Today, key players in the aviation industry, led by Boeing and Virgin Atlantic Airways, have joined forces with academics and environmental groups to launch a push for low carbon fuel. This new coalition, Sustainable Aviation Fuels Users' Group, is being advised by NRDC and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to ground test and bring to market the next generation of low carbon, sustainable aviation fuels. For the first time, the development of a fuel will be monitored from the growth of the plant through to its refining into a fuel. This is a whole new way of thinking about producing fuels and nothing like this is done for fossil fuels.

What is fundamentally at stake is a race for our energy future. There are two paths ahead of us - ever dirtier high-carbon fuels such as tar sands oil and liquid coal or developing new, lower carbon fuels that don't harm the environment.

The group will focus on two potential new low carbon fuels - jatropha and algae - which are considered "next generation" biofuels because their production is intended not to compete for food or water resources or for land important for conserving nature or carbon.  It is also committed to developing fuels that will benefit small scale farmers and local communities.

While the group acknowledges in its pledge that efficiency and bringing down the carbon content of their fuels overall are critical components of reducing global warming pollution, the reality is that as long as planes are flying, they are going to use fuel. Right now, the majority of that fuel is coming from controversial sources, politically and environmentally. It is encouraging to think of a future fuel that could alleviate the damage from fossil fuel extraction and combustion and benefit, rather than tear apart, local communities and our environment. That is what this group is ambitiously setting out to do.

So how will the aviation sector help develop these low carbon fuels?

Importantly, the group has agreed to adopt the standards of a global, multistakeholder process called the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) and certify - through third party verification - aviation biofuels through rigorous environmental and social screening.

The challenges ahead are weighty. But the group has laid out important parameters in their pledge:

• 1. Jet fuel plant sources should be developed in a manner which is non-competitive with food and where biodiversity impacts are minimized; in addition, the cultivation of those plant sources should not jeopardize drinking water supplies.
• 2. Total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from plant growth, harvesting, processing, and end-use should be significantly reduced compared to those associated with jet fuels from fossil sources.
• 3. In developing economies, development projects should include provisions or outcomes that improve socio-economic conditions for small-scale farmers who rely on agriculture to feed them and their families, and that do not require the involuntary displacement of local populations.
• 4. High conservation value areas and native eco-systems should not be cleared and converted for jet fuel plant source development.

These criteria should be consistent with, and complementary to emerging internationally-recognized standards such as those being developed by the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels."

Bringing these new, lower carbon fuels on-line could make a critical dent in fossil fuel use, especially as the use of high carbon, dirty fuels, such as those derived from Canadian tar sands oil and liquid coal, are on the rise. Already tar sands oil makes up 8% of overall U.S. oil consumption of 21 million barrels of oil per day and could quadruple over the next decade. These fuels take a lot more energy and water to extract and process. And they are irreversibly scarring the irreplaceable wildlands of the western part of our continent. Four tons of soil - euphemistically called "overburden" - is mined where once pristine Boreal forest stood - a living part of one of the largest intact ecosystems on earth and one of our largest carbon storehouses.

At the first "Eco-Aviation" conference in Washington D.C. last June, the Chairman of Air New Zealand stood before an assembled crowd of representatives from the aviation and aerospace industries and proclaimed that now was the time to tackle climate change. He said that the sector should take up serious efforts to address what was becoming the issue of our day - global climate change. Virgin Atlantic Airways (VAA), in partnership with Boeing's Commercial Aviation division, had much the same message and a zippy ad about VAA's first biofuels test flight last February. 

This was the opener for what was to become the Sustainable Aviation Fuels Users' Group being launched today. In the absence of federal leadership on developing low carbon fuels, initiatives such as this are critical to jumpstarting a new fuels future. Low carbon fuels - together with efficiency and moving much more of the energy for our transportation to the grid and then greening the grid - hold the promise of actually reducing our dependence on oil and helping us combat global warming.

We will work hard to see that it is the work of this initiative - not the high carbon fuels agenda - that takes flight. Our planet depends on it.