What world does aviation want to live in, Trump’s or Europe’s?
13 years ago, the EU caved to industry pressure and excluded international aviation emissions from carbon pricing. Next year, the possibility to expand the ETS will be back on the table. The question is: will airlines rehash their bullying tactics or recognise what’s at stake for aviation’s future?
I spent last week at the Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) after a long hiatus. My last visit was in 2012, the resounding memory of which was a senior US government appointee furiously banging his fist on the table across from me.
What elicited this kind of outburst from an American official? While by now quite normalised as the default tone of the Trump administration, this wasn’t exactly what you expected from Obama appointees. It was because 2012 was the year that the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) was set to incorporate emissions from flights between European and non-European airports. What would have been a relatively modest cap on aviation emissions was met with howls of protest from the industry, which successfully lobbied the US government to take up its cause.
In the end the EU caved to the pressure, saving face by framing its backsliding as a gracious compromise to allow ICAO to develop global regulations.
13 years of climate damage from international flights
Fast forward and now we’ve had 13 years of climate damage caused by international flights. About the total annual emissions of Greece have gone unregulated every year because international flights are not in the EU ETS (and that is only counting the damage from flights leaving the EU, not those arriving).
Meanwhile, a deal did emerge at the international level, called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). However, to date, under this scheme not even one offset has been surrendered. With structurally weak regulation at the global level and the EU scheme kneecapped, a major polluter continues to glide under the radar unchecked.
Luckily, next year we get another chance. The EU ETS’s extension to international flights will be back on the table. One thing we can bet on is that airlines will fight tooth and nail, and again, whip up a fever against it. Indeed, the vice-president for sustainability at the International Air Transport Association has already called the ETS an “existential threat to our global industry”, and Airbus got a head start lobbying against expansion even earlier this year.
There is no doubt either that the aviation industry will find a friend in the White House who will happily oppose any sensible EU regulation. The administration may even relish the opportunity to marry together its anti-EU and anti-climate crusades.
But will the industry opt to dust off the 2012 playbook and tap the US as its champion against the ETS? If so, it needs to question whether the enemy of its enemy is really its friend (note that both United Airlines and Boeing donated $1m each to Trump’s inaugural fund).
The global far-right populism that Trump has helped spearhead is bent on upending the international order. While this order is the would-be mechanism for global climate action that aviation would rather avoid, it is also the very system upon which international aviation’s operations depend.
For a global industry, is existing in the world where nothing can get done at the international level actually good for business? And that’s before we talk about further Trumpian fallouts such as mass layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration, part of the government “efficiency” drive in the US, or the trend of tourists turning their backs on the US, hardly music to an airline’s ears.
What world do airlines want to live in?
As the old international system wanes, aviation can no longer count on corporate interests being the most important in any policy debate. But it is within the industry’s power to work towards the world it wants to live in.
Will that be one defined by the arbitrary and indiscriminate disruption of international structures, born out of the US tariff campaign? Or by the EU’s sensibly planned, targeted, collaborative approach that combines cooperation and climate stability – including with an extended ETS? The latter promises long term stability, albeit with an actual requirement for the aviation industry to reduce its climate impact; the former promises nothing but unpredictable chaos that no business can viably find stability in.
So, as airlines gear up to fight the EU on the ETS for international aviation, maybe they should pause and ask themselves, is this the world they really want? It could be that collaborating with the EU to put a relatively modest price on international flight emissions would actually reinforce the stability, both regulatory and planetary, upon which their operation depends.
The 2026 ETS revision stands as a unique opportunity not just to end the era of inadequate climate action on aviation, but also for the industry to lead by example with the collaborative, not combative, tone of global politics its own future may depend upon. A good start may be toning down the anti-EU rhetoric. With all this at stake next year, my message at ICAO this past week was quite simple: I can’t wait for the ETS to apply to international aviation.
