Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the California desert

Putting my cynical cap on, my hot take is this: Everybody now realizes that Emirates and Clark are exactly right. As was Airbus.[1] Demand will blow past supply (i.e. runways and gates). Ticket prices will sky rocket. But from the perspective of the plane and engine manufacturers this translates to, "if everybody sits on their hands and does nothing, we're going to enjoy a windfall of profits". Clearly, IMO, Boeing, all the engine manufacturers, and now (somewhat despite themselves) Airbus, are going to passively collude[2] to bring about this windfall. All they need to do is sit tight and wait things out. The threat of competition isn't significant enough to break the collusion; there are too few players, the barriers to entry--regulation, technical and logistical expertise, etc--too steep, and like with housing little prospect that political reforms will make it easier to build enough new runways and airports to change the capacity trajectory.

Similar calculus applies to most of the established carriers. There's much more competition among them, but if the manufacturers are expected to continue to coast there's no angle to exploit in that regard and thus little incentive to agitate for disruption along this dimension, and so the carriers also get to look forward to windfall profits, notwithstanding that they'll be forking over much of it to the manufacturers. Clark just isn't cold-blooded enough to want to play that game; he's got too much of a fighting spirit. (Or perhaps more realistically it's also because if Emirates doesn't keep growing it won't be viable in this prospective future reality?)

[1] Boeing wasn't wrong, either, but point-to-point only bought a couple of decades of supply expansion.

[2] I think there's an economics term for this, but I don't remember it.

The fact is, there is ample demand for high density energy storage. People want to go places, people want stuff brought to them. Until battery technology makes a massive leap into the realm of eating roses and shitting rainbows, combustible fuels are the only economically feasible option.

In that realm, our options are A) keep digging up fossil fuels, then burning producing a bunch of C02, or B) capturing a bunch of C02, turning it into biofuel, then burning it to release the same amount of C02.

Put in simple math terms:

   Fossil fuels: net CO2 = CO2 from energy to extract + CO2 from burning
   Biofuels: net C02 = CO2 from energy to extract + (CO2 from burning - CO2 from growing) 
                     = CO2 from energy to extract

Carbon neutral.

Standard fuel: I dig up one carbon. I burn this carbon. One carbon is now in atmosphere.

Biofuel: I grow one carbon. one carbon is now taken from the atmosphere. We are at minus one carbon. I burn this carbon. We are back to net zero carbon taken or added.