Date published: 2005/09/21
The BBC says:
UK homes, firms and motorists will have to cut carbon dioxide emissions to zero due to air travel growth, a study says.
Even if such growth is halved, the rest of the economy will need cuts beyond targets set for 2050, said the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
The government predicts UK air passenger numbers will rise from 180 million to 475 million by 2030.
Environment Minister Elliot Morley wants to see aviation included in international emissions agreements.
The government's target of a 60% cut in CO2 by 2050 is based on the amount in the atmosphere that scientists say is safe to avoid dangerous climate change.
But the report said that ignoring aviation had led to a "serious underestimation" of the effort needed.
"If the UK government does not curb aviation growth, all other sectors of the economy will eventually be forced to become carbon neutral," said Dr Kevin Anderson, who led the research at the Manchester University research centre.
"It will undermine the international competitiveness of UK industry."
The report called for a change to current rules, under which aviation and shipping are not considered part of a country's CO2 output.
Aviation is regarded as especially polluting because of the large amount of fuel used at high altitude.
"At the moment aviation is completely outside the Kyoto agreements and all international and national targets and it doesn't make sense for aviation to be outside," Mr Morley told BBC Breakfast.
"We will be pressing, at the next October environment ministers council, for European aviation to be included within the emissions trading scheme to actually have a cap in trade in relation to CO2."
...
The findings are part of a five-year study into CO2 emissions over the next 45 years by the Tyndall Centre.The report, Decarbonising the UK, describes ways of cutting CO2 emissions from road transport, housing, industry and coal-fired power stations.
It also looks at the role of renewable energy, nuclear power and hydrogen fuel in providing low carbon energy supply.
Don't you love policy wonks, inventing wonderful new words like "decarbonising". The report is long (89 pages) but not long enough to give full details behind the study. They look at five scenarios, but as usual that is not even close to covering the possibilities (given all the parameters they allow to vary). One thing the Tyndall Centre ought to do is release the spreadsheet behind their model, so that people can check these things independently, and make their own scenarios.
The report says aviation and shipping should be included in emissions standards. Unfortunately even doing that does not give the full picture. If you earn your money making movies in Hollywood and buying industrial goods from China, you are still a big producer of carbon, even though the international standards would claim that China is responsible for most of the carbon production. So this report still falls far short of the real picture.
One bad thing about the report is that it promotes the usual idea that the working class should not expect to have the same privileges as the middle class (such as the people writing the report) have had all these years, in particular with respect to air travel. For example, the section devoted to demonising air travel starts with the wonderful quote "it's not that we need to fly less, but that we cannot fly more!" Well coming from a bunch of academics who no doubt fly more often (and in general produce a lot more carbon) than the average British citizen this reads a bit rich.
They also have included more propaganda for the idea of personal carbon quotas. One variant of this is that everybody effectively gets taxed extra when fuel is purchased. Well this already happens of course (except for so-called public transport), and in particular car drivers already pay way more in tax than any proposed carbon tax. So this is nothing new. But the problem is that just paying for fuel does not fully account for the carbon produced. In particular, the users of any service that is subsidised (e.g. so-called public transport) are not fully paying for the carbon they have produced (directly and indirectly). So these taxes will end up being biased towards politically incorrect forms of consumption (e.g. private cars, or anything else the control freaks have trouble controlling).
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