By Caroline Lucas, MEP - 6th March 2006
The true environmental and social costs of flying are not being borne by EU aviation industry, argues Caroline Lucas MEP.
Climate change represents a bigger threat to our way of life than terrorism, according to, amongst others, the UK government’s own scientific advisor Sir David King – and it is being fuelled by the untrammelled emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
The UN International Panel on Climate Change reckons we must cut global emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 – and if we are to do so in a way which places the largest burden on those countries most responsible for the emissions, that means cuts of at least 80 per cent in the EU.
Aviation is the fastest growing source of emissions: it is currently responsible for between five and ten per cent of the EU’s emissions – and this is growing at a staggering 4.3 per cent a year. They are scheduled to double by 2020 and triple by 2030. Though the industry is delivering some operational and technological improvements to help combat this, the rapid growth in total flight numbers means emissions will remain on an upward trajectory.
In addition to being a pollution- heavy means of transportation, aircraft emit a very large proportion of their pollutants directly into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, where the pollution is disproportionately damaging.
Since the only international treaty designed to cut GHG emissions, the Kyoto Protocol, omits the aviation industry, the growth in aviation emissions, if left unchecked, will wipe out the reductions in all other economic sectors.
Incredibly, recent research suggests that the growth in aviation will produce more than 60 per cent of our total emissions by 2050, meaning that CO2 emissions from other sectors would have to be reduced to zero if we are to cap global temperature rises. Clearly that’s impossible – and the only way governments have kept this reality out of the headlines is by ignoring it: excluding the aviation sector from Kyoto and EU and national legislation, and letting the airlines get on with business as usual.
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair recently told a parliamentary committee he didn’t believe “restrictions on air travel at an international level” would cut passenger numbers, a shameful attempt to court public support for new airport-building even when it flies in the face of his publicly stated commitment to tackling climate change.
Fortunately, the European commission has taken a different view, and it has proposed a range of measures for the sector to cap and progressively reduce aviation’s CO2 emissions. The historical importance of the aviation industry has given the airlines unfair tax advantages over other sectors: the Chicago Treaty, for example, prevents taxes on aviation fuel.
Airline tickets are exempt from sales tax and the industry enjoys a complex jigsaw of tax breaks and hidden subsidies across the EU. These anomalies increase the demand for flying by artificially keeping airline costs – and therefore the price of tickets – down.
These various state aids are enormous – an estimated €13bn annually in the UK alone – and they benefit the better-off at the expense of the poor, both on a global sale (the majority of flights are taken by people in developed countries) and within the EU (as the rich tend to fly more often).
This context means the true social and environmental cost of flying is not being borne by the industry itself – and any package of measures to reduce aviation’s impact must level the playing field by re-internalising
these costs. In short, making the aviation industry pay its way. There is no justifiable reason why a train from London to Brussels should costs three times as much as a flight.
Ideally, we could achieve the twin policy goals of cutting emissions and re-internalising the industry’s social costs by adopting a package of measures: emission charges, imposing sales tax on airline tickets, banning night flights, taxing aviation fuel and improving fuel standards and Air Traffic Management techniques.
But in the real world of 2006, few of these policy options are open to us. For example, thousands of bilateral agreements – the relics of the sector’s unusual history – will need to be renegotiated first.
So the commission has proposed an emissions trading system for airlines. Put simply, airlines will have to buy the right to emit CO2, and will therefore save money by improving aircraft design and operations to cut their emissions. However successfully they are able to do this, many of these extra costs will be passed on to their customers, dampening down demand.
Such a scheme would need to be established at EU level to prevent member states from adopting high national ‘limits’, and, crucially, initial allocations must be set lower than the current rate of emissions – and be progressively reduced year on year.
It must cover all flights to and from any EU airport so as to ensure fair competition between airlines with different route profiles, to ensure the market doesn’t discriminate between EU airports – and in order to have enough scope to be measurably effective, and influence aircraft design.
The allocations should be apportioned through auction, to ensure the maximum market value is placed on the emission rights (the higher their value, the more it will ‘cost’ for airlines to emit CO2), and the scheme must be insulated from the EU’s general emissions trading scheme to prevent rapacious airlines from
gobbling up the emissions rights of other sectors rather than reduce its own.
It would also need to be backed with other measures, including emission charges, to tackle the industry’s non-CO2 emissions.Of course this will mean an end to bargain basement flights.
But the reality is the environmental costs are being met by those least able to afford them, and in the face of devastating climate change we simply can’t afford to allow one of its principal causes to grow unchecked.
I will be asking MEPs to back these proposals later this year. I hope they heed the crescendo of warnings that failure to do so risks wiping out all the work done by implementing Kyoto in other sectors of the world economy and would maintain our course towards a devastating climate terror whose impact would far outweigh the social and economic costs of clipping the aviation industry’s wings while we still have the chance.
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