In reality, airplanes accomplish the miraculous feat of hurling hundreds of thousands of pounds of people, baggage, and aluminum thousands of miles at high speeds by consuming huge amounts of fossil fuels. In the process, airlines dump massive amounts of dangerous pollutants over our homes and into our atmosphere every day. This great but largely invisible harm will continue to grow at an accelerating rate in the years to come.
Like all human activities involving combustion, most forms of aviation release carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere, contributing to the acceleration of global warming[6] and (in the case of CO2) ocean acidification.[7] These concerns are highlighted by the present volume of commercial aviation and its rate of growth.