Monday’s approval follows similar green lights for airport expansion given by the previous centre-right government – and goes against the firm advice of the UK’s official climate change advisory body, as well as opposition from climate campaigners and East Londoners concerned about noise and carbon pollution.

The Climate Change Committee said last June that “there should be no net airport expansion across the UK” and “no airport expansions should proceed until a UK-wide capacity management framework is in place”. A spokesperson told Climate Home this remains the committee’s position.

But, approving the London City expansion, Labour ministers Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh said in a statement that the lifting of the cap from 6.5 million to 9 million passengers a year would bring more jobs and tourists to London and boost business productivity. They added that the expansion would not conflict with the government’s “Jet Zero Strategy” – to clean up aviation – nor prevent the UK from meeting its 2050 net zero target because the additional emissions would not be significant.

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Climate campaigners said the move highlights the flaws of the UK’s airport planning policy and its Jet Zero Strategy, which aims to cut emissions from aviation with cleaner fuels, carbon offsets and carbon dioxide (CO2) removal machines while passenger numbers increase by about half between 2018 and 2050.

Other bigger London airports – including Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted – are also considering expansion or seeking permission to expand.

For the London City decision, ministers relied heavily on advice from two planning inspectors – Claire Searson and Johanna Ayres. The inspectors concluded that, according to the Jet Zero Strategy, the emissions from airport expansions can be “accommodated within the planned trajectory for achieving net zero emissions by 2050” and therefore “our planning policy frameworks remain compatible with the UK’s climate change obligations”.

The Jet Zero Strategy was published by the last Conservative government in July 2022. It aims to reach net zero in the aviation sector by 2050 – a goal it says is “hugely challenging”.

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Alethia Warrington, a climate campaigner at an NGO called Possible, told Climate Home the UK was “ahead of the curve” compared to other countries in setting this target but that its projections for passenger growth were “incredibly dangerous”. Possible is challenging the strategy in court. Greenpeace campaigner Paul Morozzo said the strategy was built on “false hope”.

The plan does not include any measures to limit the number of flights or the capacity of airports, allowing planning inspectors and ministers to conclude that airport expansions are not counter to the strategy.

Instead, it plans to achieve just under half of the sector’s emissions reductions by buying carbon offsets. But many carbon offsets – where the buyer pays someone else to reduce emissions on their behalf – have been found not to deliver the emissions savings they claim.

The Jet Zero Strategy plans to get about a quarter of the emissions cuts needed from fuel efficiency improvements, another quarter from “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAFs) and a small amount from zero-emission aircraft.

Many airlines are buying more fuel-efficient aircraft, shaving a chunk off their planet-heating pollution. But the viability and sustainability of SAFs has been challenged by campaigners, regulators and even airline executives.

Currently, the only non-fossil fuel commercially available for planes is made from biomass, turning crops like corn, soy and oil palm, or used cooking oil, into jet fuel.

But there is nowhere near enough of this being produced to meet demand. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said in December “there isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power more than one day’s aviation”. As a result, SAF is currently more than four times as expensive as regular oil-based jet fuel.

Biofuels also often compete with food crops, worsening hunger and encouraging deforestation. The UK’s advertising regulator recently ruled that airline Virgin Atlantic should not have told customers it flew a plane on “100% sustainable aviation fuel” because it gave the misleading impression that the fuel was entirely green.

Andrew Symes is the CEO of a company called OXCCU which has just started producing tiny test quantities of SAF in a container next to Oxford Airport in England. Earlier this month, he told journalists visiting the site that SAFs based on biofuel alone would not be sufficient, so his company is developing a SAF that mixes carbon dioxide and green hydrogen.

OXCCU CEO Andrew Symes holds up his company’s catalyst and SAF at its new test plant in Oxford (Photo: OXCCU)

But Symes acknowledged that the fuel is “not perfect”, as the CO2 will be bought from industry – and burning it will damage the planet. But, he said, it still offers a “huge emission saving” compared to conventional jet fuel, and could be made carbon neutral by capturing the emitted CO2 from the atmosphere.

Producing it in this carbon-neutral way, however, would require huge numbers of CO2 removal machines, as well as solar panels and wind turbines to produce the renewable electricity needed to make green hydrogen, he noted.

He predicted this kind of fuel would be used in planes in small quantities towards the end of the decade and could be scaled up from there. But Possible’s Warrington disputed that assertion.

“The idea that we can magic up this gigantic renewable capacity to produce e-fuel so a small group of wealthy frequent flyers never have to take the train – it’s just not doable,” she said. Warrington predicted it would be a “fairly sizable number of decades” before zero-carbon flights are common.

Even if all the emissions reduction measures outlined in the UK Jet Zero Strategy’s high-ambition scenario are successful, it still envisions aviation producing 19 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year in 2050 – about half the current level.

It plans to address these left-over emissions through CO2 removals, but Warrington is sceptical. “There’s no payment mechanism for this. It would be horrendously expensive. It would be extremely resource-intensive,” she said. “It just doesn’t stack up at all.”

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post London airport expansion spotlights danger of “false hope” Jet Zero strategy appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a statement, Air New Zealand’s CEO Greg Foran said that because of delays to the delivery of more fuel-efficient aircraft and because “so many levers needed to meet the target are outside our control”, the airline was dropping its target and withdrawing from the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an influential non-governmental arbiter of corporate climate targets.

As several airlines have made similar targets for 2030 or 2035, the move has cast doubt on whether they can meet them. It has also raised difficult questions about the role of carbon offsets in decarbonising aviation, a sector that accounts for an estimated 2-3% of global emissions.

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Sustainability consultant and offset developer Chris Hocknell told Climate Home that Air New Zealand’s decision to leave SBTi shows that the body’s rules, particularly around offsets, are too harsh. He accused SBTi of “environmental zealotry”, a “lack of realism” and of not engaging with businesses trying to reduce their emissions.

But Thomas Day, a researcher at the New Climate Institute, said weakening SBTi’s rules to accommodate companies that are not aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C would “completely defeat the purpose of 1.5C validations”.

Dutch airline KLM has a similar target to the one Air New Zealand has just abandoned, which it plans to meet with more efficient aircraft and cleaner fuels. Their spokesperson told Climate Home that they “are sticking to that [target]” but “at the same time, we recognise that it is not easy to decarbonise aviation”.

While Air New Zealand’s Foran partly blamed delays to the delivery of more fuel-efficient aircraft for dropping the target, the KLM spokesperson said their deliveries of new aircraft which consume about a quarter less fuel per passenger-kilometre are “currently more or less on schedule”.

But, the spokesperson said, “we recognise the picture Air New Zealand paints regarding the availability and pricing of alternative jet fuel” and “would like to see even more being done from governments to encourage production”.

Not enough biofuels

While fuel-efficiency can shave a chunk off a plane’s emissions, the only way to fly a plane without producing emissions is to stop using fossil fuels to power them.

Currently, the only non-fossil-based fuel commercially available is made from biofuels, turning crops like corn, soy and oil palm or used cooking oil into jet fuel.

But there is not enough of this being produced to meet demand and, as a result, it is currently more than four times as expensive as regular oil-based jet fuel.

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Jonathan Lewis, transport lead at the Clean Air Task Force, told Climate Home that he doubts whether there will ever be enough of these biofuels produced to power the world’s planes. A recent report he co-authored found aviation will need about 40% more energy in 2030 than all the world’s biofuels will be able to supply.

It’s a concern shared by the CEO of RyanAir Michael O’Leary. He told the Guardian in December: ” I don’t see where we will get the supply in the volumes we need. You want everybody running around collecting fucking cooking oil? There isn’t enough cooking oil in the world to power more than one day’s aviation.”

Even if the world could produce enough biofuels, that is likely to come with bad environmental and social side-effects, as the growing of crops to fuel planes displaces crops for food and encourages the chopping down of forests.

Other options for cleanly powering planes are fuels based on green hydrogen and ammonia. But these fuels are in early stages of development and would require big changes to airport infrastructure and, for hydrogen, aircraft design.

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Airlines’ climate targets are all based on emissions per passenger and per kilometre so flying less won’t help them meet them, but it will reduce their and the world’s total emissions.

No airline has said it will reduce flights for climate reasons, so any pressure on that is likely to come from consumers and governments. France recently banned some short-haul domestic flights to howls of protest from the airline industry.

Offsets to fill the gap?

Another way for airlines to meet their climate targets is for them to buy carbon offsets. Lewis said that that was likely to be “a necessary part of decarbonising the aviation sector”.

While many airlines have bought offsets whose claims of emissions reduction are highly questionable, initiatives like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market are trying to improve the industry’s integrity.

But on the same day Air New Zealand announced it was leaving, the SBTi released the results of a consultation on the use of carbon offsets to meet climate targets.

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It found that the evidence it had reviewed “suggests that various types of carbon credits are ineffective” and “there could be clear risks to corporate use of carbon credits for the purpose of offsetting”.

This review, published by SBTi’s technical experts, struck a very different note to an earlier statement put out in April by the body’s board which said offsets “could function as an additional tool to tackle climate change” and “consequently, SBTi has decided to extend their use”.

That statement by the board prompted a revolt by staff, many of whom called on CEO Luiz Amaral to resign, which he did in July citing personal reasons.

Too strict or lax?

Hocknell accused SBTi’s technical experts of a “very puritanical approach” and said he hoped that SBTi’s pro-offsets elements won out in what he predicted would be a “big, big fight”.

Hundreds of companies have dropped out of SBTi after failing to follow through on a promise to set sufficiently ambitious climate targets. “If I get my crystal ball out, you’ll see hundreds more companies drop this before the end of the year,” said Hocknell.

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But New Climate Institute’s Thomas Day, who has accused SBTi of being too lax, told Climate Home “the purpose of the SBTi is to support the transformation of sectors and to offer a platform for companies who commit to this transformation.”

“It would completely defeat the purpose of 1.5C validations if the rules would be redefined to accommodate companies who are not willing or able to do so,” he added.

“If the technologies do not yet exist to put the aviation or oil and gas sectors on a 1.5C-aligned trajectory, then we need to recognise this and consider as a society how to address this, rather than moving the goalposts to pretend that everyone is on track,” Day said.

Pedro Martins Barata, the Environmental Defense Fund’s carbon markets lead, told Climate Home there were two ways of looking at Air New Zealand’s announcement.

One is that the airline set a target without measuring the consequences and “should get a reputational bad rap”. The other is that “in a voluntary system you need to walk players through how to increase their ambition over time and allow flexibility, or risk alienating corporate players and essentially becoming irrelevant in the process”.

“Are we better served by a small number of incredibly ambitious companies that can commit to far-reaching standards?” he asked, “or by having a much broader movement that can significantly impact climate change?”

“If you’re in the second camp,” he said, “you’d want Air New Zealand to do something even by purchasing good carbon credits, rather than simply walk away from it all.”

This article originally said incorrectly that Denmark had banned some short-haul flights.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Matteo Civillini)

The post As first airline drops goal, are aviation’s 2030 targets achievable without carbon offsets? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Industry groups fear the ban could set a precedent for wider limitations across Europe on short-haul flying – once a symbol of cross-border liberalisation and now increasingly under fire.

French and European airports and regional airlines are laying out a new strategy to counter the ban on three French short-haul flight routes, which is in place for three years.

While they say a formal legal challenge is unlikely, they plan to invoke freedom of movement – one of four basic freedoms enshrined in European law – in informal reviews of the law expected to take place twice a year, and to lobby the government.

“We have the principle established by the EU of an open, liberalised market with the freedom to provide air services for any European airlines between any point within Europe,” one senior industry official said.

“And that’s basically to support the freedom of movement, people and citizens across Europe.”

The freedom of movement argument wades into one of the most sensitive topics in European politics, but faces considerable hurdles given its complexity, European sources said.

Limited impact

Industry bodies also claim the ban – which impacted far fewer routes than environmental groups had hoped – is ultimately ineffective in significantly curbing emissions.

Scara, a group representing regional French airlines that lobbied aggressively to water down the original ban, said it would also use review periods to claim that the ban has no real impact.

“We’ll embarrass people with the data,” said Willie Walsh, head of a global trade association for airlines, said on the sidelines of the Airline Economics conference in Dublin.

“If we banned all flights of less than 500 km in Europe…it would be less than 4% of the CO2 in Europe, right? I think there’s a perception that it would be 80%. It’s not a solution,” he told Reuters.

Of the EU’s 27 member states, 21 have total yearly emissions which are less than 4% of the EU’s total.

According to the Union of French Airports, which plans to complain to France’s Council of State about the ban, likely by the end of this month, the routes that will be banned represent only 0.23% of France’s air transport emissions, 0.04% of transport sector emissions and 0.02% of the air transport sector’s emissions.

Green campaign group Transport and Environment has produced similar estimates.

Calls for more measures

Green lobbyists say the figures show that the flight ban is too limited. They want wider restrictions, and are preparing to counter the industry’s efforts to reverse the ban.

Jo Dardenne, aviation director at campaign group Transport and Environment said the ban is an important signal to countries keen to reduce aviation emissions.

“It’s to show that… you have the right to actually cap emissions from your aviation sector,” she said.

She added: “The French domestic flight ban is an important message that more needs to be done to address aviation’s climate impact, but governments shouldn’t ignore the biggest chunk of the sector’s emissions linked to long haul flights. These are currently ignored or even exempted in most regulations addressing aviation emissions.”

Disappointed by the lack of ambition in the current rules, campaigners said they hope to go back to the original proposal of banning flights on routes with travel times of less than 6 hours.

“It’s hypocritical. They made the ban have no impact… they had a strong push to reduce the ambition,” Sarah Fayolle, a transport campaigner for Greenpeace in France, said.

The airline industry expects support from the EU in limiting the scope of the ban. “Europe has certainly recognized that the French law could be applied only in a limited way… So this is good,” Scara head Jean-Francois Dominiak said.

Fit for 55, a set of EU rules designed to tackle climate change and introduce reforms, will come into force across the bloc in the next two or three years and should have a more significant environmental impact, EU officials said.

But for now, the EU will stick to its approval, Henrik Hololei, director-general for mobility and transport at the European Commission told Reuters, adding the “strings attached” EU officials mandated, like review periods, make the ban reasonable.

Last year, the Danish government announced it would ban all domestic flights by 2030, unless they switch to zero-carbon fuels.

The post Airlines plot fight-back against France’s short-haul flights ban appeared first on Climate Home News.

The “aspirational goal” was signed off by transport ministers at the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) assembly in Montreal, Canada.

But there is currently no viable technology to eliminate planes’ emissions and airlines and governments at Icao have not contemplated reducing flying itself.

Airlines have largely chosen to use much-criticised carbon offset schemes to meet their climate targets.

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A group of mostly high-income countries calling itself the “climate ambition coalition” pushed for the 2050 net zero goal against opposition from Russia and China.

Industry trade body Iata also backed the goal despite reported opposition from Chinese airlines.

At a preparatory meeting of the UN’s aviation body in July, 2050 net zero was put forward to the tri-annual Icao assembly in Montreal this week.

At the assembly, US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said the goal was “achievable if we act” and called on the assembly to “bring Icao fully into the world’s fight against climate change”.

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New Zealand’s representative wrote that the target was “the minimum aspiration this sector should aim for”.

But Russia’s representative told the assembly that the target “will without a doubt impose an unsustainable burden on the industry”.

China used a climate justice argument. Its delegation said the net zero goal “would lead to discriminatory market distortions to the disadvantage of developing countries” and that “China firmly opposes developed countries’ attempt to transfer their responsibility for emissions reductions to developing countries”.

But the majority of countries supported the net zero goal. It has been approved by the executive committee and goes to plenary today. The executive committee and plenary members are mostly the same people so it is likely to pass.

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From the assembly in Montreal, the International Coalition for Sustainable Aviation’s Tim Johnson said: “We hope Icao can agree a net zero 2050 goal today that would begin a process to bring aviation in line with the Paris Agreement. This has been a hard fought negotiation but the really hard work starts now to introduce the measures that will decarbonise the industry.”

Other campaigners were more critical. Anne Kretzschmar from Stay Grounded said: “Adopting a climate target with no binding commitments for states and no interim targets is like building an aeroplane without wings”.

Johnson said that green groups had pushed for interim targets in Montreal and, while the US and some European states had supported them, they had not wanted to jeopardise an agreement by pushing too hard for them.

Transport and Environment’s aviation lead Jo Dardenne questioned how aviation would meet its target.

“Having a long term aspirational goal on one side and then having a poor offsetting scheme [Corsia] on the other side and defending that it’s going to get aviation down to zero is just laughable,” she said.

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The industry’s main technological solution to aviation emissions is the use of “sustainable aviation fuels” made out of plant matter. A recent report from the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) cautioned growing crops for energy has some downsides for the climate and cannot be produced at the scale needed to meet projected future aviation demand.

Instead, CATF says governments should research next-generation fuels like those based on clean hydrogen. These are years away from being commercially available.

Airlines have used offsets to claim emissions reductions. But these offsets, including Icao’s own Corsia scheme, have been widely criticised. Recently, budget European airline Easyjet said it would no longer use offsets and would focus on reducing its own emissions instead.

The post International air travel set for ‘aspirational’ 2050 net zero goal appeared first on Climate Home News.

The strategy launch at Farnborough International Airshow was delayed from morning to afternoon, while transport secretary Grant Shapps did a media round to explain why Britain’s roads and railways couldn’t handle the heat.

Publicity for the launch was confined to a press release, stacked with supportive quotes from the industry, and a tweet, in which Shapps declared it would “allow passengers to enjoy guilt-free flying”.

A handful of activists in pig masks greeted him with the sceptical slogan: “Jet zero? Pigs might fly!”

The “guilt” of air travel comes from its outsized carbon footprint. While aviation only accounts for 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, on a personal level, air travel is a polluting luxury. One long-haul flight can erase the emissions benefits of going vegetarian for a year.

It is why a UK citizens’ assembly on climate two years ago came out strongly in favour of a frequent flyer levy and ban on private jets. That was too radical for this government. Nor would it consider limiting airport growth.

Instead, it is relying on fuel efficiency, sustainable aviation fuels and carbon offsets to decarbonise – and destigmatise – the sector. The government’s “aspiration” is to run the first zero-emission domestic routes in 2030.

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The strategy sets out interim targets to net zero aviation by 2050, with a progress review every five years. For the domestic sector, it sets a more ambitious net zero target of 2040.

“We want 2019 to be remembered as the peak year for aviation emissions. From now on, it should all be downhill for carbon emissions – and steadily uphill for green flights,” said Shapps.

It is a “more challenging trajectory” than the government has previously set out, said Cait Hewitt, policy director at the Aviation Environment Federation. But there is nothing to hold the industry to account for delivering – and its track record is not good.

Campaigning organisation Possible audited every climate target the international aviation sector had set since 2000. Out of 50, all but one had been missed, abandoned or forgotten about.

As with previous aviation climate strategies, “jet zero” relies on future technology breakthroughs rather than curbing demand – and all of the options run into problems at scale. By Hewitt’s calculation, to meet the UK’s jet fuel demand entirely with e-fuel would require a windfarm the size of Northern Ireland.

“We don’t feel that the government is being honest about the challenges,” she told Climate Home News.

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Specific measures include a £165 million fund to support the development of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and a mandate requiring at least 10% of jet fuel to come from sustainable sources by 2030.

This can mean biofuels derived from algae or waste, or synthetic fuels made with green hydrogen and captured carbon. None of the options are yet commercially competitive to produce.

Gaynor Hartnell, of industry body the Renewable Transport Fuel Association, said SAF was “the only viable solution for long haul flight” and welcomed the support. But the five production plants the government expects to deliver supplies cost £500 million apiece, she added, and will require further subsidies to get off the ground.

For Greenpeace UK, reducing the number of flights is the only meaningful answer. “This government doesn’t have the courage to regulate aviation emissions yet and this isn’t a plan to do that, just a delaying tactic and a very expensive waste of time,” said campaigner Emily Armistead.

This article was updated after publication with the precise temperature record.

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From the end of 2023, Schiphol airport, the third busiest in Europe in terms of passenger traffic, will limit the maximum number of flights each year to 440,000, 12% less than in 2019, the Dutch ministry of transport said in a statement on Friday.

The flight cuts aim to restore “the balance between a well-operating international airport, the business climate, and the interests of a better and healthier living environment”, transport minister Mark Harbers said in the statement. 

The government said the airport, which has faced staff shortages this year, must rein in its growth as the country seeks to reduce CO2 emissions and pollutants such as nitrogen oxide. The Netherlands previously cut the national speed limit to 100km per hour (62 mph) to reduce nitrogen pollution.

“This is a difficult message for the aviation sector that is still recovering from the far-reaching consequences of the coronavirus pandemic,” Harbers said.

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Dutch airline KLM described the decision as “highly detrimental” and said “it does not tally with the desire to retain a strong hub function” for Schiphol. The airport said it supports a “well-thought-out approach” that helps it achieve its goal of “connecting the Netherlands with the world as an increasingly quieter and cleaner Schiphol.”

Campaigners welcomed the decision, saying it sent a clear signal that curbing aviation demand is necessary to meet climate goals.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has called for international shipping and aviation targets to be radically strengthened, in line with the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to 1.5C.

Aviation accounts for 2.1% of global emissions. The sector has agreed to an “aspirational goal” to make air travel growth carbon-neutral from 2020, establishing a carbon offsetting scheme to buy emissions reductions in other sectors.

Leo Murray, director of innovation at the NGO Possible, told Climate Home News it was a “world first development which could be hugely significant to global climate efforts.”

“Due to the extreme technical challenges of decarbonising air travel and the slow progress to date, it is almost certain that reducing overall flight numbers – at least temporarily – will be required at the global level to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Murray.

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Murray added it was unlikely that other airports would follow suit, but the flight cap weakened the argument for expansion of rival hubs such as Heathrow. 

It is the first time that a government has announced a flight cap, Koenraad Backers, director of aviation at the Dutch NGO Nature & Environment, told Climate Home News.

“It has always been growth, growth, growth up till now,” Backers said. “Tolerated is no longer the order of the day; rules also apply to the aviation industry.”

Greenpeace, which lobbied for Schiphol to reduce airport traffic, described the move as a “historic breakthrough.” 

“It is good that the Cabinet realises that Schiphol has, for years, been flying beyond all boundaries when it comes to noise, nitrogen, ultrafine particles and the climate,” Dewi Zloch, aviation expert at Greenpeace in the Netherlands, said in a statement. 

Zloch said the cuts don’t go far enough to curb aviation emissions. “This is the impetus. Schiphol needs to finally come up with a plan that takes the Paris Agreement into account,” she said. 

The post Dutch government issues world-first cap on flights from European hub appeared first on Climate Home News.

On Friday, the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) association wrote an open letter to the government. They warned that the cost of aviation fuel was rising and therefore they must “regrettably” discontinue operations indefinitely from Monday.

Sigh. pic.twitter.com/jeVIWttHEU

— Mo-Mo (@Morris_Monye) May 6, 2022

After air passengers scrambled to rebook flights before the shutdown, the AON announced on Monday that their strike was cancelled after the government agreed to talks.

The next day, the government agreed to subsidise aviation fuel, ensuring it costs no more than N480 ($1.15) a litre for three months. This is likely to cost Nigerian taxpayers between $1-3 million.

On social media, Nigerians accused the government of spending money on the elite who use air travel while neglecting road and rail transport.

“Another subsidy for the rich!” tweeted Ajiboye Ridwan, a physio from Ibadan. “They couldn’t come up with this sort of intervention for… the education sector”, said Samuel Ajao.

Another subsidy for the rich! https://t.co/RlX5XSCzCY

— Ajiboye Ridwan (PT) (@PT_ajiboye) May 10, 2022

Appearing on Arise News, Allen Onyema, one of the airline owners behind the strike threat claimed air travel was “no longer elitist”. But a one-way flight from Lagos to Abuja costs around $227, nearly twice what the average Nigerian earns in a month.

Across the world and particularly in developing countries, most flying is done by a wealthy minority. In Nigeria in 2021, there were 13 million domestic passengers, many of them the same individuals counted more than once, in a nation of 206 million.

Most Nigerians rely on road and rail to get around the country, which is cleaner but less convenient. Roads are often unpaved and both roads and the rail can be dangerous. Last month, a train carrying 362 passengers was bombed and most of the passengers were killed or kidnapped.

On social media, critics expressed fears the subsidy would become permanent. “Another subsidy scam. Three months that will never end,” said one Twitter user. “Subsidy is addictive. It is like narcotics. When you start, it is difficult to stop,” tweeted another.

Subsidy is addictive. It is like narcotics. When you start, it is difficult to stop. https://t.co/puuXgZqvG6

— Victor (@VOChuku) May 10, 2022

After the pandemic hit airlines’ profits, the government provided N4bn ($9m) to 18 domestic airlines. Air Peace CEO Allen Onyema said the government has “helped the growth of aviation more than any other government I can think of”.

He told Arise News: “We don’t pay customs duties, we don’t pay [value added tax] on ticket sales, we don’t pay [value added tax] on imported aircraft, we don’t pay [value added tax] on spares and so many other things they’ve done for us.”

Onyema is wanted in the US over 36 charges related to an alleged $20 million bank fraud.

Nigeria spends around a quarter of its budget subsidising petrol, against the advice of the World Bank. These subsidies mean that, although it is Africa’s biggest oil producer, the recent rise in the global oil price has cost the government money.

The post Nigerian airlines win jet fuel subsidy after shutdown threat appeared first on Climate Home News.

The €6m ($6.8m) demonstration project is funded by the European Union and Turkish government. It will grow simple water-based plants, known as algae, in outdoor ponds and indoor tubes, and refine them into fuel and other products.

After touring the site on Boğaziçi University’s campus and handing out algae-based chocolates to reporters, Turkish energy and natural resources minister Mustafa Varank said: “The work is underway for the use of biofuels produced here by Turkish Airlines. We want [them] to carry out [their] first flight using biofuel from here before the end of 2022.”

Experts told Climate Home News biofuel from algae had potential but expressed scepticism it could be produced on a scale to break aviation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Yakında, yosundan üretilen biojet yakıtı kullanılan uçaklarda seyahat edebileceğinizi biliyor muydunuz?

Avrupa’nın ilk ve tek karbon negatif entegre biorafineri projesinde pilot üretimler başladı.

Dünyanın geleceği Türkiye’de! pic.twitter.com/KxalDGj6Rm

— Mustafa Varank (@varank) January 8, 2022

Dan Rutherford is the aviation director of the International Council on Clean Transportation. He said: “Algae jet fuel is kind of like disco, [it] comes back every decade or so but in a worse form. The US government has been picking at this for at least 30 years and has never figured it out.”

In 2011, a plane flew from Houston to Chicago powered by fuel which was 40% algae-based and 60% petroleum. Solazyme, the San Francisco-based company which developed the fuel, filed for bankruptcy in 2017.

Aviation is a notoriously difficult sector to clean up. Electric batteries, the main solution to land-based transport, are heavy and not powerful enough to keep planes in the sky for long periods.

Biofuels made from plants like soy compete with forests and farms for land. As water-based plants, algae don’t pose that problem – but they still have issues.

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The main challenge is competing on price. The price of traditional jet fuel from petroleum has doubled in the past year to $830 a tonne. It is still cheaper than sustainable alternatives, which a McKinsey analysis in 2020 costed at $1,300-3,800/t, depending on the production method.

Berat Haznedaroglu, director of the Istanbul project, told Climate Home he was aiming to get the price down to $1,000/t for algae-derived fuel. He expects interest in clean fuels to grow as governments, airlines and airports try to meet their climate commitments.

“There will be a mandate coming from [industry body] IATA and the governments,” he said, adding that the increased cost of using clean fuels would be passed on to passengers. “I think it’s going to be €10-15 ($11-17) per ticket”.

Brussels-based thinktank Transport and Environment’s aviation director Andrew Murphy said: “EU investment in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) development in Turkey is a good strategy to bring that aviation market into the scope of its own SAF measures such as ReFuelEU.”

But, he added: “Algae has some concerns due to scalability, so both the EU and Turkey need to fund feedstocks which can be more easily expanded.” For example, he proposed hydrogen derived fuels like e-kerosene.

UK, Switzerland accused of undermining EU green treaty reforms

Haznedaroglu said that hydrogen-derived fuels were “a part of the toolbox” but that most hydrogen is still made from fossil fuels and “the research path for hydrogen is still a little behind algae”.

The Istanbul facility is a university-based demonstration project. It aims to prove the concept, not to become a large-scale supplier itself.

 

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Another limiting factor is the weather. A US energy department study found that algae production rates “vary dramatically from summer to winter, even in places like Florida”. Istanbul has an average maximum daily air temperature in January of 9C (48F).

Haznedaroglu said it would be preferable to grow algae in warmer southern Turkey, but there are cold-resistant forms of algae which survived recent snows in Istanbul. Algae grows in places as cold as Iceland.

The Istanbul facility will produce algae for food supplements, animal feed and fertilisers as well as jet fuel.

Rutherford said: “That’s a recurring theme on biofuels generally for aviation. You start off saying ‘jet fuel’ and then you start producing products and a lot of them are pretty fungible. They end up cosmetics, food, replacing petrochemicals.”

Haznedaroglu said that 80 cubic metres of the site’s 110 cubic metres are dedicated to biofuel production in outdoor ponds. The other 30 cubic metres are the indoor tubes.

These are more expensive but less likely to be contaminated by pollution. These are used for products like food supplements where avoiding contamination is particularly important.

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The $550bn bipartisan infrastructure bill was signed into law last month after intense negotiations between Congress Democrats and Republicans. It includes spending on green transport like $66bn on rail and $7.5bn on electric vehicle chargers as well as $25bn for airports.

Announcing the spending, the Biden administration said: “The United States built modern aviation, but our airports lag far behind our competitors. According to some rankings, no US airports rank in the top 25 of airports worldwide.”

Speaking at Dallas Fort Worth airport after meeting airline executives, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said that the bipartisan infrastructure law was “an investment in climate equity”.

Campaigners, on the other hand, said airport expansion could be “a big problem for the climate” and hurt the health of millions of Americans who live, study and work near airports. But unlike in Europe, it has not generated significant controversy, reflecting a lack of low-carbon alternatives to travel long distances.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says it will spend $15bn of the $25bn on projects that increase safety and expand capacity. Eligibility is defined under the Airport Improvement Grant criteria.

The Federal Aviation Administration is a government body which regulates aviation. (Photo: FAA/screenshot)

Projects funded by the most recent round of these grants include a new airport in Kentucky (the state’s 60th), new and extended runways in Colorado and Indiana and an expanded terminal building in North Carolina.

Sarah Burt, an environmental lawyer at Earthjustice, said that if the money was used to increase air traffic without improving the efficiency of aviation “then that is obviously going to be a big problem for the climate”.

For international flights, carbon dioxide emissions from US commercial aviation have more than doubled since 1990. For domestic flights, they’ve grown 22%.

Together, they are responsible for around 216 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than the total annual emissions of Bangladesh.

As Delhi chokes, India’s supreme court is grappling with the air pollution crisis

Vera Pardee, a lawyer working on clean air litigation for the Sierra Club, said that airport expansion would hurt the health of people who live near airports.

“It is shocking to improve the facilities inside while doing nothing about the effect of the pollution that is generated outside,” she said.

Over five million Americans live and 163,000 Americans go to school within 500 metres of an airport perimeter, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Aircraft noise also has “all kinds of different health ramifications”, she added.

While many of Biden’s green infrastructure spending plans were scaled down during negotiations with Republicans, airport funding remained at $25bn throughout.

UK needs to deliver on climate, not set higher 2030 target, say advisers

Politically, the aircraft and engine manufacturers and airlines are a powerful lobby group.

Last year, a House of Representatives committee investigating the tragic 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash accused the FAA of getting too cosy with plane-builder Boeing and missing the warning signs.

The FAA’s boss Stephen Dickson was a senior executive at Delta Airlines before Donald Trump appointed him as the aviation regulator’s administrator.

The FAA released a plan this year for a net-zero emissions US aviation system by 2050. It relies on carbon offsets, using more sustainable fuel, increasing aircraft efficiency and cutting airport emissions. There is no suggestion of curbing demand for flights.

Critics of offsets argue that getting developing countries to reduce emissions so that Americans can keep flying is unfair and that the offset projects often don’t deliver the benefits they claim to.

On Thursday, a United Airlines jet claimed to be the world’s first to run one of its engines on 100% sustainable aviation fuel, derived from organic waste. But such fuels are expensive and there are concerns that scaling up production would entail growing crops for energy that competed for land with food sources and forests.

China ‘trumps’ the west by pledging larger share of IMF relief to African nations

The FAA’s guidelines state that, once airports reach 60% capacity, they should begin planning to build or extend their runway or extend their hours.

According to a Journal of Air Transport Management study, this has led to many US airports, like Denver, Orlando and Miami, expanding while still relatively far from capacity.

Despite its climate impacts, US and European aviation campaigners said the bill’s airport spending has not received the level of protest which similar measures in Europe have.

US-based E3G senior associate Alden Meyer said: “There are concerns around expansion in some local areas but it’s more related to the noise and congestion than it is climate-driven.”

‘Subversion and treason’: Australian minister attacks independent climate body

In Europe, the concept of “flight shame” has taken hold, with travellers opting to stay home or travel over land – since before the coronavirus pandemic led to wider restrictions. The term originated in Sweden and was popularised by teen activist Greta Thunberg, who sailed from the UK to New York for the United Nations general assembly in 2019 to avoid flying.

European campaigners have focussed on cancelling airport expansions and increasing taxes on aviation to reduce the number of kilometres flown rather reducing per-kilometre emissions.

In February, the French government cancelled an expansion of Paris’s main airport on climate grounds. A battle over plans to add a third runway to London’s Heathrow Airport has been making UK headlines for nearly 15 years.

UK-based anti-aviation campaigner Leo Murray said the US is “sadly lagging many years behind the UK public and political discourse” on this issue.

Brussels-based campaigner Andrew Murphy pointed out that the European Investment Bank had agreed to end financing of airport expansion, adding that the US “bailout for airports will only drive emissions from the sector higher”.

There is less of a history of anti-airport activism in the US, where taking a train instead is only an option on a limited number of routes.

US campaigners have focussed on reducing emissions per flight. Burt and Pardee are challenging the Biden administration’s acceptance of Trump-era plane emissions standards which Pardee said “do absolutely nothing” as they are “12 years behind business as usual”.

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Plans for a third runway had stalled after the Court of Appeal ruled in February that the expansion was unlawful because, among other reasons, it failed to consider the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The Supreme Court overturned the ban and ruled that Heathrow’s expansion strategy was not illegal, stating that the Paris Agreement does not qualify as UK government policy. 

Tim Crosland, a lawyer at Plan B, which brought the case along with Friends of the Earth, described it as a “really dreadful ruling”.

“We have so many documents from the UK government saying that the Paris Agreement is the lynchpin of policy on climate change and that we were the ones that were instrumental in securing it,” he told Climate Home.

In his anger at the verdict, Crosland broke an embargo to reveal the outcome on Tuesday, at risk of being held in contempt of court.

EU urged to address aviation’s full climate impact, including non-CO2 emissions

Campaigners plan to appeal the ruling in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where they will argue that increasing aviation emissions is inconsistent with the right to life. 

Despite the ruling, Heathrow still faces major obstacles to carry out its expansion plans. The airport may now seek planning permission, but could struggle to convince a public enquiry that increasing aviation demand is compatible with the UK’s 2050 net zero target, campaigners say.

“This judgment is no ‘green light’ for expansion. With ever stronger climate policy commitments that Heathrow must meet, it remains unlikely it will ever get planning permission for the third runway,” said Will Rundle, head of legal at Friends of the Earth.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) advised this month that if the UK is to meet its 2050 net zero goal, it will have to reduce its overall aviation emissions. There is no net airport growth in its net zero scenario, meaning Heathrow expansion would have to be offset by capacity reductions elsewhere.

“Heathrow expansion means 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, just from UK aviation, by 2050. They have to explain how that is consistent with the UK 2050 net zero target,” said Crosland. 

Aviation is likely to be the UK’s highest emitting sector by 2050, as it is hard to decarbonise, according to the CCC.

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Heathrow emits around 19 million tonnes of CO2 a year, more than half of UK aviation emissions. A third runway would add a projected 9 million tonnes to the airport’s total annual CO2 output.

Aviation demand projections have been thrown into uncertainty by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which forced airline to ground planes for much of 2020.

Without political will, the expansion plans are unlikely to happen, Friends of the Earth previously told Climate Home. Prime minister Boris Johnson, whose constituency is close to Heathrow, has been an outspoken critic of a third runway in the past.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said in a statement: “Now the ball is in the government’s court, it’s hard to imagine Boris Johnson wanting to resurrect a project that makes no business or environmental sense. With a UK-hosted climate summit just a year away, the government should draw a line under this sorry saga.”

Sauven called for a frequent flyer levy to curb demand and investment in broadband to encourage video conferencing instead of business flights.

A spokesperson for Heathrow said: “Heathrow airport has already committed to net zero and this ruling recognises the robust planning process that will require us to prove expansion is compliant with the UK’s climate change obligations, including the Paris Climate Agreement, before construction can begin.”

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The aviation sector’s climate impact is three times bigger than the effect of its carbon dioxide emissions alone, according to a study by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (Easa), the EU’s aviation regulator, commissioned by the European Commission.

The study endorses findings published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, showing that non-CO2 emissions from planes such as of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), soot particles, sulphate aerosols, and water vapour at high altitude together drive significant global heating.

Current EU policies to curb the aviation sector’s growing emissions only take into account carbon dioxide emissions.

The EU estimates direct carbon emissions from aviation account for nearly 4% of the bloc’s total CO2 emissions. But when considering non-CO2 emissions, aviation is likely playing a much bigger role in the EU’s contribution to rising temperatures globally.

Campaigners at Transport & Environment (T&E) say the study is an acknowledgment by the European Commission that the aviation sector’s full impact on warming needs to be addressed — 12 years after it started to consider the issue.

As UN action on ship emissions falls short, attention turns to regions

“It confirms that carbon emissions are only the tip of the iceberg when accounting for aviation’s climate impact,” said Jo Dardenne, aviation manager at T&E. “It’s the first time the EU regulator addresses the issue.”

While collectively planes’ non-CO2 emissions have a net warming impact on the planet, individually they have varying warming and cooling effects, the extent of which remains uncertain. The mass grounding of flights during the coronavirus pandemic handed scientists a rare chance to study plane-free skies and understand how far aviation stokes global warming.

In a note to the EU Parliament accompanying the report, the Commission stated the study “fully confirmed” previous estimates that non-C02 impacts were “at least as important” as CO2 emissions in contributing to warming.

It added the findings “needed to be addressed” in line with the EU’ climate objectives but it stressed that “the complexity of non-CO2 climate impacts relative to CO2 ones and the trade-offs between various impacts, poses a challenge” to policy responses.

Potential policy measures  included the creation of a levy on planes’ NOx emissions and the possible inclusion of these emissions under the EU’s trading scheme. The mandatory use of sustainable aviation fuel and operational measures, such as optimising flight trajectories to avoid the formation of contrails, were also recommended.

These measures would take at least five to eight years to be implemented if “there is political will”, the report said.

Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation

Dardenne told Climate Home the EU could not afford to wait eight years to act on the issue and urged the Commission to include policies in its Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy, due next month, which will set its vision for the transport sector for the next decade.

The Commission, she said, “shouldn’t waste any more time in implementing the solutions that are available today”.

Bill Hemmings, an independent consultant based in Brussels, said the Commission’s three-page note to Parliament and emphasis on the complexity of the sector’s climate impact was “yet another example of policymakers seeking to avoid acknowledging a very inconvenient truth”.

“It would be foolish not to recognise that the issues around aviation’s climate impacts at altitude remain complex and uncertain,” he said, but “there are strong arguments now to advance this work as quickly as possible… despite many lost years.”

The latest report is nearly a year late. The Commission was expected to present aviation’s non-CO2 effects and possible policy measures to address them by January 2020, in response to pressure from European lawmakers to reflect the aviation’s full climate impact in the emissions trading scheme.

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This was not the first time the European Parliament had pressed the Commission on the issue.

In 2008, it led to the publication of a study commissioned by the EU Commission’s transport department exploring policy options to reduce the climate impact of NOx emissions. The study made six policy recommendations but concluded three to five more years of research were needed to strength the scientific understanding.

Hemmings accused the Commission of having left the 2008 report to “gather dust on a shelf”.

He called on the EU to reflect aviation’s full warming impact in its greenhouse gas emissions inventories, to inform how much action the EU needs to take to achieve its 2050 climate neutrality goal.

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In February, campaigners claimed a historic victory in the Court of Appeal, which quashed plans for a third runway at Heathrow on climate grounds. The case was brought by litigation charity Plan B and campaign group Friends of the Earth.

Three appeal judges ruled that government approval of the expansion plan was unlawful because, among other reasons, it failed to consider the Paris Agreement on climate change. To pursue the project, the transport secretary would have to review how it could fit with the country’s climate commitments. The transport department accepted the ruling and said it would not appeal.

In a two-day virtual sitting of the Supreme Court this week, Heathrow argued the government was not legally required to consider the Paris Agreement.

At the same time, the airport owners claimed a third runway was compatible with Paris, so a government review would ultimately conclude it could go ahead.

According to the UK Committee on Climate Change, aviation is likely to be the UK’s highest emitting sector by 2050, as it is hard to decarbonise. Heathrow currently emits around 19 million tonnes of CO2 a year, more than half of UK aviation emissions. A third runway would add a projected 9 million tonnes to the airport’s total annual CO2 output.

A spokesperson for Heathrow airport said: “Heathrow will ensure the expansion project is compliant with the UK’s climate change obligations, including under the Paris Climate Agreement, as part of our plans to reach net-zero carbon. We fully expect to be held to account by the government through the planning process.”

Read more: Where are US emissions after four years of Donald Trump? 

Friends of the Earth lawyer Katie de Kauwe questioned this argument in Heathrow’s appeal. “If it really makes no difference to the outcome, then why are you bringing the appeal?” she asked, in an interview with Climate Home. “Why not let the government conduct its review?” 

De Kauwe said that if the Supreme Court agrees with the previous ruling the government’s airports national policy statement will remain a “zombie policy” until the government reviews it. Without political will, the expansion plans are unlikely to happen, she said. Prime minister Boris Johnson, whose constituency is close to Heathrow, has been an outspoken critic of a third runway in the past. 

The verdict is expected in January.

De Kauwe described the case as “hugely significant”. “It is the first case that has ruled that government plans for a massive infrastructure project are unlawful on the basis of the Paris Agreement,” she said. 

Campaigners and lawyers say the verdict could set a precedent for other climate litigation cases relating to the Paris Agreement. 

“This case is being closely watched by lawyers around the world who want to see how much impact a country’s signature to the Paris Climate Agreement has on actual decision-making” Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia University in New York, told Climate Home. 

“The ruling by the Court of Appeal seems to give at least some teeth to Paris.  The Supreme Court will either cement or pull those teeth,” Gerrard said. 

“We are seeing a movement across the world of climate litigation,” said de Kauwe. Campaign group Transport Action Network is challenging the UK government’s largest-ever road building programme by building on the Heathrow result, she said. “It is a huge boost for climate campaigners, [showing] what can be achieved through the courts.”

This article has been amended to remove an incorrect reference to the timing of the airports national policy statement.

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Those were among the more radical proposals in a package of recommendations on how to decarbonise in a fair and socially acceptable way.

“[The assembly members] came out most strongly in favour of taxes on air travel which increase, not only as people fly further, but also as they fly more often,” said Jim Watson, one of the assembly’s expert leads.

The 108 members of the Climate Assembly represent a cross-section of the British public. They were invited by lawmakers to work out how the UK can reach its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

A 32-year old assembly member called Chris from Oxford said the assembly was “a complete representation” which was a surprise and really “refreshing”. He said: ” I’ve spoken to people for who it’s a complete crisis – to complete denial or don’t believe it’s a real thing, that end of the spectrum.”

After hearing from experts at six weekend sessions in 2020, the assembly members developed proposals to slash emissions in every sector of the economy. The chairs of six parliamentary committees wrote to prime minister Boris Johnson, urging him to act on the report.

In the letter, they said: “We believe that their work merits a response and subsequent action. We therefore urge the Government to consider carefully the recommendations in the report and ask that you publish a response before the end of the year.”

Citizens’ assemblies on climate change seek to shape the post-Covid recovery

Air travel accounts for 7% of UK emissions and is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. Passenger demand is expected to grow, in the absence of policy intervention.

Assembly members said the government should even out the cost of air travel compared to the alternatives. In the UK, domestic flights are often much cheaper than travelling by rail.

One way the assembly said the government should do this is by taxing frequent fliers. This proposal was supported by 80% of assembly members.

A frequent flyer levy has previously been suggested by the government’s official advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change. The government then said it would consider the recommendation.

There are currently no taxes for frequent fliers anywhere in the world and most countries do not tax flights at all.

According to Leo Murray, director of innovation at green NGO ‘Possible’, the assembly’s support showed that frequent flyer taxes were popular with the general public and were therefore “politically deliverable”.

Frequent flyer levies are fairer and more popular than flat taxes on flying, said Murray. “The public is not going to get behind a solution that means ordinary people are unable to take an annual family holiday or see family abroad.”

A 2014 study found that, in the UK, 15% of the British population took 77% of all the flights. The same study found just 41% of Brits had flown in the last year. Murray said air travel was similarly unequal in most other countries – both in the Global North and South.

Most of British society’s elite – newspaper columnists, parliamentarians and chief executives – are among the frequent fliers, Murray noted. This, rather than the public’s view, is the real barrier to change, he said.

Ireland’s democratic experiment lays the ground for stronger climate action

Andrew Murphy, aviation manager at the Transport & Environment NGO, agreed that a frequent flyer levy would be popular. “It certainly fits the political mood at the moment which is to increasingly draw attention to that small percentage of the population which are responsible for a large amount of flying,” he said.

He agreed with Murray that those who fly the most should pay the most. But, he said, a frequent flyer levy would be difficult to implement and simpler policies should be prioritised.

One of the challenges of a frequent flyer levy, he said, would be keeping track of how many times people have flown.  The UK has no ID cards and people often have more than one email address, passport and credit card, so could find ways to dodge the tax.

It would require foreign airlines to cooperate with the UK authorities and raise the question of whether UK residents pay it or just UK citizens. Less wealthy people who have a particular reason for needing to fly often would also be penalised, he said.

Murphy said the most important thing governments can do to limit the climate impact of aviation is to stop expanding airports. The UK government is trying to expand London’s Heathrow Airport, despite a long-running legal challenge. 

Murphy also said aviation fuel should be taxed. “We’re jumping all the way to a frequent flyer levy at a time when jet fuel remains completely untaxed,” he said. “Why jump by the more known type of tax? Let’s do that one first.” 

Airport expansion and jet fuel were not mentioned in the Climate Assembly’s report.

Airlines’ climate obligations postponed as UN body endorses industry proposal

Other recommendations from the Climate Assembly included scrapping incentives to fly like air miles, and a ban on polluting private jets and helicopters. A passenger on a private jet in Europe is responsible for around ten times the emissions of the same journey made by economy class.

Murray supported this recommendation and added that, for technical reasons, electric air travel is more feasible for private planes than public ones. This is because they usually travel shorter distances and with fewer people.

The European Business Aviation Association told Climate Home News a private jet ban would do little to curb climate change. A spokesperson said: “Business aviation is but 2% of aviation’s contribution to global emissions. Also, air traffic is an international business, meaning unilateral, isolated solutions make little sense. We’re therefore proposing a more achievable and holistic approach.”

The trade body promoted sustainable aviation fuel and Corsia, a carbon offsetting scheme run by the International Civil Aviation Organization, as business-friendly alternatives.

Corsia is set to give airlines a free pass until 2023 and has been widely criticised by environmental campaigners.

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Domestic air travel will return to pre-pandemic levels by 2022, two years ahead of international air travel, according to projections from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Tourism Economics.

This trend puts an onus on major markets like the US and China to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions from in-country flights, experts said. Domestic travel accounts for around 40% of aviation CO2 emissions globally.

“It puts more of an emphasis on the need to tackle domestic aviation, absolutely,” said Annie Petsonk from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), who was not involved in the study. “Now is the time for aviation to build back better, and really take climate considerations to the core of its recovery.”

Climate targets for international aviation are generally considered to come under the remit of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Domestic aviation is covered by the national plans that form the building blocks of the Paris Agreement, but is rarely an area of focus at UN climate conferences. 

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Domestic flights make up a relatively small proportion of air travel for most European countries, including in the UK, the world’s third largest aviation emitter. But in the world’s top two emitters – the US and China, with 24% and 13% of global aviation emissions respectively – over two-thirds of emissions come from domestic flights.  

In 2015, the US laid out an aviation climate action plan to achieve “carbon neutral growth” above 2005 emissions for airlines by 2020, but little progress had been made towards this target before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a draft regulation for the country’s first ever emissions standard for aeroplanes. However, the average new aircraft delivered in 2019 was already about 6% more fuel-efficient than the EPA would require in 2028, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), an independent research group based in the US.

“This is an example of manufacturers trying to lock in permissive environmental standards for aircraft in the final days of this administration,” said Dan Rutherford, aviation director at the ICCT. “Job one for the next administration will be to go back to the drawing board on EPA’s aircraft CO2 standard.” 

In a webinar last week setting out the new IATA/Tourism Economics projections, the organisations said Asia Pacific and US have seen a lower pandemic-induced fall in aviation than elsewhere, due to their large domestic markets.

“From this crisis we expect [the domestic share of travel to spike up… as people do look for some more known, safer destinations as well as looking for some savings on their travel,” said David Goodger, a managing director of Tourism Economics.

How fast will aviation recover? 

The forecasts come from a “baseline” scenario where overall flight passenger numbers recover to 2019 levels by 2023  – a year later than the organisations’ previous forecast in April. Responding to the updated forecast, Alexandre de Juniac, director general of IATA, called for more financial and policy relief measures from governments which avoid increasing the industry’s ballooning debt.

In an “upside” scenario, recovery would be slightly faster, the organisations said. A “downside” scenario – with a second wave of COVID-19 and a financial crisis – would see passenger levels reach 2019 levels only in 2026. 

All the scenarios project a return to rapid growth in flights within the next decade, with the number of air passengers rising between 60% and 100% by 2038 compared to 2019 levels. 

The development of high-speed electric rail, which has far lower greenhouse gas emissions than air travel, is seen as one important way to reduce aviation emissions, although its construction needs to be carefully managed to avoid disruption of ecosystems. In some cases, high-speed lines have reduced aviation transport on the same routes by as much as 80%.  

China has invested heavily in high-speed rail lines over the past decade and boasts two-thirds of the world’s total. Its per capita aviation emissions are also small, although its aviation emissions are also expected to skyrocket in the coming decades. 

The US, which is a similar size to China, has little in the way of high speed rail, although there are several projects in development. These include a publicly funded project in California, which has struggled since the Trump administration cancelled $1 billion in federal support.

Biden support for US cleantech innovation ‘will raise the bar’ internationally

The Green New Deal pack of resolutions in the US, proposed last year by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, outlined plans to build out high-speed rail in an apparent effort to make air travel within the country obsolete.

“Having rail alternatives where it’s feasible to do so is a very important piece of the puzzle,” says Petsonk. “But in many parts of the United States, we don’t have the rail infrastructure or it’s not feasible, and so people will want to continue to fly. So we need both.”

Policy proposals announced earlier this month by the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force also recommended the US’s “second great railroad revolution” be brought about by investing in high-speed rail. Joe Biden had previously promised in his June 2019 climate platform to ensure the US has “the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world”, and pledged new incentives to reduce aircraft emissions through sustainable fuels and other technology and standards.  

But Petsonk said engine design and aircraft design would only get the country so far, since even if each plane operates more efficiently, total emissions will still rise as air traffic rises.  

“We think that it’s very important to in addition have a limit on the total emissions of the flights, and incentives to drive those total emissions down,” she says. “And those could be through any number of means: flying less, flying better, flying with different fuels, using offsets. But the trajectory has to be the downward trajectory compatible with net zero [emissions] by 2050.”

The post Air travel to bounce back faster in domestic markets, industry forecasts appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 36 countries that sit on the council of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) – the UN body responsible for aviation – agreed on Tuesday to ease airlines’ obligation to offset their emission growth until at least 2023.

The move effectively postpones the date airlines have to start paying for carbon credits to offset a portion of their climate impact.

The decision was made after the International Air Transport Association (Iata) lobbied Icao to change the baseline from which emissions growth will be measured – a move it estimates could save airlines $15 billion in carbon offsetting costs.

As air travel collapsed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and with many airlines pleading for government bailouts, Iata argued previously agreed rules would create “an inappropriate economic burden on the sector”.

But observers and campaigners say the move has deflated the little ambition of the aviation’s sector climate plan, which was already “far below what is needed to avoid climate catastrophe”, according to a coalition of NGOs.

Prior to the rules being weakened, research by Climate Action Tracker judged the sector’s climate goals and the measures proposed to meet it “critically insufficient”.

Aviation’s black box: Non-disclosure agreements, closed doors and rising CO2

In a statement, the International Coalition for Sustainable Aviation (ICSA) said the decision was a “betrayal to future generations and a slap in the face of the multilateral work to build the programme”.

The ICSA has repeatedly said rewriting the rules of the aviation’s climate deal wasn’t necessary, as a flexibility provision in the scheme would have allowed airlines to reduce their offsetting cost until 2023.

Gilles Dufrasne, senior policy officer at Carbon Market Watch, said airlines were “making a mockery of governments and taxpayers, taking public money while fighting climate policies”.

The meeting’s outcome was described by Icao in a tweet as “great news for the environment” and safeguarding the sector’s emission reduction programme.

Bas Eickhout, a Dutch Green lawmaker in the European Parliament, reacted with incredulity:

Seriously? You are adjusting the baseline to 2019 only with procedural tricks, further undermining CORSIA’s credibility, and you spin that as great news for the environment. Is this an UN account or did aviation industry now also take over your twitter account? https://t.co/OEK3rz1toD

— Bas Eickhout (@BasEickhout) July 1, 2020

National members of Icao have agreed to make all growth in aviation emissions carbon neutral from 2020. With few technological solutions currently available to reduce planes’ pollution, airlines were expected to fund emissions cuts in other sectors, under a carbon market called Corsia.

The agreed baseline for measuring emissions was to be the two-year average across 2019 and 2020. But with 2020 turning into a year of anomalously low air travel because of restrictions to contain the spread of Covid-19, airlines proposed to change the baseline to pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

The Icao Council – which includes the world’s largest air travel manufacturing and infrastructure nations – agreed to change the baseline to 2019 for the first three years of the Corsia programme’s voluntary stage from 2021-23.

This means that if the sector’s emissions don’t rise above 2019 levels during that time – and traffic is expected to take some time to rebound – airlines won’t have to pay anything for their climate impacts.

The 193 members of Icao’s Assembly will decide in 2022 whether to continue with the baseline change beyond 2023 or revert back to the previously agreed 2019-20 average.

The proposal was pushed by the EU, which had formally endorsed rewriting the rules.

The US had threatened to withdraw from the scheme’s voluntary stage if the baseline was not changed, according to Dutch infrastructure minister Cora van Nieuwenhuizen in a letter updating Dutch lawmakers on negotiations published on 26 June.

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Dufrasne, of Carbon Market Watch, accused Icao of “failing” to tackle the aviation sector’s climate problem. He echoed other campaigners’ calls for governments to regulate the industry at a national or regional level by ending the sector’s tax breaks and putting a price on pollution.

Previous analysis by the Öko-Institut in Germany and the US-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) found using the 2019-only baseline could give airlines a free pass to pollute until 2027, depending on the shape of the recovery.

Dan Rutherford, aviation director at the International Council on Clean Transportation, added this would make Corsia’s coverage of the sector’s emissions fall below 10% of global aviation CO2 emission to 2035 – meaning 90% of airlines’ carbon emissions would be “free of charge”.

As airlines try to woo back customers concerned about both Covid-19 and the climate impacts of flying, “they can’t afford to ignore the looming global crisis of climate change,” said Annie Petsonk, an aviation expert at EDF.

“The sooner that the costs of carbon control are included in the costs of doing business, the sooner new technologies will be developed.”

The move also means airlines will “lose their first-mover advantage” in securing long-term supply contracts from carbon credit suppliers, she added.

The post Airlines’ climate obligations postponed as UN body endorses industry proposal appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic, the International Air Transport Association (Iata), called on the UN body responsible for aviation to ease airlines’ obligations to offset their emissions growth under a scheme known as Corsia.

Iata urged the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) to change the baseline from which emissions growth will be measured – a move it estimates could save airlines $15 billion in carbon offsetting costs.

At a time when the industry is reeling from grounded flights due to Covid-19, airlines argue current rules risk creating “an inappropriate economic burden on the sector”.

On Tuesday, EU member states backed the baseline change, which could see airlines pay nothing for their climate impact until 2024.

France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain and Greece will speak in favour of the adjustment at a meeting of Icao’s council this week. That means the rule change could win majority support.

Campaigners say it would further damage the credibility of the offsetting scheme, which is widely regarded as weak and not aligned with the Paris Agreement goals.

“This could be the final blow for Corsia,” Gilles Dufrasne, senior policy officer at Carbon Market Watch told Climate Home News. “It was always a ridiculously weak system, but now it is becoming essentially meaningless. Airlines are just let off the hook one more time.”

Airlines could get free pass on climate for five years under industry proposal

Member states of Icao have agreed to offset all growth in aviation emissions from 2020. With few technological solutions currently available to reduce planes’ pollution, airlines were expected to fund emissions cuts in other sectors, under a carbon market called Corsia.

The agreed baseline for measuring emissions was to be the two-year average across 2019 and 2020. But with 2020 turning into a year of anomalously low air travel because of restrictions to contain the spread of Covid-19, airlines have proposed to measure from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

Analysis by the Öko-Institut in Germany found that changing the baseline to 2019 could give airlines a free pass to pollute for the next three to six years depending on the speed of the recovery. A study by the US-based Environmental Defense Fund found similar results.

Observers to the UN aviation talks argue the baseline change isn’t needed because offsets are already very cheap. An existing flexibility provision built in Corsia could be used by airlines to delay their offsetting obligations and limit additional financial costs.

Jo Dardenne, aviation manager at NGO Transport & Environnent, told CHN the change in baseline meant “we’re going from a cheap offsetting scheme to no scheme at all”.

“The aviation sector is clearly using the Covid-19 crisis to dilute the environmental effectiveness of a scheme that was already expected to bring little to zero environmental benefits,” she said.

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For Tim Johnson, director of the Aviation Environment Federation, the baseline change will undermine many governments’ stated intentions to bolster climate ambition.

Airlines have managed to get what they wanted from governments, Dufrasne added. Governments, including in the EU, are handing out multi-billion relief packages to airlines “with virtually no climate conditions while also agreeing to industry demands to weaken the already insufficient climate policies in place,” he said. “They are exploiting the crisis.”

Oleg Butković, minister for transport and infrastructure in Croatia, which holds the EU Council rotating presidency, said in a statement that the baseline change was “crucial to maintaining a similar level of ambition for the scheme” while taking into account airlines’ difficult circumstances.

But the move did not receive blanket support inside the EU. Sweden did not support the rule change. And a cross-party group of European lawmakers from the Parliament’s environment committee called for the average 2019-2020 baseline to be maintained until a planned review in 2022, when the shape of the sector’s recovery will be clearer.

Among them Bas Eickhout, a Green MEP, told CHN in an email: “Corsia is already extremely weak, the change that Iata pursues makes it even worse. Weakening Corsia now in such a substantial way will be nearly impossible to correct later,” he said.

French MEP Pascal Canfin, chair of the environment committee, added the EU will need to work to readdress the issue at the next Corsia review in 2022. “The EU should be leading on emission regulation, not watering down the ambition,” he said.

Aviation’s black box: Non-disclosure agreements, closed doors and rising CO2

The 36 members of the Icao Council, which includes the world’s largest air travel manufacturing and infrastructure nations, are expected to take a position on the issue this week.

Besides European countries, the US and the Latin American Civil Aviation Commission are also supporting the rule change, according to Reuters. Any decision taken by the council requires a majority of at least 19 countries.

However Annie Petsonk, aviation expert at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), said the council was not legally entitled to change the rules of the climate deal that was agreed by 193 countries at Icao’s Assembly in 2016. Instead, Icao’s assembly would need to approve any recommendations to change the rules for offsetting emissions.

If a decision was taken by the council, “this will deal a triple whammy” to Icao’s climate credibility, she told CHN: airlines will be given a free pass to pollute, the trust of countries that are not part of Icao’s council will be undermined as well as the public trust in the credibility of airlines’ environmental claims.

The post ‘Final blow’ to aviation climate plan as EU agrees to weaken rules appeared first on Climate Home News.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents the world’s airlines, has called on the UN body responsible for aviation to rewrite the rules for offsetting the sector’s emissions growth.

To curb the aviation sector’s growing emissions, member states of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) have agreed to make all growth in international flights carbon neutral after 2020.

With limited technical solutions available to make planes less polluting, airlines will rely on a carbon market known as Corsia. The scheme allows them to offset their emissions growth by funding carbon-cutting projects in other sectors.

The agreed baseline for measuring emissions was to be the two-year average across 2019 and 2020. However 2020 is turning into a year of anomalously low air travel, with planes grounded by travel restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19. That means airlines would have a bigger offsetting obligation than they anticipated if traffic rebounds quickly.

Iata is urging Icao to change the baseline to pre-pandemic levels in 2019 – a move it says could save airlines an estimated $15 billion in carbon offsetting costs.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

Last month, Iata described maintaining the 2019-2020 baseline as “an inappropriate economic burden” that would “significantly” increase the number of offsets airlines would need to buy to meet the climate target and lead to higher costs.

The proposal is to be discussed at an upcoming Icao Council meeting – a body of 36 countries, including the world’s largest plane manufacturing and airport hub nations – 8-26 June in Montreal, Canada.

The plan would “delay airlines’ climate mitigation requirements by several years and lead to significantly fewer emission reductions,” according to Lambert Schneider, research coordinator for international climate policy at the German-based Öko-Institut, who studied the impact of Iata’s proposal on climate action.

Industry experts have argued that a lower 2019-2020 baseline would have a negligible impact on airlines’ offsetting requirements and associated costs.

On the contrary, the study by the Öko-Institut found that Iata’s proposal to increase the baseline to 2019-only emissions would reduce airlines’ obligations to offset emissions growth between 25% and 75% by 2035 – depending on the speed of air travel recovery.

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Schneider and his co-author Jakob Graichen concluded that Iata’s proposal would remove incentives for the aviation sector to invest in carbon-cutting measures.

They recommended maintaining the current baseline until an Icao review planned for 2022, which is due to review the overall ambition of the Corsia scheme.

Campaigners agreed.

Annie Petsonk, aviation expert at EDF, wrote in a blog that while airlines were desperate to save money in the wake of the pandemic, hastily rewriting the rules for the sector’s emission-curbing scheme “would be penny-wise and future-foolish” and damage public confidence in Corsia.

“If investors believe that governments will make ad hoc rule changes that strand their investments, they won’t make those investments,” she said.

“Re-writing Corsia’s rules would not only give airlines a free pass to pollute for the next half-decade, it would undermine investor confidence in airlines’ climate commitments at a time when regaining investor confidence is crucial to the sector’s survival.”

Aviation’s black box: Non-disclosure agreements, closed doors and rising CO2

A coalition of NGOs including EDF, Carbon Market Watch and WWF, along with businesses and offsetting programmes have urged Icao’s Council not to change the Corsia baseline.

In a letter, they argue that consistency in apply fixed rules objectively and following established processes are crucial for investor confidence, warning against changing the rules seven months before the start of the scheme. “The lack of durable investment would contribute to worsening the climate crisis,” they wrote.

“Corsia is an important mechanism for carbon markets around the world. Changes to elements as fundamental to its design as the baseline should be treated very cautiously.”

The Öko-Institut research compares two recovery scenarios to 2035 with the climate goal airlines agreed to meet before the coronavirus outbreak.

The first is based on Icao’s most optimistic scenario which assumes a 38% decrease in air travel this year compared to pre-Covid19, a fast recovery to 2019 emissions level in the next three years and continued growth thereafter at a rate similar to what was expected before the pandemic.

The second scenario is Icao’s most pessimistic with a 71% drop in air travel in 2020, a slower recovery of more than three years and continued growth from the mid-2020s at a slightly lower rate than expected before the pandemic.

When applying a 2019-2020 baseline, the study shows that a quick recovery scenario would require airlines to purchase slightly more carbon credits than they would have if the pandemic hadn’t happened.

A built-in flexibility provision in the Corsia scheme could, however, reduce the pandemic’s impact by lowering airlines’ offset obligations during the programme’s first voluntary stage between January 2021 and the end of 2023. From 2027, offsetting obligations will become mandatory for all international flights.

Under a slower recovery scenario, airlines wouldn’t need to offset any emissions between 2021 and 2023 and would be required to buy slightly fewer carbon credits than they would have expected to before the outbreak to offset their emissions growth to 2035.

When using Iata’s proposed 2019 baseline, offsetting requirements would disappear in a quick recovery scenario until 2024 and be reduced by 25% by 2035 compared to pre-pandemic trajectory. Under a slower recovery, airlines wouldn’t have to offset emissions until 2027 – reducing mitigation efforts by 75% by 2035.

An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published earlier this month found that Iata’s proposal could push the date for airlines to start offsetting their emissions under the Corsia scheme to 2028 or even later – 12 years after the scheme was agreed in 2016.

EDF looked at five possible post-Covid-19 scenarios for the aviation industry which assumed emissions would drop between 20% and 70% this year compared to pre-outbreak projections.

The analysis found that unless aviation’s emissions quickly rebound to levels pre-outbreak or higher by 2021, a 2019-only baseline would effectively postpone Corsia’s start planned in January 2021 for three to five years.

The post Airlines could get free pass on climate for five years under industry proposal appeared first on Climate Home News.

The coronavirus pandemic has taught us new lessons about the vulnerability of airlines to disruption. A 70% reduction in scheduled flights year over year has led most of the world’s airlines to the brink of solvency virtually overnight.

Now, governments are mobilising to bail them out.

The US coronavirus relief act (Cares Act) directed $50 billion to keep US carriers afloat through September 2020. France recently announced a €7 billion bailout of Air France with some environmental conditions, including that the airline cut its carbon intensity by 10% from today’s levels in 2030, halve CO2 emissions from flights within mainland France, and use at least 2% of alternative jet fuel by 2025.

And civil society is mobilising to track the bailouts.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

The Covid-19 pandemic, with more than 3.5 million tracked infections and a quarter of a million deaths worldwide, has not only had a terrible impact on public health and hammered the global economy. It has also highlighted that governments, with few exceptions, will always intervene to rescue their airlines.

If that is going to be the case, let’s ensure the bailouts can help airlines reboot toward sustainability, rather than return to a past at odds with our climate responsibilities.

What might a “green” airline bailout look like? Here are five key strategies:

1. Accelerate the retirement of excess, carbon intensive capital stocks
2. Catalyse new investments in low and zero carbon technologies
3. Build durable funding mechanisms to support continued investments
4. Limit future emissions growth through meaningful targets
5. Empower consumers to demand sustainable flying options

Let’s consider each of these in turn.

The traffic boom of the past decade, combined with the sudden evaporation of demand under Covid-19, leaves behind extra aircraft that will not be used for the foreseeable future.  Some of those are already being retired today, others will need a push to the scrap heap. A fuel efficiency standard for in-service aircraft or scrappage incentives could help take up the slack.

In their place, we’ll need to jumpstart large new investments to mature, develop, and deploy low and zero carbon aircraft and fuels. That calls for an Apollo-style programme for advanced aircraft and engines, truly sustainable biofuels, and synthetic jet fuels generated from renewable electricity.

Ambitious new programmes are needed to mature alternatives to conventional “wing and tube” aircraft as well as hybrid, electric, and hydrogen powered aircraft. Support should also go to “drop in” alternative fuels generated from wastes, cellulosic feedstocks, and renewable electricity. These fuels should provide at least a 70% lifecycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional jet.

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Governments can lead but can’t shoulder all of the expense – we’ll need durable, industry funded mechanisms for continued investments. Those could come from a fuel levy, emissions trading, or carbon tax on airlines with revenue earmarked for research and development (R&D).

Another approach attracting attention in the UK in particular is for a frequent flyer levy, as championed by A Free Ride campaign . This could generate funds for R&D from the most frequent fliers, and also provide public health benefits by curbing excessive, high frequency flights that increase the risk of global pandemics.

We’ll also need ambitious but achievable emission limits to backstop these investments.

Airlines have already agreed to offset most growth in international CO2 from 2020. This could be expanded to include domestic aviation and to transition away from offsets, which are incompatible with long-term decarbonisation.

Because low carbon aviation technologies will need decades to mature, capping aviation emissions now means balancing future traffic growth with improvements in fuel efficiency. As a point of context, between 2013 and 2018, airline traffic in the US grew three times faster than fuel efficiency improved. Global traffic grew six times faster.

No silver lining to coronavirus, but a golden opportunity

Finally, we need to empower consumers to reward more sustainable carriers by addressing a persistent lack of transparency in airline emissions.

Consumers should be able to vote with their money to support lower emitting airlines. Most people aren’t aware that the carbon intensity of flights linking the same city-city pair can vary by more than 80%. Mandatory reporting of emissions by flight would help environmentally conscious consumers choose more fuel-efficient flights while providing needed market pull for the technologies discussed above.

Success is by no means guaranteed, and a rush to define terms can lead to unintended consequences. For example, under the US Cares Act, airlines are operating large numbers of “ghost flights” in part due to requirements that they maintain minimum air service levels to underserviced airports.

There will also be a strong headwind to investments in new aircraft and clean fuels now that fossil jet fuel prices have fallen by two thirds since February. But, like it or not, Covid-19 is forcing a reboot of the aviation industry. Let’s make it a lasting one that works for the planet as well.

Dan Rutherford is the aviation director at the International Council on Clean Transportation. 

The post Five ways for governments to green airline bailouts appeared first on Climate Home News.

Lufthansa is in talks with the German government over a package reportedly worth €10 billion. The company warned it had cash to survive just weeks as flights were grounded to halt the spread of Covid-19.

Campaigners have repeatedly called for any state aid to carbon-intensive sectors like aviation to be conditional on measurable climate action, but environment minister Svenja Schulze said now was not the time to impose green conditions.

“I do not want to question the bailout money we are dispersing round. We have been internationally commended on our policy on quick help and this is right,” said environment minister Svenja Schulze at the opening press conference of the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, a mainstay of the climate diplomacy calendar, which Germany is co-hosting with the UK this week.

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The two-day event is taking place by video conferencing as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.

Ministers from 30 countries are participating in the online talks, with a focus on how to design an economic recovery to the Covid-19 crisis with job creation and climate protection at its core.

Schulze argued the economic response to the pandemic required different approaches in the very short term and in the months following the ongoing public health crisis.

“We are still in the very midst of the crisis. So what we have are short term funds to help businesses survive this crisis. This is a protective shield for workers and employees,” she told reporters on Monday.

Responding to questions about how the Lufthansa bailout aligned with the green recovery, Schulze said now was the time for “quick, targeted help”.

“But there will be a time after the crisis,” she added, describing the second phase of the economic response as a recovery plan that follows “a compass of climate action and social progress” aligned with the Paris Agreement and climate neutrality objectives.

France calls for minimum carbon price to counter oil crash

“Rescue is rescue,” agreed Nick Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and an advisor to the UK presidency of Cop26 climate talks.

Joining the press conference by video link from the UK, Stern said: “The first weeks and months are for protecting employment and preventing the economy from imploding. That should be the priority.”

Stern warned against discriminating against specific industries, such as airlines, in the rescue phase of the Covid-19 response. “But rescue moves to recovery,” he said: a second phase to start in summer or autumn this year.

“At that point, we must lift our eyes and look forward and ask ourselves where are the activities of the future, where are the jobs of the future.”

Energy efficiency, electrifying transport, pedestrianising cities, protecting land and forests and investing in health and education could form the key pillars of a recovery investment plan, Stern suggested.

“Of course energy companies and airlines are going to have to change and you don’t try to wipe them out in the weeks of rescue, what you do is you protect employment and then you move to the encouragement of the change,” he added.

Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation

Bailouts to the aviation industry have dominated countries’ immediate response to the pandemic. The sector has been brought to its knees from a near-shutdown of air travel.

European airlines have sought €12.8 billion in government bailouts since the start of the pandemic, according to a tracker created by campaign groups Transport & Environment, Greenpeace and Carbon Market Watch.

Air France-KLM is expected to receive a €10 billion relief package in loans and guarantees from the French and Dutch governments.

France’s finance minister Bruno le Maire unveiled €7 billion in support for the carrier on Friday, including €4 billion of state-backed loans and €3 billion of direct loans.

Le Maire warned the relief package was “not a blank cheque” but that support was dependent on environmental conditions, including a CO2-cutting plan and for Air France to become “the most sustainable airline on the planet”.  Details on what this means are yet to be finalised and the European Commission still needs to approve the plan.

Back online, ministers taking part in the Petersberg Climate Dialogue are due to discuss how to maintain momentum for climate action this year. A key UN climate summit, Cop26, initially due to be held in Glasgow, UK, in November has been postponed to an unspecified date in 2021.

Schulze, said the international community should “stick to the schedule set by the Paris climate agreement” and that countries needed to “present updated climate protection goals this year”.

Interview: UN development chief calls for green shift away from ‘irrational’ oil dependence

Under the Paris Agreement, countries are due to communicate or update their 2030 climate plans and publish a long-term decarbonisation strategy before 31 December, regardless of the timing of Cop26.

So far, only a handful of countries including the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway and Chile, have submitted tougher mid-term plans to the UN. But the timetable for raising ambition is looking increasingly likely to slip.

New Zealand reaffirmed its existing 2030 target last week, while waiting for independent advice on how to align its climate plan to the 1.5C goal expected in early 2021. The pandemic has also hampered developing countries’ ability to design new plans before the end of the year.

Schulze insisted the EU needed to “send a clear signal” for climate ambition by submitting its updated 2030 climate plan to reduce emissions by 50-55% from 1990 levels. She added the union needed to do “everything possible” to encourage other major emitters to step up.

Countries represented at the dialogue include China, India, Japan, Chile, European member states, small island states such as the Marshall Islands and other developing nations such as Ethiopia and Bhutan.

The post German environment minister defends airline bailout, promises green recovery appeared first on Climate Home News.

With people staying at home to slow the spread of the disease, global oil demand has slumped by a third, hitting producers hard.

Climate campaigners are calling on governments to make relief for the fossil fuel industry dependent on tougher climate action. In the rush to protect businesses and workers from the impacts of the public health crisis, though, some polluters are being bailed out with no strings attached.

In a historic deal, a group of major oil-producing countries, Opec, and allies including Russia, on 12 April agreed the biggest ever cut to oil supply to stabilise energy markets and end a price war between Moscow and Saudi Arabia. Yet prices continued to slide.

A report by Influence Map, which analyses corporate lobbying on climate policy, found the oil and gas sector to be the most active globally in lobbying governments for financial support and deregulation in response to Covid-19. 

This, it found, was particularly the case in the US, Canada and Australia.

Which governments gave them what they wanted? Here is a round-up of the various types of support to polluting sectors introduced by the world’s largest economies.

US 

Donald Trump has been determined to support the energy sector ravaged by oil prices and falling demand, putting pressure on Opec members to agree to cut production. 

At home, the Trump administration instructed the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to be filled to the maximum of its 30 million barrels capacity to “alleviate financial hardship” on the energy sector.  The Department of Energy said it intended to make an additional 47 million barrels of storage capacity available. 

The Covid-19 bill clocked up a gigantic $2 trillion to help workers and industries impacted by the pandemic. 

It includes $61bn in relief for airlines, including $50bn  for passenger airlines, split evenly between loans and grants to pay employees, and $8bn for air cargo carriers.

The bill includes $17bn for companies deemed critical in maintaining US national security – largely set aside for one company, Boeing, which was already under pressure over two deadly crashes before the pandemic.

Solar and wind power businesses did not get the access to tax credits they had sought under the package. Right-wing US organisations lobbied against proposed tax incentives for green programmes. “Climate change is not an immediate threat to humanity,” they wrote. 

Oil and gas companies do not directly qualify for economic support under the bill.

Elsewhere, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a sweeping relaxation of environmental rules in response to the pandemic. This follows lobbying from the American Petroleum Institute. 

Oil and gas lease sales are going ahead as usual while three states – Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia, have passed legislation increasing criminal penalties on protests disrupting or damaging fossil fuel infrastructure.

China 

Provinces across China have taken measures to keep people in work and prop up small businesses but nationwide relief measures have been on a much smaller scale than in other major economies. 

As the number of new reported cases in China came closer to zero, five new coal-fired power plants totalling 7,960 MW were approved for construction between 1 and 18 March – more than than the total for 2019 which saw the approval of 6,310MW, according to Global Energy Monitor. 

Coal consumption has bounced back in China in recent years and the amount of coal power capacity under development increased even before the Covid-19 outbreak. 

At the end of February, provinces gave the green light to 34GW of new coal power, despite existing overcapacity. It is not yet clear if all the new approved plants will be built.

While early indications suggest Chinese officials could be turning towards heavy-industries to reboot the economy, Beijing is also considering “new infrastructure” investments such as 5G, high-speed railways and electric vehicle charging points as part of the recovery efforts. 

Environmental supervision of firms could be simplified and in some circumstances temporarily suspended to help companies resume production, according to an official from the ministry of environment. 

Russia

Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin announced a $4 billion fund to support the economy and key industries. 

The package includes tax breaks for hardest-hit sectors including air transport and tourism and the expansion of subsidised loans to businesses.

Oil and gas state-controlled companies, Gazprom and Rosneft, could be allowed to delay paying dividends, Radio Free Europe reported. 

The collapse of the price of oil, Russia’s main export, has left the economy particularly vulnerable. The government is aiming to subsidise the shortfall in oil revenue. Mishustin said the central bank would compensate the currency market if the price of Urals oil dropped below $25 per barrel. 

The mechanism has previously been used to compensate oil companies for the shortfall in export revenue when oil was sold domestically below global prices. “It should now also compensate for the decrease in federal budget revenue,” Mishustin said. 

Despite the contraction in oil demand and continued cheap supply, Mishustin insisted the Russian oil industry was prepared for volatility. 

Canada 

The province of Alberta, home to extensive tar sands extraction, has been leading Canada’s bailout of the oil and gas sector. 

The provincial government handed out tax relief measures for its struggling industry, suspending fees collected by the industry regulator to the tune of $79 million.

A ministerial order also suspended a number of environmental reporting requirements until mid August. 

Meanwhile, the Business Council of Alberta and oil and gas companies have demanded the federal government postpone a planned increase of the carbon tax and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers lobbied for a suspension of nationwide environmental rules.

However the Trudeau administration chose relief measures with an environmental slant.

On 17 April, Justin Trudeau announced $1.2bn to clean up orphan and inactive oil and gas wells in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia to maintain jobs. 

The federal government is creating a $750 million emissions reduction fund to support oil and gas sector investments in reducing emissions, particularly methane. 

Environmental campaigners have warned oil and gas could get stealth subsidies through relaxed rules to Canada’s export credit agency, the Export Development Canada (EDC). 

As part of its response to the pandemic, the Canadian government significantly extended the scope of EDC’s work. 

Under the new rules, EDC will be able to support transactions domestically as well as abroad. The agency’s liability limit, previously capped at $32 billion, has also been lifted. 

EDC has a record of supporting Canada’s oil and gas sector export abroad. It provided an average $10.6 billion a year to oil and gas projects from 2016 to 2018, according to Oil Change International.

The Canada Account, which supports export transactions deemed of national interest including the Trans-Mountain pipeline, is also benefiting from the liability cap lift.

The government also waived ground lease rents for 21 airports authorities until the end of the year as part of a support package for air travel.

Australia 

The federal government is pushing for the expansion of coal mines to keep people in work during the coronavirus-induced economic slowdown. 

Resources Minister Keith Pitt said the expansion of Acland thermal coal mine, in Queensland, was “even more” more important now the coronavirus pandemic is hammering the economy. 

The Queensland government has so far refused to approve the expansion despite pressure from mine operator New Hope, which is expected to exhaust coal reserves by September. 

In South Australia, the government suspended exploration and licence fees for the mining, oil and gas sectors. The relief will extend the licence fee deadline to 31 December. 

Energy and mining minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan announced a 12-month waiver of committed expenditure for all mineral exploration licence holders. 

UK

The UK government is resisting calls from the aviation sector for a bespoke bailout package. 

Airlines trade association Iata has led a global lobbying campaign demanding governments immediately reduce all charges and taxes and provide airlines with specific support funds. 

Iata has also been pushing regulators to relax rules so airlines can issue travel vouchers instead of refunds, allowing for a surge of passengers when travel restrictions are lifted. 

In a letter to airlines and airport executives, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak said bespoke government support would only be available as “a last resort” and after companies had exhausted other funding options, such as raising money from shareholders. 

But on 6 April, British low-cost airline group EasyJet received a $737 million loan from the UK government after warning it was running out of cash – although it managed to pay £60 million in dividends to its largest shareholder.

Despite strong commitments to climate action, the Bank of England has allowed the debt of BP, Shell and Total’s subsidiary companies to be eligible for support under the banks’ boosted corporate bond purchase scheme.

European Union 

EU member states have agreed that the union’s response to the pandemic must be aligned with the green transition and its European Green Deal.

Writing in Climate Home News, 17 environment ministers called for the Green Deal and its carbon neutrality goal to provide the pathway for economic recovery. But across the union, carbon-intensive sectors are still benefiting from relief. 

The European Central Bank rolled-out a €870 billion ($781bn) emergency bond-buying programme to stabilise the euro zone economy until the end of the year – the equivalent of 7.3% of the euro area’s GDP.

Initial analysis of the bonds purchased in the last three weeks by Influence Map shows the programme included bonds issued by oil majors including Shell, Eni and Total – with some of the bonds purchased maturing between 2024 and 2034. 

The EU Commission has also started to approve airline bailouts aimed at easing companies’ liquidity crunch. 

Loan guarantees have been made available in Sweden. Belgium deferred concession fee payments for its major airports. The French and Dutch governments are in talks with Air-France KLM for state support. Germany is also in talks with Lufthansa to provide state aid with loans and equity investments. 

In Austria, the government is also in talks with Lufthansa, the parent company of Austrian Airlines, to provide state aid for the airline only if the money supports emissions cuts.

Meanwhile in France, the National Assembly has approved a $21.4bn package to rescue its strategic industries, largely focused on aviation and automobile majors such as Airbus, AirFrance and Renault.

The text requires recipient companies to include social and environmental objectives in their business models in line with the Paris Agreement, but gives no further conditions.

Environmental NGOs have accused the government of writing “a blank cheque” to some of the country’ largest polluters.

The powerful European automotive lobby group, ACEA, has called on EU institutions to provide liquidity support for companies, suppliers and dealers.

The automotive sector is also lobbying for the union to drop a tightening of CO2 regulations aimed at raising fuel efficiency. “This not the time to think about further tightening of the CO2 regulation,” VDA president Hildegard Müller told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

India 

India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas Dharmendra Pradhan struck a deal with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) to deliver more cooking gas supplies as part of a scheme to support women living below the poverty line. 

Pradhan said he had given Adnoc its assurances India would buy crude oil from the company to replenish the country’s strategic petroleum reserves.

Brazil 

The Brazilian government has opened negotiations on an emergency loan package for energy distributors, according to Reuters. 

The government has also postponed all electricity auctions in 2020, including for renewable and green power. Experts say this could benefit the country’s natural gas plants, which will become more competitive in the next auction rounds.

Argentina 

The Argentinian government has pledged an additional $100 billion for public work investments for road works, construction and large infrastructure projects. 

Argentinian newspaper Perfil reported the government had entered negotiations with oil-producing provinces and companies to reinstate a support price per barrel to halt a production collapse. 

South Korea 

Despite plans for a Green New Deal and an objective to reach net zero emissions by 2050, the government is opening an $825 million emergency credit line to the country’s biggest coal plant manufacturer, Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co.

Environmental groups are seeking an injunction against the bailout, seeking to make the relief contingent on the company’s transition away from coal.

The post Coronavirus: which governments are bailing out big polluters? appeared first on Climate Home News.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, air traffic has slumped in a manner not seen since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

Scientists with Nasa and European research groups hope to use clear skies to narrow down massive uncertainties about the warming effect of condensation trails – the wispy white lines that criss-cross the skies in the wake of jets engines.

Understanding planes’ impact on the climate is urgent because commercial aviation generates about 2% of global carbon emissions and rising, mainly from burning jet fuel. Taking into account the impact of cloud formation in the upper atmosphere, however, could make the sector’s responsibility for human-caused global warming as high as 4% or 5%.

“It is welcome that we can have an experiment with the Earth,” said Ulrike Burkhardt, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). “But it’s not the way we would want to design it.”

Coronavirus has killed almost 90,000 people. Global demand for air travel is down 70% compared to last year and millions of jobs are at risk, according to the International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents airlines.

Researchers will use satellites and measurements by planes to study how clouds form naturally when thousands of flights are grounded, and contrast it with data from pre-coronavirus conditions of crowded skies. In the long term, that could help governments set better policies.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

Under social distancing guidance to prevent the spread of Covid-19, however, Burkhardt said it was difficult to assemble teams of technicians to install sensors on planes and find pilots to fly them.

“The air traffic system has not been diminished to the current levels since the days following 9/11,” said Patrick Minnis of Nasa Langley Research Center, who is joining a research effort to study high-altitude clouds.

“Flight groundings at the scales initiated in response to the coronavirus pandemic are a significant opportunity to better quantify the impact of air traffic on cloud cover via contrail formation.”

The new research builds on studies after the 9/11 suicide hijackings in the US grounded flights for a few days. One study, for instance, found that the plane-free skies had an impact on temperature variations in the United States, but some researchers say the findings might have been caused by natural variations.

Minnis and colleagues are trying to determine whether contrails increase the total amount of clouds in the sky, or suck up moisture that might have allowed clouds to form elsewhere. That would help to establish whether contrails and cloudiness linked to aviation had an overall warming or cooling effect on the planet.

Most low clouds such as cumulus are made up of tiny water droplets and reflect sunlight back into space from  their white tops. That helps to keep the planet cool.

By contrast, icy, high-altitude clouds formed by contrails have an overall warming effect because they trap more heat escaping from the Earth’s surface than they reflect back into space.

Coronavirus lockdown gives a boost to citizen science projects

Contrails typically form at 8-13 kms above the Earth, depending on factors including temperature and moisture. They are less likely in tropical regions than the higher latitudes of Beijing, New York or London.

Between 2013 and 2019, aviation sector emissions grew from 733 million tonnes to 915 million tonnes of CO2, according to Iata.

Piers Forster,  professor of Physical Climate Change at the University of Leeds, said that the “total historic warming from aviation is roughly twice that from its carbon dioxide emissions alone”.

“The total warming effect of aviation is still small: maybe 5% of the warming from all human activity,” Forster said, factoring in cloud formation. “But as other emissions will hopefully decline, it is expected that aviation will be the dominant source of emissions within the next few decades…

“We are beginning to look at this. We are looking at contrails and general high level cloudiness changes” amid coronavirus, he said.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

Nations have agreed to offset the growth in carbon dioxide emissions from 2020 under the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao). So far, there is no consensus to curb the overall warming effect, partly because the impact on cloud formation is too uncertain.

At an individual level, flying is one of the most climate polluting activities a person can undertake. Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has famously refused to fly, sparking a debate about the morality of air travel. There are some signs “flight shame” is dampening demand in wealthy parts of the world.

But Bernd Kärcher, a colleague of Burkhardt at Germany’s DLR, said the 2020 slowdown was likely to be short-lived, in a long-term trend of more flights. He estimated that aviation contributed 4% to man-made global warming, with most of it from contrails rather than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Understanding all impacts of aviation was vital to the policy response, Kärcher said: “To meet the Paris climate goals, every tenth of a degree of reduced increase in surface temperatures matters.”

The plane-free skies could help narrow uncertainties and so help guide longer term policies, he added. “Icao points to the need for scientific consensus, which, so it is argued, is absent in the case of non-CO2 cloud effects.”

He said that other ways to reduce non-Co2 effects could be cleaner fuels that produce fewer contrails, re-routing flights to regions or altitudes where contrails are less likely to form, or better aircraft design.

The post Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation appeared first on Climate Home News.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents the world’s airlines, said it wanted to change the baselines from which traffic growth will be judged in coming years to pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

It said it wanted  to “avoid an inappropriate economic burden on the sector” by dropping a planned baseline of average emissions in 2019-2020 that is likely to be much lower than 2019 since many flights are now grounded.

As part of efforts to curb the aviation sector’s growing emissions, countries that are members to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) – the UN body responsible for aviation – have agreed an “aspirational goal” to make all growth in international flights carbon neutral after 2020, compared to both 2019 and 2020.

Under the existing plan, countries have agreed to use a market-based offset mechanism known as Corsia. But the public health crisis and collapse of air travel means emissions from aviation are anticipated to fall this year.

A lower 2019-2020 baseline than initially expected would toughen airlines’ goals for curbing emissions growth and force companies to buy a lot more offsets to meet the sector’s climate target when traffic rebounds.

In a position paper, Iata said use of the two-year average could result in “significantly higher offsetting requirements and costs for operators further down the line”.

Coronavirus may toughen airlines’ goals for curbing emissions in 2020s

Iata called on the Icao’s council, the organisation’s governing body, to adjust Corsia’s baseline to 2019.

The trade group said using only 2019 would “preserve the environmental benefits” of Corsia as it “would remain more stringent” than the anticipated baseline, had the coronavirus crisis not happened and airlines’ emissions continued to grow in 2020.

It urged the council to make a decision on the issue before the end of June.

Corsia was agreed in 2016 and a review of the scheme was not expected before 2022.

The trade group’s call for Icao to review Corsia’s implementation comes after China – which has one of the world’s fastest growing air passenger markets – also called for the baseline to be adjusted during a meeting of Icao’s council last month.

The move also comes as the aviation industry is urging governments to provide it with economic relief as the pandemic stalled global travel. The US approved a near $60 billion bailout package for the industry last month.

However, adjusting the baseline would require political approval by other Icao members.

Bas Eickhout, a Green MEP and vice-chair of the European Parliament’s environment committee, told Climate Home News Corsia was already “extremely weak” and “won’t bring the aviation sector anywhere near to what is needed to tackle climate change”.

Governments still due to submit tougher climate plans in 2020, despite Cop26 delay

He added that while a lower baseline will force airlines to buy more credits, the credits were “very cheap” at a “couple of euros per tonne of CO2”.

Under Corsia’s first pilot phase to 2023, airlines will be able to offset their emissions using cheap Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) units.

“I don’t see the need for any adjustments now. I trust the EU won’t either,” Eickhout said, adding that any Corsia review would ideally make the baseline stricter, not weaker.

Corsia is due to come into force in January 2021 but will be voluntary for the first six years. That means only flights between countries which have volunteered to participate in the scheme will have to compensate for the growth in their emissions.

From 2027, offsetting obligations will become mandatory for all international flights.

Iata, which championed Corsia, said it was concerned that countries may be less willing to take part in the voluntary pilot phase if the scheme’s costs were higher than initially forecast.

“Current volunteers may reconsider their earlier decisions in order to safeguard the interest of their national air transport system and its connectivity,” it added.

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But observers of UN aviation talks and campaigners say that while a lower baseline would impose greater offsetting requirements on airlines, built-in flexibility provisions could reduce the pandemic’s impact and limit additional financial costs.

Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch, told CHN the calculation of the baseline using a two-year average was designed to “avoid the impact of an exceptional year”.

“If things had gone the other way, and 2020 was a year of high traffic, we would not be having this discussion,” he said.

“It’s a non-issue,” said Andrew Murphy, aviation campaigner at the NGO Transport & Environment.

“Corsia was due to have next to no impact financially on airlines…. That airlines may have to buy a few million more offsets, industry wide, across three years, is really of no consequence,” he added, accusing Iata of attempting to “stave off more effective government regulation”.

For Tim Johnson, director of the Aviation Environment Federation, “given the need for Icao and industry to align aviation’s climate goals with the Paris Agreement, retaining 2020 as the baseline could turn out to be a positive step forward for climate ambition”.

The post Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses appeared first on Climate Home News.

Over the last week, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stopgap measures have been announced to fight the coronavirus and limit economic shortfalls.

In the US, industries are scrambling for a share of a $1 trillion-stabilisation package with the aviation industry expected to receive a large chunk.

Last week, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced a €870 billion ($781bn) emergency bond-buying programme to stabilise the euro zone economy until the end of the year – the equivalent of 7.3% of the euro area’s GDP.

In contrast, the EU Commission has promised a trillion euros over a decade to finance its Green Deal and support the union’s plan to be the first climate neutral continent by 2050.

Resounding calls have been made for governments and international financial institutions to put the clean energy transition at the heart of stimulus packages, once the human tragedy eases. Almost 15,000 people have died in the pandemic with more than 340,000 confirmed cases by Monday.

“We have a responsibility to recover better” than after the financial crisis in 2008, UN secretary general António Guterres warned.

“We have a framework for action – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We must keep our promises for people and planet,” he added.

But short-term measures designed to stabilise the economy are so far doing little for the transition.

Coronavirus slows developing nations’ plans to step up climate action in 2020

In Europe, the bond-buying programme announced by the ECB – one of Europe’s most powerful institutions – follows the bank’s current purchasing criteria, which proscribes the bank from preferring one sector over another, instead buying what is available on the market.

An ECB spokesman told CHN the bank’s portfolio “will have an increasing number of green bonds” since these are rising on the market, but their total numbers remain limited.

Stanislas Jourdan, head of Positive Money Europe, a campaign group that has called for the ECB to do more to promote green finance, said the bank committed to a mass purchase of bonds “without any climate considerations”.

“Though the ECB is rightly aiming at addressing the coronavirus crisis, there is a risk that fossil fuels free-ride on those measures to gain even cheaper financing to maintain their activities,” Jourdan told Climate Home News.

The move will likely put more pressure on the bank’s upcoming strategic review of its monetary policy, which is due to consider climate risk, Jourdan added. The ECB is also expected to look at ways it can help drive the continent’s decarbonisation.

Ronan Palmer, who leads the environmental think-tank E3G’s clean economy programme, told CHN that while Europe needed an immediate economic stabilisation package, such measures should be consistent with the EU’s 2050 net zero emission goal.

Governments have ‘historic opportunity’ to accelerate clean energy transition, IEA says

As fossil-fuel intensive sectors such as the oil and gas and aviation industries are also lining up for economic relief, “this must be the time to keep these firms afloat providing some conditionality on how these companies operate in the future,” he said.

For example, an automotive company could be bailed out on the condition it accelerates the electrification of the fleet when the immediate crisis passes.

NGO Transport & Environment has urged EU governments to make any financial aid to airlines conditional on carriers paying taxes and starting to use low-carbon fuels once conditions improved.

This, Palmer added, would help governments and companies move away from increasingly risky fossil fuel investments “in a controlled manner”.

In the less immediate term, Palmer said he hoped the EU would “clip a recovery package to its Green Deal” – and use recovery efforts to boost energy efficiency, the electrification of transport, the deployment of renewable energy as well as land use change reforms.

“This is the big political battle,” warned Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and an architect of the Paris Agreement.

“We can make the right choices and address the short economic crisis at the same time as making sure we don’t lock in the economy in Europe into a fossil fuel economy,” she told reporters last week.

“There are many areas where we could take the elements of the Green Deal and quick start them with massive investments that governments are ready to go for anyway,” she said.

Coronavirus response to delay EU Green Deal by weeks

Tubiana insisted the EU needed to start aligning its economic response to the virus with its Green Deal as soon as possible.

“Or we accelerate the implementation of a green deal or I’m very concerned this will be a totally wasted opportunity because the fiscal resources will be use immediately to tackle the [coronavirus] crisis,” she said, adding this could sap the EU’s capacity to make progress on the Green Deal.

Under the Green deal, the EU committed to become climate-neutral by 2050, increase its 2030 climate target, ensure no-one is left behind in the energy transition and transform key sectors such as constructing and renovating buildings, agriculture and transport.

How quickly the promised stimulus money can help boost clean energy investments is, however, up for debate.

“Right now there is much competition for that stimulus money,” Samantha Gross, a fellow in the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate, told CHN, making a focus on clean energies and technologies “challenging” in the short-term.

Gross said the low cost of renewable energy and plummeting interest rates would, in time, constitute favourable conditions for mass investments in the energy transition. “But we need to get out of this crisis mode before businesses can take advantage of these conditions,” she said.

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For Albert Cheung, head of global analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the economic response to the pandemic will happen in two stages.

The first few months to a year is “when you get cash into people’s hands”, he told CHN. While the next couple of years can be spent shaping the recovery effort.

“That is the opportunity for green investments and putting people back to work in jobs that can accelerate the clean energy transition,” he said.

While stabilisation packages might not immediately assist the clean energy transition, the extraordinary scale of the response by governments and central banks is setting a precedent for similar measures to be rolled out to tackle the climate crisis, Jourdan told CHN.

Ronan agreed. “It shows what they [central banks] might be able to do when their put their full weight behind the climate crisis.”

The post Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans appeared first on Climate Home News.

As industrial production slows down and planes are grounded, the bust to the global economy is seeing global emissions fall. But the pollution respite for the planet could be short-lived.

Writing in Climate Home News, Andrew Norton, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) warned that “what counts in terms of meaningful action to address the climate crisis is long-term structural change”.

“If handled badly,” he warns, “the pandemic could suck the energy out of public action and public policy as prosperity declines”.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency said the outbreak could spell a slowdown in the clean energy transition if governments fail to use green investments to bolster economic growth.

While immediate resources and attention to tackle the virus are necessary, the pandemic will put governments’ focus on climate action to the test.

Postponed

The virus’ impact on the global climate and biodiversity agenda this year is already being felt, with a host of meetings being cancelled or postponed.

UN Climate Change has announced it won’t hold any physical meetings until the end of April and Africa Climate Week has been postponed.

International negotiations on an ocean treaty to create marine protected areas in the high seas have been postponed – potentially giving countries extra time to break the talks’ deadlock.

And in London, the International Maritime Organisation has put off key talks on reducing shipping emissions.

The delays are putting increasing pressure on an already tight timetable ahead of a major biodiversity summit in China in October and the UN climate talks in Glasgow in November, as meetings risk being pushed back into the second half of the year.

The pandemic may have made the steep climb the world faces to ramp up climate ambition ahead of Cop26 steeper still.

Testing Paris

And while expectations for Cop26 are building up, the legal requirements for countries to ratchet-up their climate plans this year need attention.

Alister Doyle has taken a close look at the decision texts spelling out what countries need to do this year.

By the riverside 

In Ethiopia’s capital, a major project to clean up Addis Ababa’s riversides has opened opportunities to boost the city’s green development.

But as Dagim Terefe found out, the $900 million plan has a heavy human cost, with people being displaced and their shelters demolished, at times “without warning”, to give way to the development. Read his report here.

Rebound

In Montreal, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) council is meeting to decide which carbon offset schemes airlines will be able to use to offset their emissions from January 2021.

Under UN plans, Icao members have agreed to make all growth in international flights after 2020 carbon neutral compared with a baseline of average emissions for 2019 and 2020. With flights grounded because of the virus, that average is likely to go down.

If traffic rebounds in coming years, growth from the baseline will be bigger than previously expected, forcing airlines to do more to offset their emissions growth.

Campaigners have expressed concerns Icao could come under pressure to lessen airlines’ financial hardship. One to watch.

This week’s top stories

• Coronavirus may toughen airlines’ goals for curbing emissions in 2020s
• Addis Ababa riverside project gives priority to development over residents
• Coronavirus: IMO postpones key meeting on reducing shipping emissions
• Will governments pass the first test of the Paris climate agreement in 2020?
• Coronavirus: UN delays talks on global ocean biodiversity treaty
• Coronavirus delays global efforts for climate and biodiversity action

And in climate conversations

• Coronavirus and climate change are two crises that need humanity to unite
• An ambitious year for climate is a big year for women’s empowerment
• Power structures over gender make women more vulnerable to climate change

The post Putting the brakes on – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

But the virus is also putting the finger on one of the industry’s most difficult challenges: curbing the sector’s increasing greenhouse gas emissions from a baseline of 2019 and 2020.

As part of goals to limit emissions, members of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao), the UN body responsible for aviation, have agreed an “aspirational goal” to make all growth in international flights after 2020 carbon neutral.

Under the plan, countries have agreed to use a market-based offset mechanism known as Corsia to mitigate emissions from flying. Offsets are the primary tool to curb the sector’s emissions with alternative fuels and energy efficiency technologies not developed at scale.

The resolution to establish Corsia adopted in 2016 states that the sector’s growth should be offset compared with a baseline of average total emissions for 2019 and 2020.

But with thousands of flights grounded because of the coronavirus, emissions from aviation are anticipated to fall this year, reducing average emissions over the two years.

If traffic rebounds in coming years, growth from the baseline will be bigger than previously expected, forcing airlines to do more to offset emissions than they would if flights in 2020 were unaffected by coronavirus.

Coronavirus delays global efforts for climate and biodiversity action

Last week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said it anticipated revenue losses for passenger business of between $63 billion and $113 billion. Airline share prices have also been hit hard by the outbreak, now considered a pandemic by the World Health Organisation.

“Emissions can rebound next year from the coronavirus situation,” Annie Petsonk, aviation expert at Environmental Defense Fund, told Climate Home News, adding “airlines could have more to offset” emissions growth.

On the other hand, “the coronavirus paired with concerns about climate change could mean that people will act more carefully about getting to places in the future,” she said.

Separately, Petsonk wrote in a statement that Icao was likely to come under pressure to “change the fundamentals of Corsia” to ease the financial hardship for airlines.

That could include calls to revise the 2019-20 baseline. “This would be a dangerous mistake because it might trigger a reconvening of the 190+ member countries of Icao’s Assembly to renegotiate the hard-fought 2016 resolution,” she wrote.

From January 2021, only flights between countries which have volunteered to participate in the Corsia system will have to compensate for the growth in their emissions. From 2027, offsetting obligations will become mandatory for all international flights.

Flying accounts for about 2%-3% of global emissions, roughly the same as Germany. Icao’s own forecast anticipates emissions to increase by up to 300% by 2050 under business as usual.

Coronavirus and climate change are two crises that need humanity to unite

On Friday, Icao’s council – a body of 36 countries, including the world’s largest air travel manufacturing and infrastructure nations – is due to start discussing which of 14 carbon offset schemes  airlines will be allowed to use during the first three-year voluntary stage. The meeting is due to last until 20 March.

The decision is key to the integrity of the Corsia scheme in delivering real emissions reductions since it will impact the quality and quantity of offsets that airlines will be able to buy to cancel out the growth of their emissions.

The inclusion of credits from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a carbon market set up under the Kyoto Protocol, is a concern for observers and campaigners, who fear this could flood the market with billions of cheap credits that have not actually achieved emissions cuts.

A 2016 EU-commissioned report found that just 2% of CDM projects were highly likely to ensure “additional” emissions reductions.

The meeting, which is taking place in Icao’s headquarters in Montreal, is closed to observers and the media.

Icao’s Technical Advisory Body (TAB) made a set of recommendations to the council, which have not been made public. Climate Home News understands that at least six of the 14 schemes that applied have been judged eligible to be used under Corsia.

Campaigners have called on Icao to publish the TAB recommendations, warning against the risk of a back room deal and the politicisation of the decision.

Will governments pass the first test of the Paris climate agreement in 2020?

In a letter, the International Coalition for Sustainable Aviation warned the council its decisions and “the transparency with which you make these, puts the credibility of aviation’s climate efforts in the global spotlight”.

The start date to accept offset projects could have a key impact on the scheme’s integrity.

An earlier date would allow more credits on the market while a later start date would restrict the market’s liquidity. But research has found that the supply of credits is much higher than the demand forecast.

A study by Ecosystem Marketplace found that starting the crediting period in 2013, would allow for a billion tonnes of carbon credits from the CDM to become available under Corsia.

That is the equivalent of six to ten times airlines’ foreseeable demand, according to Ecosystem Marketplace.

Another option, reportedly being considered by Icao, is to include offsets that were based on emission reduction activities that have taken place between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2020.

“A lot of people began developing projects in 2016 explicitly because Corsia was announced that year,” said Steve Zwick of Ecosystem Marketplace.

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An analysis by Carbon Market Watch found that credits currently available on the voluntary markets, which exclude credits from the CDM for instance, are enough to cover Corsia’s demand well into 2025.

“This would leave five years for new projects to start and generate credits for the rest of Corsia,” Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch said, insisting eligibility should been defined by the quality over quantity of credits.

In its letter, the ICSA has called on Icao’s council members to exclude any offsets from projects which were started before 2020.

ICSA also called on the council to ensure emissions reductions are not double counted by both the airline buying the credits and the host country benefiting from the project.

There is still no international agreement on avoiding double counting emissions reduction after countries failed to agree on the issue at the last UN climate talks in Madrid in December.

The post Coronavirus may toughen airlines’ goals for curbing emissions in 2020s appeared first on Climate Home News.

Activists erupted into cheers at the Royal Courts of Justice in London after successfully blocking plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport.

Lord Justice Lindblom found that the plans backed by MPs disregarded the UK’s Paris Agreement pledge in 2015 to reduce carbon emissions to 1.5C or “well below” 2C warming.

“We have concluded that the designation of ANPS (Airports National Policy Statement) was unlawful by reason of a failure to take into account the government’s commitment to the provisions of the Paris Agreement on climate change,” he told the packed courtroom in central London.

The ruling could have an impact both in the UK and elsewhere around the world, emboldening campaigners to file legal challenges against other carbon-intensive infrastructure projects.

The failure of the UK’s Secretary of State to justify the plans had been “legally fatal,” Lord Justice Lindblom added. But the judges dismissed other appeals against the UK Government, including on challenges relating to noise and air quality.

The ruling came after green groups teamed up with London Mayor Sadiq Khan and local authorities affected by the proposal to mount a series of legal challenges against the expansion.

Net zero goal ‘greatest commercial opportunity of our time,’ says Mark Carney

Plans for a third runway – which had been on track to open in 2028-29 – would have rerouted rivers, roads and the M25 and contributed an estimated 3-4million tonnes to UK’s carbon emissions. The cost of the project was initially estimated at £14 billion ($17.8bn) but has since risen to £32bn ( $40.6).

Head of Legal at Friends of the Earth, William Rundle, said: “It’s an historic victory for the climate and for the local communities fighting the Heathrow expansion for so very, very long.

“What we’ve managed to do is to stop the Heathrow expansion dead in the tracks. The government’s plan has been found to be illegal because they didn’t consider climate change properly, and shockingly, took legal advice that the Paris Agreement was not relevant.

“At the time of the climate emergency this is an attitude that we really need, and we are really celebrating the Court of Appeal’s judgment. We need to put a halt to aviation expansion.”

Speaking outside the court, London mayor Khan said the decision was a victory for Londoners and for “future generations”.

He told reporters: “What the government should now do is not tinker, not tweak with their airports and national policy statement. Instead what they should do is abandon any plans for a new runway at Heathrow.”

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Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in 2015 vowed to “lie down before the bulldozers” to oppose the third runway, has been noncommittal about the airport in the intervening five years, saying recently: “The bulldozers are some way off but I am following with lively interest the court cases”.

While the Court of Appeal does not have the scope to rule out the expansion going ahead, the ruling means the plans will now be subjected to renewed scrutiny in Parliament amid increased public pressure to meet its climate pledges.

Heathrow Airport and fellow supporters of the scheme have long argued that the expansion would bring considerable regional and national benefits as well as boost GDP growth to the UK after Brexit.

Today’s ruling came as the airport yesterday announced its ninth consecutive year of passenger growth, welcoming a record 80.9 million passengers last year.

However, a report by the think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF) found that an expansion would do the opposite of “levelling up”, by shifting jobs, carbon emissions and GDP from other regions into London and the south east from the North of England.

They also said the UK would be “blowing its carbon budget” – and that the 3-4 million tonnes of carbon emissions would be equivalent to the footprint of 100,000 jobs in manufacturing.

The Netherlands faces pressure as global ‘test case’ for deep emissions cuts in 2020

UK lawmakers backed the expansion by 415-119 votes in June 2018, after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn gave his party a free vote. Sadiq Khan’s initial court challenge was unsuccessful, but the group was given leave to appeal in October last year.

Responding to the ruling, a Heathrow Airport spokesperson said the challenge on climate change front was “eminently fixable” and pledged to “get Heathrow done” regardless.

“We will appeal to the Supreme Court on this one issue and are confident that we will be successful,” they said.

“In the meantime, we are ready to work with the government to fix the issue that the court has raised. Heathrow has taken a lead in getting the UK aviation sector to commit to a plan to get to net zero emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris Accord.

“Expanding Heathrow, Britain’s biggest port and only hub, is essential to achieving the prime minister’s vision of Global Britain. We will get it done the right way, without jeopardising the planet’s future.”

This piece is an extract of a story originally published by DeSmog UK. 

The post UK’s Heathrow airport expansion ruled unlawful over climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

EU delegates have been criticised for failing to raise meaningful objections to Corsia, an instrument designed to force airlines to limit their environmental impact but which could torpedo Europe’s own emissions trading scheme (ETS).

The ETS currently includes all flights that operate within the European Economic Area but precludes trips in and out of the catchment area. A new Icao resolution now says that Corsia “should be the only market-based measure applied to international flights”.

EU agrees to ‘update’ Paris climate pledge

Icao wants to avoid duplicative counting of emissions but EU countries were asked by both the European Commission and Parliament ahead of the meeting to lodge a formal “reservation” when appropriate. Only verbal objections were made by transport officials.

A commission spokesperson reiterated after the assembly had finished that the EU is committed to Corsia’s implementation but that it should co-exist with the bloc’s own policies and efforts to meet the terms of the Paris Agreement.

The EU executive later insisted that “no state at Icao put this into question, nor did any question the EU ETS. Therefore there was no need to file a formal reservation.”

A spokesperson added that “Finland on behalf of the EU reiterated its full support to Corsia but also stated that we retain under the Chicago Convention our existing legal framework and policy space, and our ability to go beyond Icao rules in light of the EU’s Paris Agreement commitments.”

The commission also insisted that the Icao resolution applies to global instruments not regional systems like the ETS.

Dutch Green MEP Bas Eickhout told Euractiv that “again, the EU doesn’t dare to draw the line at Icao”, adding that the UN body is “not up to the [climate] task so the EU should continue with its regional approach”.

Corsia and the ETS differ in that the UN scheme requires airlines to make payments to offsetting schemes around the world, like forestry projects, while the ETS is a market-based mechanism tied to a carbon price that can go up and down.

Clean mobility group Transport & Environment released new analysis in September that suggests aviation emissions would increase by 683 million tonnes of CO2 over the next decade if the EU relies solely on Corsia.

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That figure is equivalent to the annual emissions of France and Poland combined.

“The UN offsetting scheme will allow airlines to go on growing their emissions while paying others for cheap offsets. In a world where every sector needs to reach zero emissions, the sums don’t add up,” said T&E expert Andrew Murphy.

However, the head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Alexandre de Juniac, said that “we need to implement Corsia successfully. It’s essential to our promise of carbon-neutral growth.” IATA insists that offsetting could stimulate more than $40 billion in climate financing.

In 2021, Corsia begins its voluntary phase, which all EU countries have agreed to join. India and Russia are notable absentees, while China has also soured on the idea. In 2016, 65 countries signed up for the demo and now the number has grown to 81.

The scheme is meant to be fully operational by 2027 and include all Icao members. A review of the EU ETS is scheduled for 2024, when officials could decide to let the scheme revert to including all flights in, out and within the bloc.

Incoming commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has tasked her transport commissioner with tweaking the ETS before that point though, by extending it to shipping and cutting free emission permits for airlines.

Icao member states also failed to adopt an aviation-specific emissions target for 2050 but did agree to look into what options are available. The results will be presented at the body’s next general assembly in 2022.

The Air Transport Action Group, which represents airlines and other industries, said it was “encouraged that there was clear support from governments meeting at Icao to develop a UN-backed goal”.

Estonia backs European net zero carbon target. Poland loses an ally

However, Iata vice-president Paul Steele told the Icao assembly that the meeting had been “unprecedented” and “a step backwards”. He added that “sadly, I think we are going to have to move faster than Icao is going to be able to move” on environmental matters.

International aviation and shipping have long been excluded from climate agreements but the UN bodies that have oversight, Icao and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), have faced pressure to set targets.

The IMO aims to cut emissions from its sector by 50% compared with 2008 levels by 2050 but critics already warn that no viable plan to do so has been drafted.

Aviation is responsible for roughly 2.5% of global carbon emissions, while shipping accounts for 2.2%. Both would feature in the top ten emitters if classed as countries.

This article was updated with comments from the European Commission. This story was originally published by CHN’s media partner Euractiv.

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The irony that most will come by plane and leave a huge carbon footprint in their wake is not lost on anyone.

We should all be thoughtful about the amount we fly. But some of my civil society colleagues are calling for all climate conference attendees to amp up their commitment to low-carbon travel. They’ve suggested attendees to next year’s UN Climate Change Conference, likely to be held in Scotland, attend either through zero-emissions travel – like Greta Thunberg’s sailing journey to New York – or via videoconferencing.

I think this push is dangerous.

As a writer for IISD Reporting Services and previously a New Zealand youth delegate, I’ve been to several UN climate change conferences, also known as Cops. Before my first conference, I had an image of what it would be like: country delegates sitting in a huge, flag-filled room talking climate change. It quickly became clear that’s only what they look like at the very beginning and end.

Climate activists announce plan to ground Heathrow flights with drones

In between, talks splinter into 20 or 30 parallel workstreams, each discussing a different complex issue. At last year’s COP in Poland, I counted 27 different workstreams. There are usually five to 10 meetings happening at the same time in different rooms.

On top of these, there are the informal and private meetings: the one-on-one bilaterals with the Cop president or the executive secretary of the UN’s climate treaty body; the casual, unplanned chats in the cafeteria; the diplomats who huddle together, cross-legged, on hallway floors.

The outcomes of the Cops are highly informed by this fragmented, informal process. The most powerful nations – who have historically been the drivers of carbon emissions while enduring fewer impacts – bring large teams to the conferences. They can take advantage of a divided process by being in many places at once. The United States, for example, brought nearly 150 people to the Paris Cop in 2015.

Least developed countries and small island developing states, on the other hand, often arrive with two or three delegates. How do these countries, who endure the direct effects of climate change most intensely, advance their priorities in 27 different workstreams meeting in different rooms?

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They band together and pool resources to advance their common positions in the many different discussions. This kind of coordination is organized via face-to-face meetings and hallway huddles, where rapport and relationships are key.

Now imagine a scenario where delegates can only take the train or sail to attend a negotiation, as demanded by some in civil society. Who would show up? Who could afford to commit diplomats, heads of state or critical ministers to travel for weeks at a time? European nations can reach Scotland by train. Canada and the United States may be able to consider an ocean voyage. Perhaps China could put a delegation on a train for a month. Maybe some other richer countries, like Mexico, Japan or Brazil, could think about participating.

Who wouldn’t be in the room? Least developed countries. Small island developing states. Kiribati. The Marshall Islands. Chad.

Teleconferencing seems a more workable option, but this relies on fast, dependable internet, which many countries lack. Ask any government official from a small island developing country about connectivity and they’ll tell you.

Teleconferencing also wouldn’t allow for those not in the room to participate in the informal element of the negotiations. If powerful nations are the only ones physically in the room, they’ll have unique access to those meaningful, informal chats, those hallway huddles, those chances at collaboration.

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I’ve watched the process for six years. This is how it works.

By all means, let’s ask European delegates to take the train to the Cop in Glasgow and celebrate individual examples – like Greta’s sea voyage to New York – as powerful symbols. But demanding low-carbon travel for all will only further disadvantage the most vulnerable.

There are many problems with the UN climate talks: corporate influences and the fossil fuel lobby continue to co-opt agreements and water down ambition as global temperatures rise. I hope voices like the Extinction Rebellion movement continue to criticize the process and take action at the next climate Cop.

I hope they act in service and in consultation with the most vulnerable. A global flotilla of ships and videoconferencing paid for by wealthy nations sounds idyllic but insisting on sustainable travel will only reinforce the exclusion of the global south.

Natalie Jones is a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and doing a PhD in international environmental law at Cambridge University

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Developers were judged to have underestimated the environmental impacts and overestimated the economic benefits of proposed facilities to handle up to 7.5 million extra passengers a year from 2027.

In a ruling that could have implications for other airport projects, the authority cited the 2050 net zero emissions target adopted by France’s national parliament in June.

It sent developers back to the drawing board, asking them to “demonstrate the compatibility of the project with France’s commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050”. This should include details of arrangements to offset any emissions that could not be reduced or avoided, the authority said.

Comment: Good climate strategy does not include airport expansion

“The [Marseille] ruling shows the importance of setting net zero emissions targets and ensuring they include international aviation,” said Andrew Murphy, aviation campaigner at Brussels-based Transport & Environment. “A failure to do so is essentially cheating the climate. The environment authority is right to question the assumptions that airport expansion is based on.”

Aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions globally, as passenger demand outstrips the development of technology to reduce its impact.

The sector is often excluded from national climate plans, on the basis that it operates across borders. Its emissions are primarily regulated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao), rather than UN Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.

However both France and the UK, in legislating carbon neutrality targets, have been advised by independent experts to take responsibility for the carbon footprint of flights to and from their territory.

It calls into question plans for a third runway at Heathrow, London, one of the biggest airport projects in the world. In a public consultation, the developers claim an expanded Heathrow would take up only 1.2% of the UK’s carbon budget in 2050 – but excluded emissions from international flights, the main source of its climate impact.

France announces tax on air travel in climate push

Parliament voted in favour of Heathrow expansion last year by a wide margin and campaigners lost a high court challenge in May. Developers still need to obtain a development consent order from the Planning Inspectorate and get sign-off from the transport minister.

According to the 2018 Airports National Policy Statement: “Any increase in carbon emissions alone is not a reason to refuse development consent, unless the increase in carbon emissions resulting from the project is so significant that it would have a material impact on the ability of Government to meet its carbon reduction targets, including carbon budgets.”

The Committee on Climate Change is due to publish specific advice on aviation later in 2019.

As a wave of local authorities declare “climate emergency”, campaigners are questioning the case for airport expansions in cities including Bristol and Manchester in the UK and Wellington in New Zealand.

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This article was updated with further context on the approval process for Heathrow expansion

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But while the UK government has declared a climate and ecological emergency, ongoing plans for airport expansions suggest we’re flying full-speed towards crisis rather than away from it.

Globally, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation are rising rapidly, and set to further escalate. Passenger numbers are rising far too fast for efficiency improvements and alternative technologies, such as electric or biofuel-powered engines, to keep up. What’s worse, the climate impact of flights is two to three times larger than their CO₂ emissions alone, due to the release of nitrogen oxides – powerful greenhouse gases – and the contrails planes leave in their wake which trap even more heat in the atmosphere. The aviation industry has also evaded fuel taxes, emissions regulations, and is often completely omitted in emissions accounting.

‘Fake news’: UN aviation body blocks online climate critics

This is particularly important as cities are setting targets to reduce their carbon emissions. While many of these cities have airports, their climate strategies tend to focus on the emissions released within the city’s boundaries and from their electricity use. They don’t account for emissions from imported goods and services that are consumed in the city but produced elsewhere, nor from flights through their airports. Any emissions from residents travelling outside the city are generally omitted.

One example is Leeds in the UK, where the city council recently declared a climate emergency and committed the city to emitting no more than 42 megatonnes of CO₂ from 2018 until 2050. But the city’s targets sit uncomfortably alongside plans to expand Leeds Bradford Airport.

The expansion should double the number of passengers using the airport every year from 4m to 8m by 2030. The climate impact of all those flights would be more than double the 2030 target emissions for Leeds as a whole. If passenger numbers continue growing after 2030, even at a slower rate, the overshoot would escalate to a factor of nine by 2040.

Climate impact of all flights through Leeds Bradford Airport if passengers increase to 8m (red), remain at 2018 level of 4m (yellow) or fall to 1m by 2030 (green), compared to the target emissions for Leeds as a whole (black dashed curve). (Graphic: Jefim Vogel, author-provided)

By 2050, the combined climate impact of all flights through Leeds Bradford Airport since 2018 would exceed the carbon budget for Leeds as a whole by a factor of 2.5. Even if only one in four passengers are Leeds residents, their flights alone would use up 62% of the city’s entire carbon budget by 2050.

As aviation is governed mostly at a national level, Leeds City Council may argue it has little control over the expansion, but is it even trying to stop it? Their Inclusive Growth Strategy suggests the opposite: endorsing the expansion and promising new transport links to the airport with a new commercial centre nearby.

Even if passenger numbers remain at 2018 levels, air traffic at Leeds Bradford would overshoot the city’s carbon budget. (Graphic: Jefim Vogel, author-provided)

If the number of passengers using Leeds Bradford Airport remained at their current levels, all flights from 2018 to 2050 combined would still produce a climate impact equivalent to the entire carbon budget of Leeds. Only if passenger numbers fell drastically could flying become remotely compatible with climate targets.

If cut in half by 2022 and 75% by 2030, the flights of Leeds residents alone would use up 8% of the city’s carbon budget. This might be just low enough to squeeze all other activities in Leeds into the remaining carbon budget – if these are also radically decarbonised.

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Such a drastic reduction might seem difficult, but perhaps some flights are more dispensable than others. For UK residents, 70% of all flights in 2014 were claimed by just 15% of the population, and while many business leaders fly every week, more than half of the population didn’t fly at all in 2014.

Given how sharply the number of flights has to decrease, the difficult question then is who gets to fly, and for what purpose. Should priority be given to someone taking their fourth flight this year to their second home in the Mediterranean, or to someone visiting their family living abroad? And how is this decided? A first step might be to increase taxes in line with the number of flights a person takes, with what’s called a frequent flyer levy.

But that’s not enough. Price mechanisms can’t make the value judgements at the heart of this – and they could just make flying exclusive to a rich elite who could still afford it. It seems more appropriate to make these decisions through democratic deliberation processes like citizens’ assemblies.

Reducing flights will need to come with wider changes in transport systems and society. A large share of current air traffic could be made redundant by using video conferences for meetings. Improving rail transport could make for a low-carbon and affordable alternative to flying for medium-distance travel. More overnight trains with sleeping facilities and better cross-border integration of rail operators would help. Carefully developing attractive holiday locations closer to home, made accessible by electrified public transport, and promoting low-carbon activities like bike trips could also reduce demand for flights.

Another major issue is car transport which accounts for the lion’s share of transport emissions and causes severe air pollution, with dramatic impacts on public health. Road accidents are a major cause of death worldwide, far exceeding deaths from malaria or war, and road networks and car parks take up lots of public space.

Making transport systems sustainable means ending the dependence on car travel. This involves massively expanding reliable and affordable, low-carbon public transport within and between cities. It also means better urban planning, with more bike lanes, bike sharing and car-free zones. Suburbs should be designed so that a car isn’t necessary for getting around. And a drastically reduced car fleet could be bound to fuel efficiency standards before eventually becoming fully electric.

Deep and rapid changes to the world’s transport systems are needed to halt climate change, and many of these would also improve human well-being and public life. But to get there involves challenging powerful vested interests in aviation and the car and oil industries. The challenges are vast, but doing nothing means accepting an unacceptable future.

Jefim Vogel is a PhD researcher in ecological economics, Joel Millward-Hopkins is a postdoctoral researcher in sustainability and Yannick Oswald is a PhD Researcher in ecological economics, all at the University of Leeds. They receive funding from the Leverhulme Trust through the ‘Living Well Within Limits’ project.

This piece was originally published by The Conversation.

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The 16-year-old Swedish activist, who has galvanised Europe’s youth to rise for the climate, will cross the pond from the UK to New York on a racing yacht to attend the climate action summit convened by UN chief António Guterres on 23 September.

The high-level meeting is a critical moment for governments to show increased ambition on climate action. Youth are to play a prominent role, with Guterres calling on young people to “revolutionise the world”.

After New York, where she will join climate demonstrations, Thunberg is expected to tour the US, Canada and Mexico before traveling to the UN climate talks in Santiago, Chile, which start on 2 December – taking a sabbatical year from school to dedicate herself to activism.

Guterres asks all countries to plan for carbon neutrality by 2050

Refusing to fly because of the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions associated with air travel, Thunberg will go by sea on a 60-foot sailboat fitted with solar panels and underwater turbines that generate electricity. The aim is a zero carbon voyage.

Thunberg said she decided to make the trip because the “window of time when things are in our hands” to keep global temperature rise below 1.5C “is closing fast”. She warned world leaders had to listen to the voices of millions of young people concerned about the climate crisis.

“Together with many other young people across the Americas and the world, I will be there, even if the journey will be long and challenging,” she said.

Good news!
I’ll be joining the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, COP25 in Santiago and other events along the way.
I’ve been offered a ride on the 60ft racing boat Malizia II. We’ll be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to NYC in mid August.#UniteBehindTheScience pic.twitter.com/9OH6mOEDce

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 29, 2019

The boat on which Thunberg will travel is called Malizia II and is owned by German property developer Gerhard Senft.

It is rented to Monaco Yacht Club and team Malizia’s co-founder Pierre Casiraghi, the grandson of Monaco’s Prince Rainier III and actress Grace Kelly, who will accompany Thunberg along with professional race skipper and captain Boris Herrmann.

Thunberg’s father Svante and a filmmaker will also be aboard.

Greta Thunberg will sail across the Atlantic aboard the racing sailboat Milizia II (Photo: AndreasLindlahr)

A spokeswoman for team Malizia told Climate Home News: “We are doing the trip of our own accord because we strongly believe in Greta’s mission.”

In a statement, Herrmann praised Thunberg’s “courage” in speaking up about the climate crisis “in front of the most powerful people”. He said he was “not surprised that she considers this trip as something perfectly achievable for her” despite “the lack of comfort”.

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Thunberg is due to set out from the UK shores mid-August and – depending on the weather – arrive in New York around two weeks later. It is hurricane season in the Atlantic, meaning the boat will be sailing against the wind and may meet rough weather. Forecasters anticipate about a dozen storms between June and November.

Aware of his responsibility, skipper Herrmann added: “We will make sure she will reach New York in the safest way possible.”

Since July 2018, the boat has been fitted with CO2 sensors to collect data on carbon in the oceans as well as the waters’ temperature, acidity and salinity levels.

The data is shared with Germany-based organisations the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Munich and the Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel to inform research.

‘Fake news’: UN aviation body blocks online climate critics

Lucy Gilliam, aviation and shipping officer at NGO Transport & Environment, welcomed Thunberg’s decision to sail to the New York meeting, adding that many environmentalists remained “a little in denial over the impacts of flying”.

A transatlantic flight doubles the typical annual carbon footprint of a western European, she told CHN.

A keen sailor who has previously crossed the Atlantic, Gilliam warned it was likely to be a “difficult” and “pretty uncomfortable” voyage. “The faster you can get across, the better. It’s going to be full on. Good luck to them,” she said.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) meets in Montreal a day after the UN’s climate action summit in New York. Icao has been criticised for setting weak climate targets for the sector and shrouding technical talks in secrecy.

Gilliam said she hoped Thunberg would seize the opportunity “to highlight the disparities between different UN bodies” on climate action.

It has not been revealed how Thunberg will travel home to Sweden after ending her Americas tour in Chile.

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Under the plan, plane tickets will be taxed for all flights departing from France, except those to Corsica and France’s overseas territories. Transit flights are exempt.

It will add €1.50 ($1.68) to the cost of a plane ticket in economy class within the European Union and €3 to an economy ticket outside the EU. In business class, the levies will be €9 and €18 respectively.

Transport minister for the ecological transition Elisabeth Borne told reporters taxing flight tickets was nothing new, citing air passenger duties in the UK and Germany. She added that Sweden and the Netherlands were considering a similar eco tax on flight tickets.

The government expects the tax to raise €182 million ($204m) to fund investments in green transport infrastructure, including the rail network.

Gilets jaunes: ‘We were ecologists before the capitalists’

It decided to pursue an aviation tax at a meeting of the Ecological Defense Council, which was set up in response to yellow vest protests against rising living costs.

The yellow vests or “gilets jaunes” movement was triggered by opposition to a tax hike on diesel, which protesters said created an unfair burden on the car-dependent poor. Rich people taking the plane for a weekend break were not subject to the same tax, they complained.

Pascal Canfin, an MEP for French president Emmanuel Macron’s party and the former director of WWF France, welcomed the “good news“, describing “a strong decision which was not won in advance”.

Campaigner Andrew Murphy of Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment tweeted that the levy was “a good first step” but should be hiked and backed up by policies to cut aviation emissions.

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The announcement comes as France, together with the Netherlands, is pushing for the EU to adopt a bloc-wide tax on air travel in the form of a levy on fuel or passenger tickets. At a meeting of EU finance ministers last month, they noted aviation was one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

France’s minister for the ecological transition, François De Rugy, said his government “continued to lead the fight within the EU for aviation to contribute further to efforts to reduce greenhouse gases”.

He added that the decision came “in support of and gives credibility to France’s approach at the European level, for which we must seek the broadest coalition”.

De Rugy added that exchanges which the aviation industry in France had shown that the sector was “ready to propose solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

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Last month, the European Commission issued its recommendations on the draft national energy and climate plans (NECPs) submitted by the 28 EU member states to achieve their 2030 objectives.

But “while the plans include ambitious goals, they lack concrete policies and measures to deliver on the promises,” according to new research by the PlanUp project coordinated by Carbon Market Watch, an environmental NGO.

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Finland, Sweden and Portugal in particular were praised for their “overall high ambition” when it comes to setting long-term energy and climate goals. But deeper analysis “reveals a lack of details and quantifiable expected results with regard to policy measures in the transport, buildings and agricultural sectors,” said Carbon Market Watch.

The NGO’s analysis is hardly surprising. In fact, it largely corroborates the European Commission’s own findings. When it issued its recommendations last month, the EU executive identified “substantial” gaps in the draft national plans – particularly when it comes to energy efficiency – and urged all EU countries to submit improved versions before the end of the year.

On transport, the five draft national plans were generally praised for addressing issues such as light transport, biofuels and electro-mobility. “However, they largely fail to recognise the importance of tackling emissions from heavy-duty transport, shipping and aviation,” according to the analysis by the PlanUp project.

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The building sector, responsible for 40% of energy consumption in Europe, was also neglected. Even though buildings are addressed in all of the five plans, they fall short, “especially when it comes to planning for deep renovation rates and energy efficiency improvements”. Germany stood out in this area however, because it set goals to achieve carbon-neutral buildings by 2050.

Agriculture is the other sector where the five countries were found to be missing the mark. With the exception of France and Portugal, “agriculture is again largely omitted” from the draft national plans, the analysis said, even though it has significant potential to contribute to carbon reduction efforts.

Finland’s forestry sector comes under particular scrutiny in this regard. Although the country won plaudits for setting an ambitious goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2035, the current EU Presidency holder plans to rely heavily on surplus carbon credits from forestry to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions in other sectors.

Finland puts new climate target top of EU leadership agenda

“Finland’s commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2035 is very promising,” said Agnese Ruggiero, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch. “Yet, relying on policy loopholes to reach climate goals is dangerous because it means that targets are met on paper but not in practice,” she said in a statement.

“The final plan is an opportunity for the new government and the current EU Presidency holder to live up to its claims to lead on climate by committing to concrete measures in sectors such as transport and agriculture,” Ruggiero said.

A final area where all plans seem to be falling short is public involvement. While Finland and Sweden held public consultations to draft their national plans, France, Germany and Portugal failed to involve interested parties and the general public.

“A more transparent process…would ensure greater support and commitment from all parties involved,” the NGOs said.

EU countries have until the end of the year to submit revised versions of their draft national energy and climate plans (NECPs).

This piece was originally published on CHN’s media partner Euractiv.

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A number of campaigners and researchers complain they have been barred from following the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao) account, after posting messages about aviation emissions.

Icao’s combative approach to public engagement has drawn wider criticism, with environmental journalists describing it as “spectacularly ill-judged” and “self-defeating“.

On Wednesday, Steve Westlake, a behavioural scientist at Cardiff University, shared a screenshot showing Icao had blocked him. It came after he responded to three Icao tweets by sharing a comment from Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg arguing most airport expansions were incompatible with meeting international climate goals.

That analysis is uncontroversial. Aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The sector’s emissions target, negotiated in Icao, is not aligned with the Paris Agreement, which calls for global warming to be held at 1.5C or below 2C.

A few hours later, Icao tweeted a poem declaring “spam, fake news or plain abuse/fall outside our terms of use”. In response to critics, it insisted: “We don’t want to reduce activists’ focus on #aviation emissions. We in fact encourage it. For it to be effective, it should be fact-based and well-targeted. Abuse, spam, and misinformation are not helpful to anyone.”

About #socialmedia:
Spam, #fakenews, or plain abuse,
Fall outside our terms of use!
We will not have this behaviour here,
And thus we must again declare,
We will not engage with you if you dare,
To pollute our feed through clear misuse!

More:
https://t.co/SR1hnWeWoM pic.twitter.com/X21sBr21ou

— ICAO (@icao) March 27, 2019

Other users to fall foul of Icao’s social media account include British academic Kevin Anderson, who champions a moral case for flying less, and Vincent van Oort, who described Icao’s carbon offsetting scheme as “weak” and called for “fair taxation” to reflect the sector’s environmental impact.

It is not just climate campaigners: user Pierre-Yves Baubry appears to have been blocked for asserting that Taiwan controlled its own airspace, not Icao member state China.

Just noticed that I’ve been blocked by the international civil aviation authority @icao Have others working on aviation emissions also been blocked? Appears to be that their commitment to open skies does not extend to open (& courteous) debate? pic.twitter.com/y4mXuomiOX

— Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) November 13, 2018

Asked to explain the policy, Anthony Philbin, head of communications at Icao, told Climate Home News: “Normally we block campaigners after they have repeatedly ignored our advice that the actual decisions regarding their concerns are being made by sovereign nation states.

“There is a common tendency among persons not familiar with multilateral governance to identify the decisions made through Icao as being ‘Icao’s decisions’, and to subsequently direct criticisms at our organisation for being somehow negligent or irresponsible regarding the targets and outcomes countries decide on together here.

“I’m sure you can understand that such misperceptions and false accusations can be unduly damaging to our reputation as an effective multilateral agency.”

Westlake said he had had no such advice or counterargument from Icao before he was blocked, nor had he posted on their timeline before.

Icao is the forum for countries to regulate emissions from aviation. Its member states agreed in 2016 to cap net emissions at 2020 levels. That is set to be largely achieved by airlines paying for emissions cuts in other sectors, to offset their growth.

The details of the carbon offsetting scheme are being negotiated largely behind closed doors. Earlier this month, campaigners welcomed a decision to prevent double-counting of emissions savings, but warned the process was vulnerable to industry capture and weak environmental integrity.

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This article was updated with a response from Westlake to Icao’s statement

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The sector has committed to carbon-neutral growth from 2020. As air traffic growth outpaces efficiency improvements, airlines will be expected to pay for emissions reductions in other sectors to offset the climate impact.

In a closed-room meeting, Icao adopted broad criteria to ensure those carbon offsets are not also counted towards national targets and represent extra emissions savings. That was reported by NGO observers and confirmed on Twitter by French negotiator Philippe Bertoux. The press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Climate campaigners welcomed the decision, but said more was needed to meet the industry’s promises. They are also calling for an age limit on eligible carbon offsetting projects and transparency around the way the rules are put into practice.

“This decision is a step forward,” said Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch, “but without setting an ambitious restriction on the age of eligible credits for the scheme, it could mean a giant setback for climate action. The aviation industry needs to face the reality that only new carbon reductions can deliver its goal of carbon neutral growth.”

Airlines eye massive carbon handout

There is a huge pool of dormant projects under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism that could, in theory, meet demand from airlines for carbon offsets. Analysts at New Climate Institute estimate 82% of the available supply would continue cutting emissions with or without the extra revenue.

Researchers from the same think-tank urged Icao to ban projects started before 2016 from taking part in the aviation carbon market, in a commentary for Nature Climate Change last month.

Another critical issue is the make-up of a technical advisory body, which will be responsible for interpreting and applying the rules.

Annie Petsonk, aviation expert at Environmental Defense Fund, warned that it risked being shrouded in secrecy and vulnerable to industry lobbying. “We don’t want Icao to become the Fifa of carbon markets,” she told Climate Home News, referring to the football governing body’s record of corruption.

The Icao Council meeting runs until 15 March. It is not clear whether negotiators will settle outstanding questions around the carbon market’s operation at this session.

While airlines are eager to learn the details for their planning, Petsonk noted they will not need to start buying offsets until 2023. “It is more important to get it right than to rush it,” she said.

The industry’s Air Transport Action Group endorsed the newly agreed rules. “It is important for the industry that strong sustainability standards are applied for the types of eligible offsets,” said director Michael Gill in a statement.

Meanwhile, some argue the sector should be paying more for its climate pollution. At a meeting of EU environment ministers on Tuesday, Belgium’s Jean-Luc Crucke called for the bloc to impose taxes on air travel.

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In Montreal, countries are negotiating the design of a global carbon market for airlines at the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao). In the European Union, member states are battling over whether or not to relinquish their power to regulate aviation emissions to make space for the global system. Both decisions are critical to the environmental integrity of efforts to decarbonise flying.

The Icao rules, being developed in secrecy, will include eligibility criteria for carbon credits to be used in the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (Corsia) to offset emissions growth above their 2020 levels. The biggest existing mechanisms and programs will want their share of the pie, and the risk of relying on flawed programmes to artificially tackle the aviation’s growing carbon problem is real and worrying.

At the top of the list is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a controversial market created under the Kyoto Protocol with a potential supply of credits so large that it could meet the entire demand of Corsia without implementing new projects after 2020. In an open letter sent at the start of the Council session, over 60 civil society organizations asked Icao Council members to not make CDM credits eligible for compliance under Corsia, which starts with the adoption of robust Emissions Unit Criteria (EUC).

The CDM’s performance to date has been underwhelming to say the least. Only 2% of the projects registered under the mechanism are highly likely to generate emission reductions which are not overestimated and would not have happened in the absence of the system. Relying on the CDM to offset the growth in aviation emissions could end up having no impact on overall greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, or even increase it.

Airlines eye massive carbon handout

In parallel to these global negotiations, the EU has been entangled in a heated debate surrounding how it will respond to this new international market.

Icao member countries face a 1 December deadline to register any differences between their own legislation and the rules which would be implemented under Corsia. In the absence of this, EU countries would consent to replacing any existing regulation with Corsia, without knowing what the exact rules of the market will be.

The EU emissions trading system (ETS) currently covers all flights inside the European Economic Area and has seen a recent price rise following a newly adopted revision of the market. By setting a cap on emissions, the EU ETS prevents uncontrolled growth in pollution from the aviation sector, something Corsia will not regulate.

Replacing the EU ETS with Corsia would therefore significantly water down the ambition of EU climate policy, and could create a gap of 96.2 Mt CO2e in the EU’s 2030 climate target. EU member states will therefore need to support the European Commission’s proposal to “file a difference”, that is to notify Icao of the differences between EU legislation and Corsia rules, if they want to avoid surrendering their own power to regulate aviation emissions.

This is a crucial time for aviation. A lack of ambition on both sides of the Atlantic would lead to the establishment of a scheme with no real impact on the climate, and the dismantlement of any other policy which could have complemented it.

These developments show that many aspects of the Corsia will need to be scrutinized by civil society, researchers, and journalists, for which much improved transparency rules will be needed. Negotiations at Icao have been marred by opaque processes and no public engagement. EU member states should therefore promote ambition in the Icao Council, and wait before they agree to implement a scheme for which rules have not yet been determined.

Gilles Dufrasne is a policy researcher at Carbon Market Watch

Andrew Murphy is an aviation campaigner at Transport & Environment

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The aviation sector has committed to carbon-neutral growth from 2020, agreeing to “offset” extra emissions by paying for emissions cuts in other sectors.

But negotiators at the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao) may allow airlines to use a glut of old offsets to meet their quotas. Thousands of dormant projects are ready to flood the market with cheap credits, according to European analysts, without driving any new emissions reductions.

After clashes between emerging economies and European countries at an Icao council meeting in Montreal, discussions on offset eligibility will resume in September.

Brazil and China are at the centre of a push for all carbon credits generated under UN Climate Change mechanisms to be eligible for the aviation carbon offset scheme, known as Corsia. Their positions were set out in an Icao document dated 20 April and seen by Climate Home News.

Filip Cornelis, director of aviation at the EU commission, in a letter dated 1 March, called for a “vintage restriction”, ruling out projects started before the end of 2016.

“Corsia has only an environmental added value compared to a scenario without Corsia if it leads to the generation of additional emission reductions,” the letter said.

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The main potential source of offsets is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which the UN developed in response to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It allowed rich countries to meet some of their climate obligations by funding emissions cuts in the developing world.

However, later analysis found the vast majority of projects funded by the CDM would likely have happened with or without that support. For example, a hydropower dam would pay for itself through electricity sales, regardless of carbon market revenues.

A 2016 report by Öko-Institut for the European Commission estimated 85% of studied CDM projects and 73% of potential supply 2013-20 had a “low likelihood” of driving emissions cuts.

Independently, the New Climate Institute (NCI) last year judged 82% of real or potential carbon credits generated over that period were from projects not reliant on CDM revenue to continue their operations.

In the absence of eligibility limits, operating or dormant CDM projects could supply up to 3.8 billion credits for less than €1 a tonne of CO2, a follow-up NCI study for the German government found.

That covers the predicted 3 billion tonnes of aviation emissions growth up to 2035, at minimal cost to the industry.

“We are advocating that Corsia either decides to only allow new projects in response to this demand or targets projects which we term ‘more vulnerable’, which actually do depend on [carbon market] revenue at the moment,” explained NCI economist and report author Harry Fearnehough.

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There is uncertainty over how much of that potential supply glut will materialise, he said. It includes projects that registered for the CDM but never issued carbon credits – and some may not have gone ahead.

Icao has drawn up draft eligibility principles that form a “good basis to avoid past mistakes,” according to Kelsey Perlman of Carbon Market Watch.

In theory, they would rule out the CDM because it does not have a safeguarding mechanism, but some countries want to make it an exception. China opposes a centralised process for determining eligibility while Brazil maintains all CDM projects should be automatically approved.

Much will depend on a technical advisory body that is due to make recommendations before the next meeting.

With so much up in the air, Perlman said an age limit on credits was a good way to give the system some environmental integrity.

“If airlines were allowed to buy offsets from climate projects undertaken years ago, no new carbon reductions would be achieved to compensate aviation’s growing pollution,” she said. “This underlines the need for a date limiting eligible offsets under Corsia, to prevent the threat of worthless credits from flooding the market.”

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Dirk Forrister, director of the International Emissions Trading Association, defended the CDM. Projects that looked like a safe bet with hindsight were not necessarily such an easy choice at the time, he told Climate Home News: “There was still a cash crunch.”

People who had developed projects for the CDM “in good faith” should get the first shot at the aviation market, Forrister said. “I am not saying every one of the projects that got registered [under the CDM] should automatically qualify [for Corsia], but I think it should be given a chance to show it comports with the new rules.”

Haldane Dodd, spokesperson for the industry’s Air Transport Action Group, deferred to the experts on precisely which offsets should be eligible.

In general, the group supports using CDM credits. “After all, these are ready to go now and everyone agrees that early action is vital if we are to get on top of the climate challenge,” he said.

Aviation accounts for more than 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The industry has struggled to find low carbon ways to get planes in the air, with incremental improvements in energy efficiency outweighed by rapid demand growth.

Under the Icao climate deal, the sector is to offset the increase in emissions starting in 2021. But green groups warn this commitment lags the ambition of the Paris Agreement to hold global warming below 2C – and could be undermined by weak participation and offsetting rules.

“Corsia looks more and more like an awful deal for the climate,” said Andrew Murphy, aviation campaigner at Brussels-based Transport & Environment, of the latest talks.

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Concorde, the world’s last commercial supersonic aircraft, generated three times more noise, NOx and CO2 than today’s subsonic planes and contributed five times more to global warming, due to the high altitudes at which it released its emissions.

No carbon dioxide regulations, either international or European, have so far been put in place for the next generation of supersonic aircraft, which the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) expects to begin certifying by as early as 2020.

There are already hundreds of these jets planned. Aerion, a US startup which has already received over $100m in investment to design an A-S2 supersonic business trijet with Airbus, told Climate Home it expected its first planes to come to market in 2025. 

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“We anticipate beginning construction in 2020 or 2021,” said Jeff Miller, Aerion’s vice president for communications. “Our production target is 36 aircraft a year and we see a market for about 600 supersonic business jets.” Flexjet has already placed a $2.4bn order for 20 of the planes.

The firm’s jets would be small, heavy and capable of shaving off up to half the long haul flight time for what one analyst called “the 1% of the 1%” of business travellers who can afford it.

The A-S2’s modern turbofan engine will minimise aerodynamic ‘drag’ and make it at least 20% more fuel efficient than its cone-shaped predecessor, according to the firm’s calculations. This would still be significantly more polluting than today’s subsonic aircraft.

“We will meet all the latest standards for CO2 and NOx and any other kind of emissions,” Miller said, adding the engine designs were based on cutting edge “efficient” technology.

Supersonic jets are too heavy to fall within current standards and Daniel Rutherford, the aviation director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, which uncovered the VW diesel scandal, was sceptical about the jets’ ability to meet the existing limits for lighter craft.

“My understanding is that the newest supersonic designs being developed would fail Icao’s subsonic CO2 standard by a wide margin,” he told Climate Home News. “It takes a lot of energy to accelerate and then operate an aircraft at supersonic speeds. On an real-world basis, I’d expect even improved supersonic aircraft to be twice – or even more – carbon intensive than a modern subsonic aircraft. Speed kills.”

The AS-2 will shave off up to half the long haul flight time for what one analyst called “the 1% of the 1%” of business travellers who can afford it (Image: Aerion)

The current lack of standards for supersonic jets is creating “a chicken and egg situation”, according to Tim Johnson, the director of the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF).

“On the one hand, industry argues that you need new data to develop standards because you only have old data from Concorde,” he said. “So you have to develop prototypes. But our fear is that once this has been done, the standards are usually set around the technology, because of the money that has already been invested in it. We are obviously very alarmed about that. We’d like the standards to drive the market and not the other way around.”

To the contrary though, the European Council of EU ministers is pushing for the approaching supersonic fleet to prioritise any standards that emerge from Icao over EU environmental law.

An EU working document dated January 2017 says that where noise and polluting emissions are concerned, all airplanes, engines and parts in the supersonic class “shall comply with the [Icao] environmental protection requirements”.

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No other Icao states or actors have waived their right to set stronger environmental regulations in advance of potential measures at the global aviation forum, according to green think tank T&E and the AEF.

Bill Hemmings, the aviation and shipping director of T&E, said: “Europe’s countries promised that the next generation of supersonic jets would only be allowed to operate in Europe with public acceptance.

“But EU officials could be completely undermining this commitment when taking decisions behind closed doors at Icao and at the EU Council if the proposed powers of Europe’s aircraft certification body… are curtailed,” said Hemmings.

Aerion technicians say operators of its business jets would have to offset their emissions under Icao’s Corsia carbon offsetting scheme if they emitted more than 10,000 metric tones of CO2 a year in international airspace. Miller said Aerion viewed Icao, not regional or national governments, as the appropriate venue for global aviation regulations. 

The firm is far from alone in developing supersonic jets that could fly under the regulatory radar. Spike aerospace, funded by Wall St investors, is planning high speed flight tests next year ahead of a roll out of its S-512 business jets by 2023.

Boom also expects flight tests next year for its 55-seat XB-1 supersonic plane which should be brought into service in 2023, with support from investors in Silicon Valley, London and New York. Virgin’s Richard Branson has promised to buy its first ten supersonic jets and five unnamed airlines have reportedly ordered 76 of the jets.

Concorde, which made its last flight 14 years ago, regularly provoked sharp intakes of breath with sonic booms that broke the sound barrier. Aerion’s A-S2 will only reach speeds above Mach 1 (around 1000mph) over water, and fly at an altitude of 51,000 ft – compared to Concorde’s 60,000 ft. A NASA supersonic X-plane which allegedly makes a ‘soft thump’ rather than a ‘sonic boom’ is due to go into construction at Lockheed Martin next year.

Rolls-Royce also reportedly sees future demand for supersonic jets among what Flight International magazine called “a growing international population of billionaires”.

Funding for such ventures is usually a closely guarded secret, although Boom said it had taken in $41m earlier this year. That is still a drop in the ocean compared to the $4bn Aerion says it will need for development and certification in 2025.

Funded by the oil billionairre Robert Bass, Aerion is collaborating on the A-S2 project with Airbus Defence and Space, which Miller says has made “a substantial contribution” to the engineering of its fusillage, wing structure and fly by wire systems.

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Many details still need to be worked out, with transparency being one of the most important, to ensure the agreement truly helps the environment.

Countries are meeting soon to discuss the rules that will govern the agreement. These meetings are highly technical but also highly consequential. If the outcome is hiding the aviation agreement’s results from the world, we will have no way to know we are flying on course to a sustainable planet.

Without transparency, there is a risk that emission reductions credited to the aviation sector could be double-counted in the Paris Agreement, weakening overall climate ambition.

The aviation deal, which was struck at the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), aims to stabilise emissions from this sector at 2020 levels by requiring airlines to purchase reductions elsewhere in order to compensate for their growing emissions.

It is a tentative first step, and needs to be much more ambitious to make sure that aviation plays its role in addressing climate change. But it’s an important development, and one which would not have occurred without years of persistent European leadership and engagement.

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Establishing effective carbon markets is no easy feat, especially one where airlines purchase emission reductions from other sectors. To put it simply – how can you be sure these reductions are not also being counted toward other climate targets? Moreover, some “offset credits” have been shown not to represent real emission reductions. How can you be sure that the credits airlines buy meet minimum quality standards?

Transparency must be the overriding principle to address these concerns. Consumers who fly, and therefore pay for these offsets, need to know whether their airline is complying with international rules; whether the emission reductions promised are actually delivered; and whether those same emission reductions have been pledged to anyone else.

This level of transparency can be achieved if each airline is required to disclose its total emissions each year, and document that it is meeting its goals under the agreement. All programs that supply emission reductions to the airlines must provide assurances that these reductions aren’t being claimed by anyone else.

Europe has plenty of experience with these systems. Much of my time as Europe’s climate commissioner was spent trying to make Europe’s carbon market work better. Europe was the largest purchaser of offsets and we learned from experience that strict rules are needed to make sure every emitter reports its emissions, and to prevent, detect, and punish fraud, including keeping out offsets from environmentally harmful projects and those that in fact delivered no emission reductions. It is impossible to see this aviation agreement work effectively without similar levels of transparency.

Aviation officials implementing the new agreement don’t have to start from scratch. They can learn from Europe’s experience that transparency is integral to success, including an open decision making process, opportunity for public comment, and clarity that rules are being followed and enforced. The International Coalition for Sustainable Aviation, an NGO network working on this issue, has prepared best practices for transparency that offers a roadmap for an effective aviation carbon market.

Europe is not the only carbon market that relies on transparency for success. Global and state efforts like the Kyoto Protocol and California Cap and Trade are other examples of where transparency has played a central role in establishing and improving carbon markets. With so many markets operating with transparency, there is no excuse for the international aviation community not to do the same.

Connie Hedegaard is a former European Commissioner for Climate Action and currently serves as Chairwoman of the KR Foundation

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