Mooney: There is still hope for Aspen airport

The fat lady has not sung yet.

There is still hope to politically combat the 46% increase in just the last five years of private jet greenhouse-gas emissions. That 46% increase does not include Pitkin County — soon allowing all of the new and old 117-foot wingspan private jets to land here.

The final second reading and vote by the Pitkin County Board of Commissioners (BOCC) regarding our future runway size will be on Wednesday, Nov. 20.

At the very least, the board needs to not approve the 30-year contract to Atlantic Aviation to run the fixed-base operation, giving them monopoly pricing power. Another one-year extension is needed before the long-term contract is signed.

Decent leaders around the world, from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Pope Francis, understand that our arrogant species has created our current and ever more expensive climate crisis.

This will give you the time to require by contract that a new video truth wall be installed in both the new commercial and the current private terminal showing graphically, based on 50% seats filled, what the next private jet’s per-passenger carbon footprint is per mile. The bottom half of the video truth wall will show graphically for comparison, what the per-person carbon footprint is per mile for the next commercial jet taking off — base this on assuming the season-long seats filled average is 80%.

The BOCC can get a local student through either the Aspen Science Center, or from the coding club at the high school, to create and maintain a database of private jet gallons per minute database. This makes it easy for a county employee to compute passenger carbon footprint per mile for the video truth wall. Trip distance does not matter.

Tom Mooney

Aspen