Carbon Emissions and Aviation

A letter in today's Guardian by one of our two Green MEPs, Caroline Lucas:

Ken Livingstone is right (Green moves on buses and fuel , September 28): aviation's greenhouse-gas emissions must be brought to the centre of the debate on climate change, as flying is the fastest-growing source of emissions.

But his party, the Tories and the Lib Dems seem wedded to the largest expansion of British airports in a generation.

The renewable-energy initiatives announced in Manchester last week will come nowhere near solving the problem unless we rein in aircraft emissions, something neither the Westminster parties nor Richard Branson are seriously prepared to do. It seems Branson is just the latest airline executive to promote "green-sounding" measures to ensure the issue is tackled by self-regulation and not mandatory emissions reductions.

To simply add aviation into the current emissions-trading scheme will allow airlines to buy up CO2 emission rights from other industries and prolong the illusion that flying can continue to increase without consequence.

A much more effective way forward is the one I presented to the European parliament, overwhelmingly adopted by MEPs this summer: to establish an airlines-only emissions-trading scheme alongside a package of complementary measures to reduce aviation's non-CO2 greenhouse-gas emissions.