Taken from an article: Boeing believes passengers will prefer to fly smaller planes on services that connect more directly to destinations. Its 7E7 will be the lightest commercial airliner in the sky, Boeing claims, and the plane will be powered by the most efficient engines by far. These innovations, some experts say, more than compensate for the economies of scale that the A380 achieves.

"It would take less energy, and emit fewer pollutants, to fly several 7E7s from point A to point B than to put the same number of passengers on a single A380 for the trip,"