Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, the amendment is not about the future of aviation, but whether an attempt should be made in the next three or four years before the EU Emissions Trading Scheme includes aviation to measure and take account of the emissions from aviation caused by or belonging to this country. That is narrowly what this is about. It is not about whether aviation should or should not be included in emissions trading or should or should not be capped. That is a red herring for the purposes of this debate. The narrow question raised by the amendment is whether it is possible, meaningful and useful to include in the Committee on Climate Change’s first five-year target for carbon emissions aviation emissions that in some sense belong to the UK. I will address simply that point. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, acknowledged when he gave an example of how he would include aviation that it is exceptionally difficult—indeed, meaningless and I would say impossible—to designate emissions from international aviation as belonging to the UK as opposed to Europe, for example, and it would be extremely dangerous to do so. In due course, the Committee on Climate Change and the Government will have to decide how meaningfully to include aviation emissions in the UK targets—not to aim to limit them. As I understand it, there is no disagreement among any of the parties in this House, or on the Cross Benches or in Europe, that international aviation needs to come under controls and that that would best be done with international agreements starting with the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Therefore, if the Bill is to be amended to insist that the Committee on Climate Change produces some meaningful targets for international aviation for the UK, we have to be convinced that it is possible for it to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said that we produce figures now based on bunkering what fuel is put on to aeroplanes. He knows as well as I do that that does not in any meaningful sense represent the emissions arising from international aviation from flights into and out of the UK. I respectfully suggest that the amendments would put the climate change committee, and the Government in responding to it, in a hopeless position. They could not come up with a meaningful figure that would be operational in any sense and on which action could be taken. As I said in Committee, putting sectors and emissions into targets must imply that somewhere along the line you are capable of taking actions to meet those targets. Noble Lords on all Benches know that aviation emissions need to be tackled but they are best tackled across the whole of Europe through the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. As a country we will never take action outside the EU Emissions Trading Scheme because, quite apart from anything else, that would be illegal; you could not do it. You would not be allowed to do it. Airlines would simply go to the European Court of Justice. Therefore, I respectfully suggest that to expect the committee in its very first year to produce figures that are both meaningless and completely incapable of being acted on is not a sensible way to proceed.