Ryanair’s leadership team are fond of lashing out statistics while brandishing the airline’s carbon footprint virtue. During a recent RTÉ interview, the airline’s chief financial officer Neil Sorahan proudly declared that in the year to the end of March, Ryanair flew 200 million passengers, the first time a European airline has achieved that figure. The company also saw revenue rise to almost €14 billion.
Those worried about the impact of aviation on climate change need not worry, it appears, because according to Sorahan, Ryanair has “very aggressive targets between now and 2031” to reduce CO2 per passenger per kilometre. They are making “great strides” in this area, maintained Sorahan, noting that “we actually saw our CO2 per passenger per km come down from 67g to 66g”.
Given the increase in passenger numbers (up 9 per cent last year), Ryanair’s carbon emissions have inevitably risen. Sorahan is not worried about that: “emissions on an absolute basis are up, but on a passenger basis are down. I think that’s the key metric that everybody looks at; what you’re burning on a passenger basis.”
This is greenwashing to a comical degree. It is patently obvious that airlines, despite their focus on emissions reduction and carbon efficiency targets measured by emissions per passenger per km, will not generate overall reductions in emissions if the number of flights dramatically increases, and Europe’s aviation industry plans to double its passenger traffic by 2050. It was estimated in 2022 that European airlines needed to reduce air traffic by at least 2 per cent annually between then and 2040 to be in line with targets to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees.
Ryanair has been repeatedly challenged on the claims it makes about its green credentials. In April, the European sustainable travel organisation Transport & Environment , published its 2024 airline emissions report, identifying Ryanair as the “most polluting” European airline, with a 9 per cent growth in CO2 emissions from 2023-24.
As reported in this newspaper earlier this week, Ryanair has dropped its “carbon offset” option for passengers and its carbon calculator for flight emissions as “there was very little interest or uptake from passengers”. In any case, it is nonsense to suggest that CO2 compensation schemes make flying more sustainable. Given the demand for Ryanair’s services, passengers are obviously unworried about their own contribution to climate change disaster. Business and environment academic Peter McManners chose as the title for his 2012 book on aviation and climate change Fly and Be Damned and pointed out, “the rich world’s expectations of flying are so deeply ingrained that, on the route to a sustainable society, aviation policy is the most difficult nut to crack”.
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When he wrote that in 2012, Ryanair passenger numbers were almost 80 million. They are delighted with more than doubling that, and the real “aggressive targets” are not about reducing emissions; they are about increasing further the passenger numbers. Ryanair titles its 2024 sustainability report “Aviation with Purpose”. This trumpets its investment in “300 Boeing 737-Max-10″, promising “20 per cent less CO2 emissions” and “21 per cent more seats”. The report is led by the projection of a traffic of 300 million passengers by 2034; this is about “delivering freedom for the citizens and visitors of Europe to fly”.
The constant mantra from the aviation sector about “sustainability initiatives” hides the reality that such gestures will not offset the carbon emitted due to expanding flight numbers. On the same day that Sorahan was interviewed, so too was Michael O’Leary. His mission? To “scrap the Dublin Airport cap because we’re missing out on a lot of growth”. Dublin Airport Authority’s own planning application revealed that the lifting of the cap will increase emissions by 22 per cent by 2031, to which Minister for Energy and Transport Darragh O’Brien recently responded, “we have got to look at amelioration measures that can be taken . . . it’s not a question of giving one sector a pass”. Really?
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The Government’s Climate Action Plan for 2025 notes “it is widely acknowledged that deployment of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) will play the greatest role in decarbonising the aviation sector in the short to medium term”. Why is it not acknowledged that less flying would play a greater role? To cap the farce, it was reported in late March in the Business Post that Ryanair (along with Smurfit Kappa and Aer Lingus) have benefited from free “pollution permits”, worth “tens of millions of euros” from the UK government under its UK emissions trading scheme, as it seeks to prevent big firms “moving to countries with laxer climate regulations”. The Business Post suggested Ryanair had received “permits worth about €286 million since 2021” .
O’Leary will no doubt get his way, given the contention of O’Brien that the Dublin Airport cap “does not serve the State”. Those seeking to promote ever more flying are not serving the State either.
