ABSTRACT
If aviation fuel is produced in an environmentally and socially benign way, we can say that it contributes to development, generally. Obviously, a specific, narrow, subjective conception of sustainability cannot really work when we examine it against all the features and details of energy, emissions, water, land use change, social justice, economics and the whole constellation of things that really pertain. We should never infer from the Report of World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) that the environment is able to do anything that we ask of it. It is undeniably easier to figure out what any individual initiative such as sustainable fuel production or sustainable food production would look like if we try to imagine it in terms of a larger goal of an entirely sustainable world. But it is problematic to swap factors that we cannot really quantify or compare properly, even if we could quantify them which is almost always the case in this discussion.
