Post by RSPB Economist Adam Dutton (@AdamJDutton)
Even the most diligent among us struggle to reduce our personal impact on the world. One thing we are sure of is that international flights will stick a huge red mark in our household carbon budget meaning we need to take fewer or make bigger carbon savings elsewhere in the house. So if flying is so carbon intensive why, we might ask, is the UK even thinking of expanding airport capacity?
The reason is that for years the plan had been to regulate its emissions through the European Trading scheme.
So when the government asked the Climate Change Committee if we could expand our airports and still meet our emission obligations the answer in response was in large a truism. Essentially the report says that, “yes we will stay within our emissions obligations if we control emissions” .
Independent technical commissions, like the one led by Davies into airports, are excellent at many things but they do not stray from their brief. As long as the EU trading scheme remained the main policy they could not consider failure without looking partisan. So we currently have lots of estimates of what will happen if we do control aviation emissions but none on what happens if we don’t.Unfortunately we don’t have any control on emissions as the EU had to back away from including aviation emissions in the trading scheme. Instead we are waiting on a deal from the International Commercial Aviation Organisation who have been promising us something along these lines since before 2001. Hopeful as we are for a deal it is better to make policy based on the world as it is rather than as we would hope it to be.
And if we don’t control aviation emissions other parts of the economy, which would already be working very hard to reduce emissions, would be burdened with costs in the order of £8.5 billion per year (probably more) to make up the difference and meet our obligations.
So, in addition to dealing with the other burdens airports place on people and biodiversity, the UK should commit to no airport expansion without a strong regulatory system in place to control carbon emissions from aviation. At the very least we should do the sums to estimate what will happen if we carry on as we are.
The full report can be found here:
http://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/aviationclimatechange_tcm9-372504.pdf