This year Trinity received a payment of €2.5 million from Ryanair, furthering the bond between the two parties that had started in 2021 with the founding of the Ryanair Aviation Research Centre. Grossing a total donation of four million, the Centre is ostensibly dedicated to researching sustainable aviation fuel – a great leap in Ryanair’s climate booklet and a sign of pride for Trinity as College boasts the company to be the ‘EU’s greenest airline’. However, the past few years shrouded in claims of greenwashing and other controversies does little to prove the airline sees ‘green’ as anything but a colour.
Besides being ranked as the tenth most polluting company in Europe in 2019 – preceded exclusively by coal plants – Ryanair was involved in a greenwashing controversy back in 2020 after rolling out an ad campaign claiming to be “Europe’s lowest fares, lowest emissions airline”. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned Ryanair’s ads because the airline failed to substantiate these environmental claims. For example, Ryanair had used charts dating back to 2011 for this data, eight years before the comparison was made. Another point of criticism raised by the ASA was the fact that the ads did not factor in the number of seats per plane, which the agency claimed to be substantial information needed for consumers to contextualize the claim. As explained in an article by Wired, Ryanair’s claim to be the ‘lowest emissions airline’ is dependent on the metric of CO2 released per passenger rather than overall emissions. This number is derived by dividing the total amount of emissions with the number of passenger kilometres. Because Ryanair has high seat density, and therefore a higher number of passenger kilometres, they can lay claim to the lowest emissions in the EU when measured in CO2 per passenger kilometre. This is why Ryanair can boast their 67 grams of CO2 per passenger kilometre, beating Easyjet’s 81.05 grams in 2015, despite Ryanair’s total 2018 emissions being almost 60 percent more than Easyjet’s.
Unfortunately, an opportunistic approach to math seems to be the least of Ryanair’s problems. CEO of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, has been known to have some controversial opinions, regarding climate change as “complete and utter rubbish” and noting in 2017 that he doesn’t believe climate change is real, even denying the correlation between carbon consumption and climate change. O’Leary noted that he didn’t think beef consumption and carbon emissions are the primary driving forces of climate change, yet simultaneously stated he believed “human ingenuity will find ways of improving the way we breed beef and the way we consume fuel”.
Last year, O’Leary was hit by the ultimate manifestation of karma – a cream pie to the face – after holding a one-man protest outside the European Commission in Brussels. O’Leary, whose protest was a response to air traffic controllers’ strikes over pay and working conditions, was backed by Ryanair’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) laughing off the actions of the two female environmental activists: “Passengers so happy with our routes and petition that they’re celebrating with cake”. The airline later posted an image of a cream covered O’Leary captioned “instead of buying two cream pies, could have bought a flight from Belgium for the same price”. For a man known to be critical of climate change this might come as no surprise, but for a company that prides itself on taking climate change seriously, it becomes doubtful whether the company can separate itself from the man at the helm. Besides encouraging and standing up for a man known for rejecting climate change as an idea, the company’s climate policies mimic O’Leary’s own view of how the problem should be solved: with technological advancement and symbolic gestures. The Ryanair Aviation Centre is merely a reflection of this approach.
Dedicated almost exclusively to the development of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF), the centre has become the flagship of Ryanair’s dedication to sustainability. Considering that a third of Ryanair’s climate targets are dependent on the increased use of SAF, recent comments by O’Leary referring to SAF as ‘cooking oil’ casts reasonable doubt on the validity of their entire sustainability strategy. In an interview with The Guardian, O’Leary called SAF ‘a wheeze’ and expressed his lack of faith in the whole project by claiming that there ‘isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power more than one day’s aviation’. Regardless of O’Leary’s disbelief in his own company’s strategy, the airline moved along with a purchase of 1000 tonnes of SAF from Shell this spring in addition to its two and a half million euro donation to Trinity.
The additional payment this year was welcomed enthusiastically by the Provost: “I want to thank Ryanair for their support: It is good news for the researchers in the Centre and for the students who will benefit from the teaching arising from the research”. While this is not necessarily wrong, the statement neglects to account for the implicit handcuffs this deal puts on Trinity. Ryanair will support Trinity’s interactions with regulators and policy makers, blurring the lines between Ryanair’s narrative and Trinity’s. The line between Trinity’s partnerships and Ryanair’s can already be brought into question, as Ryanair’s conferences held in Trinity have included bringing in oil companies such as Shell. While aligning themselves with oil companies might be part of Ryanair’s strategy towards sustainability, it is doubtful whether Trinity should take a page off Ryanair’s book in this case – Shell’s had enough greenwashing controversies recently as is.
O’Leary’s long history of garish comments, and Ryanair’s public support of him, has made it abundantly clear that neither take climate issues, or climate activists, seriously. At a university like Trinity, which not only represents research and knowledge but the student body itself, aligning with this kind of rhetoric and clear disregard for voices that go against the status quo simply won’t do.
Claiming Ryanair as a pillar of sustainability is both practically and morally wrong: that is to say, just because something is ‘greener’ doesn’t make it ‘green’. In addition to charming comments by CEO O’Leary, joking that “the best thing we can do with environmentalists is to shoot them”, having the Centre be dedicated to the development of SAF is a problem in itself. As climate charity Possible reported, the Aviation Industry happily uses CO2 efficiency or alternative fuel targets as a way to negotiate expansion – effectively defeating the purpose of producing sustainable fuels. As long as airlines like Ryanair are actively trying to grow, there will be no improvement in the ecological damage these airlines cause – no matter how much research they fund, how few grams of CO2 per passenger kilometer they have, or how much carbon they can offset.
Trinity furthering Ryanair’s agenda in writing as well as in spirit only affirms the wrongdoings of a company, and industry, that is notoriously a top polluter. The Aviation Centre and its research is far from useless; it just does little to inform the issue of overconsumption, which is the root of all climate issues. If College wishes to sustain a green profile it must stand up for its students rather than companies and industries actively destroying the planet. Only time will tell whether this partnership enables Trinity to do so.
