UK aviation emissions must be below 2005 levels and we can't trade our way out of it

If we can't trade aviation emissions away, and there's no technology fix, will domestic flights have to face the chop?

Big news on aviation emissions, as the Committee on Climate Change - the government's own independent scientific emissions watchdog - have said that the UK's aviation emissions should be 'capped'.

This would mean that they must remain at or below 2005 levels. When the government announced the third runway at Heathrow, they did say that they would do something similar, but the big caveat was that this cap would be flexible, in that it would be possible for the aviation industry to buy carbon credits through the European emissions trading scheme, to balance growing emissions.

Significantly, the Committee is having none of it - they say that in the long-term emissions trading isn't the answer, and that the UK, along with other developed countries, needs to "plan for deep cuts in its own CO2 emissions", meaning significant domestic action is required. Intriguingly, head of the committee David Kennedy is quoted as saying that they will look specifically at Heathrow and its role in helping the UK to meet this target, as part of a wider review of aviation emissions the committee is publishing later in the year.

That, to us, looks like a signal that scrutinising the emissions caused by domestic flights is on the table. Because if the committee is saying that the aviation industry can't trade emissions away in the long term, and the experts are saying that technology isn't going to dramatically cut emissions from planes - (the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution said that the industry's targets on efficiency improvements are ‘clearly aspirations rather than projections') - something's got to give. What's it going to be?

It's worth noting that aviation emissions are still exempted from the 80% emissions cuts that the government have committed to for the rest of society, which means to meet an overall cut of 80%, other sectors are going to have to pick up aviation's slack. Even to allow the aviation industry to operate at 2005 levels will require other sectors of the economy to make cuts of 90% or more - it does make you wonder why aviation emissions are so privileged that they can be ring fenced, when everything else is going to be cut. Is that really sensible, particularly when making deeper cuts in the power sector, for example, would mean that energy customers could end up paying for the right of the richer section of our society to fly. Put that in your fairness pipe and smoke it.

The unspoken thought that's probably at the front of the minds of those ministers who have been tasked with figuring out how to reduce the UK's emissions is that the government's aviation policy of continued expansion, a third runway at Heathrow and rising aviation emissions is completely at odds with the government's climate policy. Which is what we've been saying for a while, and yet Ed Miliband still can't bring himself to say a third runway at Heathrow's a stupid idea.