The unveiling of the world’s first legally binding carbon budgets in tomorrow’s White Paper is an important first for Britain. UK carbon levels, which have already fallen by 22% since the benchmark date of 1990, will now in future have to be reduced by 34% by 2020 and ultimately by at least 80% by 2050. This is all good news, but there are caveats. One is that carbon levels fell dramatically in the 1990s because of Heseltine’s closure of most of Britain’s remaining coal-fired power stations, but since 1997 have remained static. In other words, more ambitious target reductions 40 years into the future are all very well, but if there have been virtually no reductions over the last decade, what credibility do they have? Another caveat is that air travel is once again being given virtual exemption. Since transport emissions are the single fastest rising cause of greenhouse gas emissions across the world, this is a central flaw in the global anti-climate change framework.

The Americans insisted at Kyoto in 1997 that they wouldn’t sign up to the Protocol (from which they later quit anyway) unless the airline industry was excluded from the targets. Then in succeeding years the EU pressed at ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) meetings for aviation to be brought into the Kyoto Protocol, only to be rebuffed again on each occasion by the US. Now it is being proposed by Ed Miliband that the Kyoto targets should not be imposed on the airline industry because it will be covered by the EU ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) from 2012 for all flights within the EU. He really should not bow so easily to this special pleading from one of the most polluting industries on the planet.
Miliband argues that if aviation was obliged to make 80% cuts like everyone else by 2050, “you could go back to 1974 levels of flying, and I don’t want to have a situation where only rich people can afford to fly”. This is a wholly false and deceptive argument. First, poor people generally do not fly (11% of the so-called D-E classes have never flown); the huge increase in flying has not been spread across the classes, but is strongly concentrated on the better-off managerial and professional classes who may enjoy 10-20 flights a year. Exempting airlines from the same rules as everyone else is simply providing a large and unwarrantable subsidy to the rich and the corporations who often bankroll them.
Second, the EU ETS is no substitute for the annual reductions in emissions being sought from every other industrial sector. The ETS allows trading both within and between sectors, so that the airlines will simply buy credits from other industrial sectors and have no incentive to make reductions in airline emissions. Yet there is a great deal in aircraft manufacture and operational procedures (especially over take-off and landing) that can and must be done to reduce emissions.
Third, the Environmental Audit Select Committee has calculated that on current trends aircraft emissions are now increasing so fast because of the enormous increase in flying (the numbers flying out of UK airports has increased from 32m in 1970 to 189m in 2002 and is expected to rise to 460m in 2020) that by 2050 they will equal the (by then) reduced emissions from all other sectors. This cuckoo-in-the-nest protection of one, highly polluting, industry is simply not tenable.
Fourth, the airline sector is already heavily cosseted by subsidies. As a result, the cost of flying has been falling each year by 1-l.5% which is the opposite of what is needed to achieve carbon budgets. We still provide enormous tax breaks by not charging VAT on aircraft purchases and repairs, worth some £9bn a year, and by imposing no tax on aviation fuel.
So we should stop building new airports and runways to meet projected demand and instead manage demand so that air travel does not completely undo the good work being done elesewhere to tackle climate change. Ed Miliband, are you listening?

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