It is a sure-fire way of losing friends and alienating people, but rationing air travel - or personal carbon trading - remains in the arsenal of every ambitious policymaker determined to find ways, however politically unpalatable, to make individuals manage their own carbon dioxide emissions.
Lord Turner, chairman of the independent Committee on Climate Change, recently proposed the rationing idea to the UK Parliament, arguing "we will have to constrain demand in an absolute sense with people not allowed to make as many journeys as they could in an unconstrained manner".
The Committee on Climate Change advises the UK government on progress towards meeting some of the harshest self-imposed national carbon reduction targets in the world.
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Turner's idea was quickly condemned by pro-aviation lobby groups such as FlyingMatters. "One always suspects with these half-baked proposals that the people who put them forward really intend them to apply to ordinary people, many of whom have only recently gained access to air travel, rather than to themselves," says FlyingMatters chairman Brian Wilson.
Turner says his committee will study aviation emissions to consider what can be achieved through efficiency gains, what biofuels can contribute, and only then - if neither of these can be shown to deliver reductions compatible with the UK carbon account - would demand management be considered.
Even so, Wilson makes the point that any political party inclined to support flight rationing should tread warily since voters do not take kindly to limits being placed on their mobility.
And the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) seems to have already quietly swept under the carpet the concept of a national emissions cap with carbon credits allocated across the population.
A Defra study last year concluded that while personal carbon trading had the potential to engage individuals in taking action to combat climate change, it remains "essentially ahead of its time" - not to mention costly.
It was the cost equation that convinced the original architect of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, Dutch consultancy CE Delft, to drop any idea of the passenger as the trading entity in the scheme design, explaining that "obliging passengers to surrender allowances would involve enormous transaction costs, as millions of allowance traders would have to be supervised and monitored".
It is a sure-fire way of losing friends and alienating people, but rationing air travel - or personal carbon trading - remains in the arsenal of every ambitious policymaker determined to find ways, however politically unpalatable, to make individuals manage their own carbon dioxide emissions.
Lord Turner, chairman of the independent Committee on Climate Change, recently proposed the rationing idea to the UK Parliament, arguing "we will have to constrain demand in an absolute sense with people not allowed to make as many journeys as they could in an unconstrained manner".
The Committee on Climate Change advises the UK government on progress towards meeting some of the harshest self-imposed national carbon reduction targets in the world.
Turner's idea was quickly condemned by pro-aviation lobby groups such as FlyingMatters. "One always suspects with these half-baked proposals that the people who put them forward really intend them to apply to ordinary people, many of whom have only recently gained access to air travel, rather than to themselves," says FlyingMatters chairman Brian Wilson.
Turner says his committee will study aviation emissions to consider what can be achieved through efficiency gains, what biofuels can contribute, and only then - if neither of these can be shown to deliver reductions compatible with the UK carbon account - would demand management be considered.
Even so, Wilson makes the point that any political party inclined to support flight rationing should tread warily since voters do not take kindly to limits being placed on their mobility.
And the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) seems to have already quietly swept under the carpet the concept of a national emissions cap with carbon credits allocated across the population.
A Defra study last year concluded that while personal carbon trading had the potential to engage individuals in taking action to combat climate change, it remains "essentially ahead of its time" - not to mention costly.
It was the cost equation that convinced the original architect of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, Dutch consultancy CE Delft, to drop any idea of the passenger as the trading entity in the scheme design, explaining that "obliging passengers to surrender allowances would involve enormous transaction costs, as millions of allowance traders would have to be supervised and monitored".
Source: Flight International
