How Alienating American Allies & Emptying US Wallets Reduced Jet Fuel Burn

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Last Updated on: 3rd April 2025, 02:24 am

Donald Trump, in his glorious return to the Oval Office in January 2025, managed to do what no climate policy has achieved in decades: reduce transborder aviation emissions. Not by design, of course. He wouldn’t be caught dead attending a COP summit unless it was hosted at Mar-a-Lago and came with a free Big Mac. But as it turns out, if you turn enough allies into adversaries, wrap your immigration policy in barbed wire and Fox News soundbites, then crater the economy, people simply stop visiting and locals don’t fly as much. Planes don’t fly full, routes get cancelled, and jet fuel stays in the ground.

In the first quarter of 2025, international air traffic into the United States fell just enough to make a statistical dent—about 2,000 fewer one-way flights compared to the same quarter in 2024. That’s a 1.8% drop in flight volume, or, in climate math, a cut of about 10,000 tonnes of Jet A kerosene not burned, if my hastily gathered data and math are right. That’s around 12.5 million liters of fuel, or for the weird US non-metric crowd who can’t move away from the Imperial system they seem to want to return to, 3.4 million gallons. And when you don’t burn 10,000 tonnes of fuel, you don’t emit 31,600 tonnes of CO₂. That’s the silver lining inside Trump’s storm cloud of belligerent nationalism.

Nowhere was this felt more acutely than here in Canada. For those of us north of the border, it wasn’t just the political theater or the tone-deaf “America First” revival. It was the sheer pettiness. Within weeks of his inauguration, Trump managed to reignite trade tensions, slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum like it was 2018 all over again, then doubling down with vague threats about dairy, softwood lumber, and tech exports.

In the smoldering aftermath of 9/11, when America’s skies went still and its heart cracked open, Canada didn’t hesitate. It opened its arms. Planes full of terrified passengers rerouted to tiny towns like Gander, Newfoundland—where 10,000 locals took in 6,500 strangers with casseroles, spare beds, and unwavering decency. No fuss, no cameras, just a reflex of kindness baked into the national character.

Decades later, Donald Trump, in a masterclass of geopolitical pettiness, lumped Canada in with countries flooding the U.S. with fentanyl. Canada—whose actual fentanyl exports to the U.S. round to zero and whose own opioid crisis was created by American greed via McKinsey and Purdue. As if the neighbor who took in your family during a disaster is somehow responsible for your overdose in the night. It’s not just wrong, it’s insulting. But that’s Trumpism in a nutshell: slap tariffs on your closest ally, blame them for your own crises, and ignore the receipts.

Add in the MAGA media’s latest fixation with the 51st state fantasy—where Alberta becomes a glorified gas station for the Republican heartland—and you’ve got a cocktail designed to sour cross-border sentiment faster than milk poured on a Texas pumpjack. Canadians, historically polite to a fault, decided to vote with their feet—or rather, their wallets and web browsers. Travel bookings from Canada to the U.S. collapsed by more than 70% in Q1 2025 compared to the year before. Seventy percent. That’s not a dip. That’s a nosedive into a crater of diplomatic dysfunction. This is the economic outcome of Canada’s #elbowsup nationalism, paralleling the massive increase in polling for the Liberal Party of Canada, now on track, due to Trump, to have a majority for the first time in years. Meanwhile Poilievre’s Trump-lite Conservatives are on track to lose seats because everyone knows they are aligned with the current malignant inhabitant of the White House.

So far the airlines didn’t quite get the memo. While demand from Canadians cratered, actual flight schedules between Canada and the U.S. were cut by just 3.5%. That’s about 320,000 fewer seats for the entire year—barely a scratch relative to the demand collapse. Which means planes were still flying. Just emptier, much emptier. Picture a 737 taking off from Toronto with more crew than passengers, the pilot eyeing the empty rows like a bartender at an open mic night. The aviation sector, rarely quick to adapt, lagged reality. Instead of cancelling flights outright, carriers flew ghost planes, wasting fuel, money, and time. It was the embodiment of sunk cost fallacy at 36,000 feet. Some of this is structural. If airlines don’t fly their routes, they can lose them. That’s something that needs to be fixed.

Contrast this with Mexico, the top origin country for inbound flights to the U.S. in both Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. Flights were flat year over year, with marginal variation—a rounding error in the bigger picture. While Mexican nationals may have felt the sting of Trump’s immigration rhetoric, Americans fleeing winter flocked to Mexican beaches in droves. Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo—they all stayed hot, and not just in temperature. The demand held up, so the flights stayed full. No emissions win here. I suspect that Americans received subtly worse service, possible at Fight Club levels of grossness, than they used to. I also suspect Americans were oblivious, given the remarkable tone deafness even Americans who consider themselves allies have been displaying.

Europe, strangely enough, grew. Flights from the UK to the U.S. were up 3%. JetBlue added more transatlantic runs. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic increased frequencies on some routes. Despite Trump’s best efforts to alienate NATO allies, it seems British business travellers and tourists either didn’t get the memo or didn’t care. Flights were added, planes were filled, and emissions ticked up. Japan followed suit, with a 10% increase in flights to the U.S. as both Japanese and American carriers reinstated routes mothballed since the pandemic. It was a tale of reopening and recovery. But it was also a lesson in asymmetry: travel declines weren’t global, they were localised—targeted collateral damage from a President’s diplomatic demolition derby.

Then there’s the Dominican Republic. Flights from the D.R. to the U.S. dropped by about 5%, largely due to Spirit Airlines trimming its Caribbean network. Not a demand collapse this time, but a business decision driven by bankruptcy proceedings and a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. The irony, of course, is that while Trump’s policies didn’t directly influence these cancellations, his chaotic governance fostered the kind of uncertainty that makes leisure carriers nervous. Still, most of the remaining flights stayed full, packed with U.S. sunseekers looking to forget about politics over piña coladas. I suspect they should be careful consuming liquid foods.

When you total up the flight reductions—roughly 2,000 fewer international arrivals—you get an aviation climate dividend worth about 32,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided. But that’s just the start. Another climate emissions dividend is hidden in the contrails. Those wispy white lines in the sky that look harmless but act like radiative blankets, trapping heat like a down comforter on a July night. Academic studies suggest that contrails have roughly the same warming effect as the direct CO₂ from burning jet fuel. So if we cut 2% of flights, and assuming those flights would have formed contrails proportionally, that’s another 30,000 or so tonnes of CO₂-equivalent warming avoided. That brings Trump’s unintentional climate contribution for Q1 2025 to around 60,000 tonnes of CO₂e. Not bad for a man who once tried to sue Scotland for putting wind turbines near his golf course.

In early 2025, the Trump administration’s return brought with it a rapid escalation in tariffs and trade tensions that have quickly translated into higher prices for American consumers. Tariffs were reimposed on Canadian and Mexican metals, expanded to include Chinese consumer goods, and new threats were leveled at European and Asian imports. The result is a spike in inflation just as it had begun to ease. By March 2025, core inflation had risen above 4.5% year-over-year, with sharp increases in grocery prices, imported goods, and airfare.

These inflationary pressures had an immediate impact on U.S. consumer behavior. Discretionary spending tightened, and travel was one of the first sectors to feel the shift. While airlines had scheduled additional domestic capacity heading into 2025, expecting continued post-pandemic growth, demand slowed by February and softened significantly by March. TSA screening data showed passenger growth falling from over 5% year-on-year in January to less than 1% by March. As household budgets came under strain, bookings for spring and summer travel declined, and airlines began announcing reductions in future flight schedules.

This slowdown in domestic travel came after a modest 1% increase in seat capacity during Q1 2025. As demand failed to keep pace, load factors began to decline. Some carriers, including Spirit and JetBlue, cut routes entirely. Others, like Delta and United, trimmed frequencies and delayed planned expansions. Although the total number of domestic flights in Q1 was still up slightly over 2024, the trend shifted quickly toward contraction.

The climate consequence was a marginal reduction in the emissions that would otherwise have occurred. While U.S. domestic jet fuel consumption still rose around 1% year-over-year, this was far below initial airline projections. That growth represents tens of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ that were not emitted due to lower-than-expected travel demand. The longer-term impact may be more substantial if inflation-driven reductions in flying persist into subsequent quarters. Given the April 2nd tariffs on everyone and everything driving up inflation across the board, American wallets are going to be much emptier this year and next year. Empty wallets don’t get opened for flights.

The Trump administration’s trade policies contributed to inflation that directly suppressed domestic travel demand. The resulting decrease in flight activity wasn’t driven by decarbonization efforts, but by household financial pressure. Still, the effect on emissions is real. Reduced bookings and cancelled flights led to fewer planes in the sky and lower fuel burn. It’s an example of how economic policy—even when not aimed at climate outcomes—can shape emissions trends in unexpected ways.

So here we are. A right-wing, populist and climate-change denying president produced a minor climate benefit by making the U.S. less appealing to visit and more budget-unfriendly to fly around. It wasn’t policy or planning. It was the consequence of being an unpredictable, isolationist trading partner with a knack for insulting friends, frightening tourists and emptying US wallets. Canadian demand collapsed, Caribbean leisure routes were pruned, and the skies over the U.S. got just a bit quieter—and cleaner. That’s the bitter comedy of climate progress in the Trump era. Not driven by green ambition, but by grey politics. America might not want to lead on climate anymore, but it seems perfectly capable of tripping into climate wins on the way to its next tariff tantrum.