CarbonTracking

Aircraft fuel,kerosene, is exempt from tax. This is kind of odd as we see the advent of carbon taxes and also when petrol/diesel for personal use is heavily taxed (€0.40/litre for diesel).

So how much of a difference would it make if the government were to tax aircraft fuel at a similar level ?

Lets take a typical mid-range airplane like B737 or an A321 uses roughly 4 litres of kerosene per 100 passenger-km. If aircraft fuel was taxed at the same rate the passenger would end up paying €16 extra for every 1000km flown.

Not too bad so far, a return trip from Dublin to Paris would cost around €24 extra. But there's a few more things to bring into play. The first is a dark subject called radiative forcing index (RFI) which is a measure of the difference, in global warming terms, of emitting CO2 at high altitudes compared to terrestrial emissions. The IPCC currently estimates an RFI of 2.7. This means that a litre of kerosene burnt at high altitudes ( above 3000m ) does 2.7 times more damage in global warming terms than a litre burnt on the ground. See here and here for more details on that topic.

So the stuff that airplanes emit is worse stuff, 2.7 times worse. Seems fair then to increase taxes accordingly, so our €24 tax increase now gets bumped up to €65. Hmm, getting saucy now isn't it.

But there's more. You see flying is about the most energy intensive activity there is known to man. Our return flight to Paris, for the weekend you know, will have used 60 litres of fuel in about 2.5 hours of actual flying or about 24 litres per hour. A Hummer ( remember those ) would use about 14 litres per hour driving around at 100 kmph. The government taxes the hell out of tHummers and the like at a tidy €2000/year of motor-tax.

So why should the same logic not apply to aircraft travel ? Why not stick on an extra 50% tax to bring it in line with other government measures to dis-incentivise. The weekender in France is now €100 more expensive but alot more equitable in environmental terms. For the sake of discussion, that shopping trip to New York would now be costing €600 more in taxes, hope those jeans were REALLY good value.

Bring on Copenhagen !

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under emissions, ireland, transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.