Tom Swift, Where Are You?

Noticed this excerpt today at Green Car Congress, in an article entitled IATA Director General Calls for a Zero Emissions Future for Aviation. An excerpt is instructive:

Technology: The aerospace industry must build a zero-emissions aircraft in the next 50 years.

I challenge the US, Europe, Canada, China, Brazil, Russia and Japan to coordinate basic research on a zero-emissions aircraft and then compete to develop products based on this research. Clean fuel is also critical. Governments have cut alternative fuel funding while oil companies are busy counting the US$15 billion in increased refinery margins that the airline industry is now paying. The first target is to replace 10% of fuel with low-carbon alternatives in the next ten years. And the second is to begin developing a carbon-free fuel from renewable energy sources. It’s time for governments and the oil industry to make some serious investments.

Hmmmm. "-make some serious investments." That's one way to put it. Another way would be "Come up with a completely new set of scientific principles." Wait, that's right, all we have to do is contact Star Fleet Command and they'll give us all the technology we need.

Zero emissions aircraft? First think "completely new physics & chemistry textbooks." At our level of knowledge, might as well wish for levitation, oh, hell, make that teleportation and have done with it.
We are faced here with what we can only hope is a fading attitude that science is bound to come up with ways to preserve our way of life, if only we make the proper investments and invoke the proper phrases at the Scientific Temple of Cant. No one is even willing to fantasize yet about Living With Less. But they will.