Britain is keeping in place — and raising — its Air Passenger Duty, a per-passenger charge levied on airline itineraries originating in Britain. The government had promised to design a new charge based on aircraft; the current charge does not correlate actual emissions to charges for them. Two aircraft of identical capacity but with different fuel efficiencies are assessed the same amount of APD. Even worse, private aircraft, cargo aircraft, and transfer passengers (mostly at Heathrow) are exempt from APD, meaning that commercial travelers to destinations in Britain are bearing the brunt of aviation’s climate impact there. If Britain is serious about taxing its own travelers and airlines to mitigate climate change, then it needs to align charges with actual impacts.
See also my earlier post on the challenges of green taxation in aviation.
Okay, so how would we work out to what extent what is proposed aligns the charges with actual impacts?
Using travel from the UK to New Zealand could we:
- take the distance and emissions of CO2 for a one-way London-Auckland economy flight from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) carbon emissions calculator at: http://www2.icao.int/public/cfmapps/carbonoffset/carbon_calculator.cfm which gives an answer of 18,335 Km generating about 1,341.73 Kg of CO2
- take the price of carbon emissions today from Point Carbon at: http://www.pointcarbon.com/ which today gives a value of €15.70 per tonne
- do a conversion from Euros to Pounds giving £13.36 per tonne and multiple that by 1.342 tonnes
- and come up with £17.93 compared with the current Air Passenger Duty (APD) of £40, the proposed APD of £55 from 1 November 2009 and the proposed APD of £85 from 2010 (see: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/pbr2008/pbrn20.pdf ) or do I misunderstand the basis of how HM Treasury arrived at the appropriate value of this “green” tax?