Hopes that replacement fuels for airplanes will slash carbon pollution are misguided and support for these alternatives could even worsen the climate crisis, a new report has warned.

There is currently “no realistic or scalable alternative” to standard kerosene-based jet fuels, and touted “sustainable aviation fuels” are well off track to replace them in a timeframe needed to avert dangerous climate change, despite public subsidies, the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, found.

Chuck Collins, co-author of the report, said: “To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies, the trade-offs would be unacceptable and would take resources aware from more urgent decarbonization priorities.

But the new Institute for Policy Studies report argues that the airline industry has missed previous goals to ramp up sustainable aviation production and that boosting use of the fuel source may even damage the environment and global climate targets.

“Agricultural land use changes could threaten global food security as well as nature-based carbon sequestration solutions such as the preservation of forests and wetlands,” the report states.

Large commercial airliners cannot be outfitted with batteries, unlike cars, due to their weight, while progress in other fuel forms, such as hydrogen, has been complicated.

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