20 july 2011, the litmus test

Rare praise for the eu, for bringing foreign airlines flying into europe within the ambit of its best-in-class emissions trading scheme - not that ets counts for much in the world, as the failure of copenhagen brutally showed (20 december 2009. This is part of a wider process of turning invisible costs on the environment into financial costs that will ultimately incentivise behavioural change. Yes, if we are ever to slow global warming rather than just mitigate, we are going to have to fly much less. The ets came from a growing realisation years ago that on current trends, climate change was likely to reduce gdp, probably by around 5% a year. Ironically the political agenda turned to this only because economic times were good and so mainstream public opinion allowed itself to worry about the environment. No longer: less people now are willing to pay higher prices to reduce climate change. Even then though the first phase of ets was a failure and only minor changes were made to the current one. Overall eu emissions were reduced by some 6% between the magic date of 1990 and 2008. However, that is a measure only of emissions released within europe, from our own homes and factories. It does not take into account what we imported, i.e. the carbon costs of our consumption - and so the emissions of what were once called developing countries' during that period have soared. In other words, in a world of international trade a net that captures part of the world is no net at all, as to reduce the globe's emissions, it needs to be a zero sum game. We've not really cut emissions therefore, we've just outsourced them. More than ever therefore if we are to cut emissions we need global sanctions and incentives, and unless we're flying less, amongst many other things, they're not working.