SAF will not meet 5% emission reduction targets
Governments had targeted a 5% emission reduction by 2030 by using SAF. However, the Director General of the global airlines body IATA recently announced: “To be blunt, there is no path to meet that outcome.”
He added: “There is still hope for 2050 – but that’s fading fast … We need an urgent dialogue to determine a realistic timeline given the current state of affairs.”
According The Guardian, “The admission is unlikely to surprise environmental campaigners, who have long regarded the pledges and supposed pathways to sustainable aviation as greenwashing and a fig-leaf to allow continued expansion of flying.”
Even if SAF were produced in volume, various studies have shown that the climate benefit is small compared with fossil fuels. Yet the industry continues to talk-up SAF and represent it as the future savior of the industry.
Purposefully Misleading Aviation Climate Marketing
A recent European academic paper in the Journal of Travel Research1 provides insight into the industry’s strategy regarding the environment. The findings of the paper “reveal a novel theoretical mechanism, “future soothing”: projecting technological salvation into a perpetually deferred future to ease public concern and postpone regulation. By transforming delay into the illusion of progress, discourses operate as rhetorical governance, sustaining growth under the guise of climate responsibility.”
In other words, the industry is engaged in deceptive marketing: making promises about the future that they know are not going to happen, to prevent regulatory action today. This concept is explained further in the paper, and key excerpts are presented and summarized below. The authors begin with the well-known background facts:
“In response to growing consumer awareness and public discourse around climate change and the need for emissions reduction, the aviation industry has paradoxically positioned itself as a leader in sustainability, embracing the concept of “sustainable aviation” … recently, airlines and their organizations have launched a considerable number of initiatives to assert their commitment to addressing climate change.”
“These narratives– circulated through CEO messages, reports, corporate websites, and marketing campaigns – portray air travel as energy-efficient, socially indispensable, and technologically progressive . They thus naturalize continued aviation growth by linking it to economic necessity and innovation. At the same time, such accounts tend to marginalize the scientific consensus on aviation’s climate impacts and obscure structural accountability.”
A key element of this strategy is based on technology myths: “the recurrent invocation of future innovations such as SAF, hydrogen, or electric aircraft that perpetually defer political interference. Such technological optimism, they argue, sustains a “myth of progress” that legitimizes inaction by creating untethered imaginaries of a climate-compatible aviation future.”
“Airlines also highlight decarbonization targets, often framed as bold commitments. A common practice among airlines is to pledge net-zero emissions by 2050 or earlier. Reference is made to “science-based targets,” regulatory compliance, and partnerships with academic institutions on emissions assessments, SAF certification and zero-carbon propulsion; all underlining the robustness of net-zero roadmaps.”
“A key element of this strategy is to depict one or several technologies as being under development or close to break-through, while timelines continuously shift to the future. Recently, this mostly includes “net zero by 2050”, a goal that is even less tangible in the absence of milestones against which progress could be measured.”
Any deviations from the mythical plan are blamed on others: “A more recent discourse, “insurmountable barriers,” acknowledges the difficulty of achieving net-zero and shifts responsibility to absent or ineffective third parties (biofuel providers, governments, or international bodies). This seeks to develop a circular narrative of attribution and blame, both with spatio-temporal contingencies – waiting for someone, somewhere else, to do something – while indirectly acknowledging that no such third party can be expected to step forward or to intervene rapidly enough at the necessary scale. While this discourse aims to dispel future criticism of inaction, it underlines the realities of limited decarbonization pathways available to the sector, both currently and likely in the future.
This marketing approach is having the desired affect: “Across these strands, a critical consensus emerges: airline sustainability communication reproduces a sense of moral adequacy despite ongoing environmental harm. As such, their rhetorical strategies are not merely devices of persuasion but tools that shape public meaning, mediate conflict, and construct social realities … The industry asserts its awareness and commitment to action, positioning itself as an agent of change and thus undermining the need for regulatory interventions … The analysis presented here shows that the aviation industry’s public discussion of climate change represents an amalgam of narratives that collectively function as a form of temporal legitimation, that is, a discursive strategy that constructs credibility and moral authority through promises of future progress.”
The paper argues it is easy to validate aviation industry claims: “If industry had shown “climate leadership,” as it claims, a decline in emissions would be traceable in trajectories. However, the evidence is that emissions have more than doubled since the 1990s and will continue to grow…”
Occasionally the industry slips and admits that the climate friendly image they have created is a chimera; According to Alaska Airlines, “Our ability to advance on this path continues to rely significantly on the development of technologies … that do not exist today at the scale or with the operational and commercial viability needed for the future” and are, according to American Airlines, “outside of American’s control … the future development and availability of these technologies is not something we can predict with precision.”
The paper concludes: “Our analysis provides a valuable contribution to research by revealing how the industry’s rhetorical control over public meaning, reinforced through partnerships with governments, public-relations agencies, and even academic institutions, enables it to shape not only consumer attitudes but also regulatory expectations. In doing so, airlines and industry bodies participate in what may be described as rhetorical governance, where language itself becomes a technology of delay. Delay is not simply an absence of policy action but a discursive accomplishment that redefines what counts as credible, feasible, or moral within climate politics.”
- Gossling et al, Beyond the Rhetoric of “Sustainable Aviation”: a Counterfactual Confrontation, 2026, Journal of Travel Research, DOI: 10.1177/00472875251411867 ↩︎