Fear of flying: why green alarmists are wrong
Kendra Okonski argues that punitive taxes on air fares and fuel will do little or nothing to save the planet Vapour trails across the autumn sky have become the equivalent of the fortune-teller’s tea leaves, spelling ecological doom. It’s the one thing that David Cameron and David Miliband seem to agree upon: cheap air travel will inundate the Earth’s atmosphere with dangerous greenhouse gases unless it is curtailed by punitive taxes. The Stern report on the economic consequences of climate change provides all the justification either of them needs to propose policies ranging from adding VAT to air fares and taxing aviation fuel, to forcing airlines into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and even abolishing duty-free in-flight purchases.
So just how guilty should we feel about last week’s bargain half-term break? Should we cancel that trip abroad to celebrate Dad’s birthday, and resist those 95p fare offers to soak up the winter sun? Until recently most people didn’t have these options because air fares were prohibitively expensive. But in the past decade deregulation and competition have enabled more people to fly more frequently for business and leisure. Imported food and other air-lifted goods have become more affordable. Improvements in efficiency and competition have benefited consumers and producers at home and abroad.
But green alarmists say this travel and commerce is irresponsible and unnecessary, and that aviation emissions contribute disproportionately to environmental damage because they are emitted at high altitude. Yet according to a report on aviation emissions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — often referred to as the authoritative consensus of thousands of scientists the science surrounding this topic is ‘inevitably speculative’: long-term projections about air traffic demand, fleet fuel burned and fleet emissions are ‘unreliable — sometimes astoundingly so’. Campaigners invoke the IPCC’s authority at every other opportunity, yet seem conveniently to have ignored this particular report.
Alarmists warn that between 1990 and 2050 Britain’s aviation emissions will increase between four and ten times. But how important is this? No matter what their growth, our aviation emissions (currently about 5 per cent of all British emissions) will pale in comparison with increased emissions elsewhere. To put things in perspective, the increase in emissions from China every year is approximately equal to all of Britain’s current annual emissions — which represent only about 2 per cent of the global total.
This makes the government’s commitment to reducing Britain’s overall emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 look rather puny, because by that stage this will mean reducing global emissions by only perhaps half a per cent. And it makes reductions in aviation emissions look frankly pointless. Even if we stopped flying altogether, the reduction would amount to no more than a small fraction of 1 per cent of global emissions by 2050 — assuming that aviation grows at the upper end of the predicted range and that jets largely fail to become more efficient. The tiny reduction that might result from any of the proposed punitive taxes is unlikely to have any noticeable effect on the world’s climate. The measure of any policy should be whether its benefits outweigh its costs: if the benefits in terms of reduced probability of climate catastrophe are minuscule, what about the costs of the various proposals?
A tax on air fares might well achieve its objective of reducing air travel. But it would also reduce the profit margins of low-cost carriers, benefiting higher-cost airlines, which have — unsurprisingly — been far from critical of this proposal. Yet just because people are not travelling by air doesn’t mean they are not travelling. Another touted advantage of taxing air fares is that Britain’s tourism industry would benefit — if Britons who stay at home spend more than the foreigners who decide not to come. It means more use of other forms of transport, especially cars, but do we really want to increase the traffic on Britain’s congested roads?
This would also be a snobs’ tax, falling disproportionately on lowerand middleincome travellers. A 2004 Civil Aviation Authority passenger survey showed that 25 per cent of leisure travellers at Britain’s major airports were ‘lower income’, with much of the remainder ‘middle income’.
Cheap air travel also benefits business. Before easyJet and Ryanair, a short-haul trip departing on Monday and returning on Wednesday cost hundreds of pounds. Lowcost carriers have enabled businesses to cut costs; benefits are passed to consumers and shareholders through cheaper products and bigger dividends. Additional taxes would force low-cost carriers to eliminate some routes, causing a partial return to the bad old days of expensive mid-week flights — with negative consequences all round.
The next proposal is to tax jet fuel. This appears equitable at first, since jet fuel is currently untaxed, whereas fuel for road vehicles is notoriously heavily taxed. But its effects are more complex. Carriers flying to nearby non-EU countries such as Norway, Morocco and Tunisia could fill up on cheap, untaxed fuel, so the relative price of flights to those places would fall. Meanwhile, longhaul carriers would carry heavier fuel loads into the EU, and there would be a bias also towards carriers with refuelling hubs outside the EU. Perversely, these two effects could produce greater overall emissions.
Finally, some pundits say airlines should participate in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). In fact, some older European carriers, both private and state-operated, have lobbied for mandatory participation because again this would confer a competitive advantage: all airlines would receive ETS emissions permits based on their emissions in a given reference period, benefiting established carriers over younger competitors which may not have existed or were much smaller during the reference period.
More important than these nuances is the overwhelming fact that greenhouse gas reductions by the EU will be swamped by future emissions from rapidly growing poorer countries — both from industry and aviation. The aspiring masses in those countries will undoubtedly choose to fly more, so their aviation emissions are likely to increase more rapidly than those of the EU. Aviation is growing fastest in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa. Polish plumbers and their kin are becoming big customers of Europe’s low-cost carriers: flights between Eastern European countries grew by 12 per cent in the past year.
But for now, these arguments can barely be heard. The loudest voices are those of the hardcore alarmists, with their ‘moral’ urge to compel us to consume less and fly less. H.L. Mencken observed astutely that, ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Where aviation and emissions are concerned, we should be very wary of politicians who brandish moralistic arguments to justify taxes which will ultimately yield few gains to us, or to the environment.
Kendra Okonski is environment programme director of International Policy Network.
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