelling for the first time in two years. What is the most responsible, lowest carbon cost of transportation in Canada Today? The answer to this question is harder to find than you might think and often as not the opposite of what […]

eFuel: Aviation and Big Oil’s Plan for a Net-Zero Carbon Future

By Mark Brooks Canada has committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Yet a recent report from Canada’s Energy Regulator (CER) predicts that by 2050 Canada will still need millions of barrels a day in hydrocarbon-based fuel. As the burning of liquid and gas fuels is one of the main sources of carbon emissions, […]

Aviation’s Moment of Truth in Canada’s Post-COVID Recovery

By Mark Brooks When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, socialist economics was declared a failure, and a world spanning free market capitalist economic system ruled supreme. Then a new crisis, global warming, in part caused by capitalism’s success in creating global prosperity, created an opportunity for a rematch. Over the last decade, aviation has […]

e-Regional airlines and Pickering Airport

By Mark Brooks When it opens in 2029, the new airport in Pickering, Ontario will start with basic infrastructure and carefully created zoning and development policies that will enable it to grow into an aerotropolis. To Canada’s flock of small market and specialty airlines, Pickering’s minimal infrastructure will be just what they need. A fresh […]

Planning Canada’s Electric Flight Future

By Mark Brooks Authorities have drawn up a programme for the introduction of electric aircraft. It will be part of a national net zero carbon footprint transport plan to be published in spring 2022 and put to the country’s parliament. It starts with a few airports and a locally built 19-seat electric aircraft. By 2040, […]

Unleashing a Golden Age of Canadian GA

  By Mark Brooks Aviation’s first Golden Age is commonly accepted to have lasted for several decades beginning with Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight in June, 1927. It was a period of record-breaking flights, air races, the first commercially-viable airliners and major advances in aviation technology. These advances changed the world with improved commercial links and […]

Aviation’s Two Paths To A Net-Zero Carbon Future

  By Mark Brooks Our planet is on fire and the status quo just doesn’t cut it. Although aviation produces only 2.5% of global carbon emissions, its role as the lynchpin of the global economy has made it a symbol of a net-zero carbon future. Two starkly different visions of that future present opposing paths […]

Time to kill the Contrail Multiplier Zombie

It is time for a zombie hunt. A dead science hypothesis from 1999 — that contrails multiply carbon emission — lives on. This living dead story is haunting newspaper articles and social media sites with a strange idea that a contrail caused by a jet flying above 25,000 feet has three times the effect on […]

Aviation 25% of carbon emissions by 2050 is a Myth

“Extinction Rebellion” activists warn that we must stop all flying or we will be the last generation. They warn that aviation is standing in the way of meeting the “well below” 2C° temperature rise agreed to in the Paris accords. Stunning claims that aviation will produce a quarter of all emissions by 2050 is repeated […]