Airlines, US Cool to EU Emissions Trading Scheme
Date: 30-Sep-05
Country: BELGIUM
Author: Jeff Mason
The European Commission recommended on Tuesday that all carriers that take off from an EU airport, regardless of nationality, should be included in the scheme in an effort to curb increasing emissions of gases that cause global warming.
But the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said the EU proposals would distract from forming a global answer to the problem of airline emissions through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
"A European solution is no solution at all. Unilateral regional efforts will only distract from this process," IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said in a statement this week.
ICAO member states were committed to "deciding a course of action on aviation emissions" in 2007 and defended the industry's environmental record, he said.
The United States, the world's largest aviation market, also feels action should be taken on an international scale, a US official in Brussels said.
"The legal basis for the Commission proposal to require participation by non-EU airlines seems to us unclear, and there are serious questions about whether such a proposal would be consistent with international obligations," said the official, who asked to remain nameless.
"The EU is free to take this kind of action with respect to its own airlines but we feel that requiring the participation of non-EU airlines in this kind of scheme should await the developments of the guidance from ICAO."
European airlines, however, are more resigned to the move and prefer it to the other proposals the Commission had studied: taxes and charges.
"When we're talking about market instruments, then we are much more favourably inclined to emissions trading than we are to taxes and charges," said David Henderson, spokesman for the Brussels-based Association of European Airlines.
"We want to be able to continue to grow and to serve a growing market and if, as seems likely, we can only do that through some kind of structure system like this, then so be it."
EU airports and Europe's third-largest carrier British Airways have also publicly supported the scheme.
The current system, launched in January, puts a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas blamed for global warming, that big polluters like power plants can emit.
Companies buy more rights to pollute if they overshoot their target or sell them if they come in below the cap.
Officials have said aviation would not enter the scheme until 2008 at the earliest because any formal proposal from the Commission must go through the EU legislative process.