The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels. ~ David Suzuki
Aviation leaders will meet at the 2025 ICAO Aviation Climate Week, from 2 to 4 June 2025 at the International Civil Aviation Organization, under the theme: “Skyward Action: Realizing Aviation’s Sustainable Future.” My article, which appeared in this newspaper on 28 May, titled Climate Week at ICAO: Discord in the Skies discussed how States participating in this event are conceptually, in their history and approaches to pollution of the air by industrial emissions, including aviation, are on disparate paths. The discussion below touches on a possible approach to conventional wisdom that has permeated aviation and climate change through carbon offsetting and reduction.
A New Twist?
In the rarified realm of civil aviation governance, where the din of jet engines often drowns out the subtler sounds of environmental deliberation, ICAO’s latest initiative to convene a dialogue on climate change—specifically regarding the implementation of the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA)—is timely, if not overdue. The stakes are no longer confined to the insulated lexicon of emissions units or compliance cycles. What beckons now is a philosophical reorientation of the global aviation sector’s epistemic assumptions. It is in this context that the present discussion may be invigorated by the dialectical perspectives of Kohei Saito’s “Slow Down” and George Monbiot’s “Heat,” both of which challenge the doctrinal underpinnings of technocratic optimism and growth-centric mitigation.
Saito’s treatise, drawn from the intellectual marrow of Marxist ecology, stands as a lucid indictment of capitalist accelerationism. In his framing, growth is not merely a quantitative index of prosperity but a metaphysical delusion—an echo of Enlightenment hubris that obscures the planetary limits of extraction and expansion. Saito’s “degrowth communism” enjoins us to recalibrate our normative assumptions about value, consumption, and technological salvation. Monbiot, in “Heat,” confronts the same malaise from a pragmatic, systems-oriented perspective, unmasking the subterfuge of “business-as-usual” solutions and carbon offsetting regimes. In their confluence, these two works present a sobering mirror to the ICAO delegates: to proceed without epistemic humility would be to chart a course toward climatic irreversibility.
CORSIA, heralded by ICAO as a historic market-based measure to mitigate international aviation’s carbon footprint, is predicated on a transactional architecture of offsets and reductions. Designed to complement a basket of measures—including technological innovation, sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), and operational improvements—CORSIA seeks to stabilize CO₂ emissions at 2020 levels through a phased implementation framework. Yet, what is conspicuously absent from its structure is a moral reckoning with the structural inequities and ecological myopia of offsetting itself. Saito would argue, with unimpeachable clarity, that such mechanisms serve to externalize ecological costs while preserving the core dynamics of accumulation and flight-based privilege.
Indeed, it is one thing to record compliance and another to question the ideological substratum that necessitates such compliance in the first place. What is the telos of ICAO’s climate mandate? Is it to enable the aviation industry to continue its expansion unfettered by environmental constraints, or is it to forge a civilizational shift toward ecological stewardship? In Monbiot’s language, the fetish of “efficiency” becomes the opiate of policymakers, delivering incremental gains while occluding the structural transformations required. Efficiency does not negate excess; it merely renders it momentarily tolerable.
This event, if it is to rise beyond the theatre of performative diplomacy, must initiate a jurisprudential and existential inquiry into aviation’s future. What is the moral calculus of a tonne of CO₂ saved in spreadsheets but not in the atmosphere? What justice is served when wealthy nations offset emissions through reforestation projects in the Global South while continuing to facilitate luxury air travel as a normative right? The delegates must be reminded that offsetting, however scientifically modeled, often veils a fundamental asymmetry: it is not a subtraction of harm but a redistribution of guilt. Saito’s call for the abandonment of GDP worship and Monbiot’s excoriation of technofixes converge in this regard. The question is not whether aviation can grow sustainably, but whether sustainability necessitates a contraction of aviation itself.
The empirical data show that aviation contributes approximately 2–3% of global CO₂ emissions, a figure modest in aggregate yet monumental in per capita terms. Aviation remains one of the most carbon-intensive modes of transport per unit distance per passenger. Yet, policy discourse within ICAO has long been insulated from this reality by the invocation of aspirational targets—such as carbon-neutral growth and net-zero by 2050—that are rarely accompanied by binding obligations or enforcement mechanisms. Here, the insights of Monbiot ring prophetic: he argues that climate policy has been hijacked by language designed to defer action under the guise of complexity. The Paris Agreement’s reliance on nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and ICAO’s deference to state voluntarism under CORSIA’s structure mirror this tendency.
The philosophical undertone of “Slow Down” indicts not just growth, but the epistemology of climate mitigation as currently construed. Saito demands a civilizational de-escalation—a retreat from productionism and technocratic hegemony. How might ICAO engage with such a proposition? It would involve confronting deeply embedded assumptions: that air connectivity is inherently good; that more passengers equate to more prosperity; that decarbonization is a logistical challenge rather than a moral imperative. The assembled delegates must examine the interstitial zone between regulatory ambition and ontological necessity.
What ICAO Should Do
It is time for ICAO to go beyond compliance monitoring and assert a stewardship ethos grounded in sufficiency rather than expansion. The implementation of CORSIA must not be the end but the means to a more radical self-examination. Does the scheme reduce real emissions or merely enable their translocation to less scrutinized sectors? Are the offsets real, permanent, and additional? Or are they, as Monbiot charges, “imaginary commodities,” created not to heal the biosphere but to preserve the illusion of continuity? The compliance mechanisms under CORSIA must be interrogated for their epistemic validity, not just procedural accuracy.
The challenge lies in ICAO’s own constitutional architecture—built on consensus, bounded by sovereignty, and entrenched in the economic interests of its Member States. Delegates would do well to reflect on Saito’s insistence that true climate action cannot be negotiated within frameworks that fetishize market efficiency over ecological truth. If the logic of capitalist expansion remains unchallenged, then the technical execution of CORSIA may well become another ritual in regulatory theater—replete with compliance reports, offset registries, and sustainability rhetoric, yet devoid of transformative consequence.
What Aviation Week Should Accomplish
What purpose, then, should animate the deliberations of this event? If we accept that aviation cannot continue to expand indefinitely in a carbon-constrained world, then the regulatory community must begin to design for contraction, not just mitigation. This does not entail a Luddite abandonment of progress but a redefinition of what progress entails. Is it not more noble to reimagine mobility through slower, more localized, and equitable forms of connectivity than to pursue universal flight access at the cost of climatic stability? The emerging discourse on degrowth, far from being an ideological outlier, must be integrated into the regulatory grammar of ICAO deliberations.
To Monbiot, the present crisis is not a crisis of knowledge but of will. The science is known; the pathways are clear. What is lacking is the political courage to act against entrenched interests. This ICAO event offers an opportunity, perhaps a fleeting one, to break from the inertial politics of accommodation. The delegates must resist the seduction of incrementalism. They must confront the possibility that CORSIA, in its current form, may be structurally incapable of delivering climate justice unless radically reimagined.
My Take
This reimagination must begin with a humble acceptance of planetary boundaries and a renunciation of growth as the organizing principle of aviation development. It must extend to a reconsideration of subsidies, air service agreements, and bilateral regimes that privilege traffic growth over emissions reduction. It must embrace the concept of “sustainable degrowth” by rewarding those States and operators who choose to fly less, not more; who invest in rail integration rather than airport expansion; who see virtue in stillness, not just speed.
The deliberative process at this event must be guided by a dual awareness: that the window for meaningful climate action is narrowing, and that the legitimacy of ICAO itself depends on its ability to align with a future that is not only technologically plausible but ethically tenable. To this end, the Secretariat must challenge States to move beyond technical submissions and articulate their vision for a just aviation future. The spirit of consensus must not be allowed to dilute the imperative of truth. Saito’s vision of deceleration and Monbiot’s insistence on integrity must be summoned into the room not as adversarial critiques but as epistemic allies.
If the ICAO event is to fulfill its promise, it must transcend its procedural mandates and rise to the level of philosophical reckoning. Compliance, while essential, is insufficient. Offsets, while operationally convenient, are morally fraught. Growth, while seductive, is ecologically untenable. The gathered delegates must summon the courage to slow down—not in the inertia of bureaucracy, but in the discipline of wisdom. They must understand, as Saito and Monbiot both urge, that the climate crisis is not an aberration of the system but a consequence of its logic. To change the outcome, we must change the logic. ICAO stands at the threshold of that possibility. Whether it chooses to step through remains to be seen.
