Swiss Made, Chokepoints and a Digital Pandemic ft. ITU's Tomas Lamanauskas

We do have some listener feedback.

It's a big one this time.

Listener and former guest Ron writes in regarding the Marie Owens Thompson episode from earlier in the summer.

He's not disputing her points on the economics of refineries, but actually he's disputing the word sustainable and sustainable aviation fuel specifically.

So Ron tells us he was actually in the room at the 2009 Aviation and Environment Summit here.

Hey, who wasn't there? I wasn't there.

I was in school.

When the industry was first sketching out aviation biofuels, and his argument basically boils down to the fact that the name came before the product.

So the sector had seen the backlash against corn ethanol and biodiesel, as Ron tells it, and decided to brand its version sustainable from day one rather than just biofuel.

So Ron's point is that the principle was dropped almost immediately.

And because there's no technological breakthrough that's expected and also collection costs are rising, the bigger the plant gets, he doesn't see the cost curve coming down.

He says that the subsidy is actually particularly the IRA's 125 a gallon credit is what's keeping it afloat and keeping us talking about it for now.

So his in his opinion, for now, it's more greenwashing than a solution at scale.

I have to admit, if listeners haven't figured out by now, I'm not an expert in this subject, but I would I'm interested to know your take, Rob.

Do you think that's just a fair assessment or is it only exists because of subsidies? True of any and every energy transition technology in the first couple of decades.

I think it's totally in line with what I don't think Rio and Thompson was saying anything different from that.

If he's just talking about don't call it sustainable.

I think, yeah, we have to look at the source of it.

And I think that was core of her point, which is there's not enough of it and there won't be enough of it until we change the energy system.

So she was not really even talking about airplanes.

She was talking about way, way back in the supply chain of airplanes.

sustainable fuel, however described, and how the whole issue of changing refineries, the whole issue of if you don't have any diesel anymore, you won't have any airplane fuel anymore, and so on.

So I think she would agree.

And we talked about how important it is in the market now with less than 1%.

And I think, I don't remember whether it was on-air or off-air, but some of the biggest sources potentially of this kind of thing, which would be animal carcasses and so on, would not be acceptable to your average day traveler.