ETS: slow motion cock-up
The European Commission’s ham-fisted efforts to half-nelson the business aviation industry into working with its Emissions Trading Scheme is coming to a climax. As a neutral observer, this could be fun to watch. Even business aviation operators, who have had to bear the burden of this unnecessary imposition, should get to see Brussels’ delusion being fully exposed. For the end of next month marks the deadline for business aviation operators to surrender their allowances for their carbon emissions over the last year of flight operations. Largely this obligation falls on European operators, since the European Commission has put the global activation of its ETS on hold in the hope that ICAO will kick start a multilateral replacement. In short, there is no way operators will meet the April deadline. Not in any manageable order, and not to any useful end. Business aviation should never have been shoe-horned into the airline ETS rule book. The industry believes it’s been picked on. True, it’s no friend of Brussels. But in truth there was no harm intended. Business aviation is just another victim of the collateral damage of ill-prepared EU policy making. Business aviation operators won’t make their deadline because the rules imposed on them took scant notice of the reality of day to day operations, and woefully underestimated the challenge of coordinating proper participation across 27 member states. Dozens of operators have not even opened a registry account through which to begin tracking their flights. For many, properly completing registration took 6 months alone. Straight out of the EU cookbook, the ETS enforcers are now threatening punitive fines for any operators failing to fall into line. Repeated non-compliance may escalate to aircraft grounding and even seizure of aircraft. While the bureaucrats of Brussels anguish over the rule book, business aviation – which creates employment in Europe of over $5bn and supports businesses across the continent – is wilting away in the recession. If the Commission, in fantasy land, got its way and was able to verify all business aviation aircraft emissions accurately, the irony is that it would most probably see that almost the entire sector falls beneath its designated payable threshold. But it won’t get its way, at least not in April and probably not this year. By then, ICAO will have done nothing, demonstrably. The Commission will have been thoroughly bluffed; there is no chance of non-EU countries accepting the resumption of Europe’s global ETS en lieu, and the continuation of a Europe-only ETS is so pointlessly discriminating to European operators that even the Commission would think twice. We hope.Tags: Richard Koe Business Aviation