The bureaucratic torpor and confusion that has mired the initial registration process for the introduction of Europe’s new emissions-trading scheme (ETS) has brought the cap-and-trade approach to reducing aviation’s carbon footprint into disrepute, according to the European Business Aviation Association (EBAA). The group is launching a new lobbying effort aimed at convincing members of the European Parliament that, as it predicted, the cost burden entailed in bringing small operators into ETS has vastly outweighed the minuscule contribution that these aircraft make to air transport’s combined output of carbon dioxide (CO2).
What’s more, according to EBAA president and CEO Brian Humphries, ETS now threatens to have the unintended consequence of delivering a competitive advantage to those non-European executive charter operators who have managed to escape the requirement to report and trade in carbon emissions. EBAA’s members have reported that quite large non-European operators do not fly more than ETS’s baseline threshold of an average of fewer than 243 flights over three consecutive four-month periods in European airspace and so are not subject to emissions trading. This means that they are not incurring the associated costs now hitting just about all European operators for which this is a low threshold because the majority of their flying is within the continent.
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