Category Archives: Environmental Issues

New taxes likely on USA flights

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Fed up with high Air Passenger Duty on flights from the UK? Tough – it looks like taxes are likely to get a lot steeper on flights departing from airports in the USA.

In what USA Today are calling a rare show of unity, it looks like politicians from both side of the fence are accepting that increasing taxes on flights is a ‘low hanging fruit’ option which would be easy to implement, and which would just lead to airlines passing on the extra charges to passengers.

Perhaps politicians on the other side of the pond are being more honest in one respect – there is no suggestion of these taxes being an environmental levy, it is a simple means of providing some funds to help plug the multi-billion dollar budget deficit. Where they have an easy sell is in proposals to double the ‘security fee’ from $2.50 to $5 per flight – a move which will affect all UK visitors flying home, aswell as any UK tourists taking internal or connecting flights within the US. The irony, of course, is that this tax is totally disproportionate to the actual costs of providing security, which can also be met through the airport usage fee. In the USA, even now we have passed the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 horrors, security is an easy sell – whereas in Europe I think we are a bit more sceptical.

There is also a proposal to tax each flight to the tune of $100 per departure – a proposal previously mooted in the UK, but never implemented.

No doubt our fresh-faced new transport secretary will be watching closely!

APD is not a green tax – told you so!

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As confirmed in our news story, chancellor George Osborne has admitted what we knew all along, namely that Air Passenger Duty (APD) is purely a revenue raising measure, not a green tax.

Finally Chancellor George Osborne has, albeit unwittingly in the form of a leaked letter, admitted that APD is “fundamentally a revenue raising duty” and currently raises around £2.5billion per year.
Mr Osborne’s admission that APD is nothing more than a tax grab came in a letter obtained by a national newspaper that he wrote to Olivier Jankovec, director general of the Brussels-based Airports Council International.

  • Do you think it is a green tax?
  • Do you think it should be revised up or down?
  • Do you think flights should be taxed in a different way?

 

How About High Speed 2 Wheels?

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For a long time, when asked about the need to reduce the environmental impact of aviation, my stock answer would be that transferring shorthaul flights on to high-speed rail services should be an obvious aim for governments. Yet, the more I have learnt about this governments high-speed two proposals, the more I have felt that it would be a very poor investment indeed, whether measured on economic or environmental grounds. Yes, having high-speed trains would shift some people from shorthaul flights onto less polluting rail services, but it has to be remembered that this big switch has already been largely made, especially on flights from London to Leeds, Liverpool and Durham Tees Valley, which no longer operate.

So if high-speed 2 is a bad investment, what would be a better investment? Obviously, any comparison between rail and air travel is about longer distance intercity journeys, whereas the vast majority of journeys take place within built-up environments, or are commutes between outlying towns and city centres. What if all the money collected from air passenger duty was actually put towards genuinely environmentally beneficial projects? Few things are better for the environment than high-quality off-road walking and cycling tracks, using existing historic transport corridors, especially disused railway lines. Yet, this can be done for a fraction of the cost of building new ones — the figure quoted by cycling charity Sustrans is that new cycle paths can be built for around £200,000 per mile, compared to the £155,000,000 per mile cost of high-speed 2.

Now, can these really be comparable, when high-speed 2 must surely carry far more people at much higher speeds? Yes, it might well do, but its entire business model is based on very ambitious estimates of user figures. Why put so many billions of pounds into such an inherently risky project? Whether high-speed 2 is viable or not (and we are certainly in the no camp), investing in better facilities for pedestrians and cyclists would still provide a much quicker win, both in terms of transport and human health.

We need Slowjet, not Fastjet

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Plans by easyJet founder Sir Stelios to launch a new airline,  tentatively called Fastjet, a have not surprisingly drawn much derision from within the airline industry. At this stage, we do not know how serious he is, nor do we know exactly what form this airline will take, but we certainly do know that there is little appetite amongst consumers for yet another low-cost European airline.

Some speculators have suggested that this might be low-cost with a twist — for example by either buying BMI itself, or its Heathrow slots, and offering a low-cost service between traditional premium airports. Others think that Stelios might have a go at the low-cost long-haul, or even the low-cost premium long-haul market. Neither of these two options would be a challenge to the easyJet business model, whereas a new low-cost airline, even if using premium airports, would certainly be a direct challenge to easyJet, in a market that is already saturated and unsettled.

Who needs Fastjet? The name brings associations with the latest British Airways advert, which draws nostalgically on their operation of Concorde, and reminds us that the crowded European skies and congested, security obsessed airports are making air travel slower, not faster. So would Stelios’ new airline, in whatever form it takes, really speed the whole game up? We very much doubt it.

Two years ago, then easyJet boss Andrew Harrison came up with a much more interesting proposal, the easyJet eco-jet, which was the concept for a new aircraft to be delivered around 2020, which when combined with other changes to European air traffic control, could deliver emission savings of up to 50% per passenger mile travelled. This at the time had many revolutionary features, and whilst not technically a jet, as it would use to rear mounted propellers, it would represent a step change in the airline industry. Cruising speeds would be around 10 to 15% slower than the typical jet aircraft used by the low-cost airlines, enough to take advantage of the efficiency savings rear mounted propellers will offer, but not so much a difference as to put people off from using it.

We’ve been through the low-cost revolution, and there is little that Stelios is likely to be able to deliver to develop this further, certainly in terms of European flights. We are still crying out for further developments in the environment revolution. Some people say that the term environmentally friendly flights is an oxymoron, but we have always begged to differ. Now is as good a time as any to bring forward the slow jet.

New York flights tax has been cut, but the imbalance still exists.

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It looks like Continental Airlines have been successful in their lobbying over the extortionate taxes charged on their New York flights from Belfast International Airport. Yet, when looked at from any other perspective, this is a very strange intervention from the chancellor. Why pick out this one route, and why offer only partial devolution of air passenger duty to the Northern Ireland assembly?

Surely other regional airports, particularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow, which also have long haul flights, and are under a devolved government, will now start asking for exemptions. Should long haul flights be the top priority, considering that APD is still marketed as an environmental tax, and that these are the flights which cause the highest levels of pollution?

For us, the biggest imbalance still exists on domestic flights, and this is at its greatest in Northern Ireland, where alternative train services are not available. Just how important are New York flights from the Belfast economy? Surely the most important link is with London – yes these flights are taxed in both directions, even if at a lower rate. Business users can still absorb the cost. A family of four considering flights to Spain or flights to Exeter for a holiday in Devon are going to think twice about being taxed twice for the domestic holiday. This is what really shoots the British tourist economy in the foot.

When cycling is worse for the environment than flying

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Cycling is bad for the environment. Fact!

Few people if any would argue with the idea that a cycling holiday on the Norfolk Broads would be far less damaging to the environment than a family trip to Disneyland, complete with long haul flights to Orlando and a gas guzzling SUV hire.

However, does that mean that cycling is always better for the environment? I am reading through my excellent Sustrans guide to Cycling in the UK, which features some superb routes on off-road cycling paths throughout the length and breadth of the country. In the introduction is a note from Alistair McGowan, in which he claims that cycling is ‘carbon free’. It is at this point that I have to stop. Breezing along a canal tow path certainly looks pollution free, when compared to a belching old diesel bus, but it just isn’t as simple as that. Carbon dioxide is of course an invisible pollutant, but it is still a pollutant, and you have to look at the whole life cycle chain.

How is it possible for cycling, or any form of human activity to be carbon free – after all, what are carbohydrates? Now we all need to eat, and for many, a bike ride is a good way of burning off excess calories, but what happens on longer cycle rides, when extra food needs to be consumed to be burned off during the ride?

Now remember that this is a blog post, not a peer reviewed scientific paper, but this was my thought when I read McGowan’s claim:

Some highly processed foods such as cornflakes require up to 50 times as much energy to be produced as they yield to the human consumer. Other foods might be shipped vast distances by air, whereas meat and dairy products require large emissions of methane from cows, which as many airline bosses will tell you, could be a much bigger problem than the emissions from air transport. The very obsession we have with ‘carbon footprints’ forgets that carbon (well, actually carbon dioxide) is only half of the problem.

The human body when considered as a machine is approximately 20% efficient, and many of us, including myself, waste up to 1/3 of all the fresh fruit and vegetables we buy — can you imagine filling up your car and then spraying a couple of gallons over the forecourt?

So, here’s the quick back of the envelope calculation — a 100 kg cyclist and bike at 20 miles an hour should need around 1/40th of the energy to keep moving, compared to a one-ton car and driver at 40 miles an hour. This is based on them having 1/10th of the mass and having 1/4 of the friction (double the speed, quadruple the friction). Cars are also around 20% efficient at converting fuel into kinetic (motion) energy, including the energy needed to refine the fuel and transport it to the petrol station. Therefore, even though the cyclist only has 1/40th of the momentum, he still needs 50 times the energy to produce the food in the first place, so cycling uses 25% more energy than driving, on a per-mile basis.

Mile for mile, the emissions caused by flying are compatible to driving, depending of course on the type of aircraft used, the route and occupancy levels, and also depending on the car journey the flight is compared to, and the number of occupants. If we assume a typical low-cost flight on a 80% full Boeing 737 800 wingtips, the cornflake munching cyclist is again a less efficient machine than the aircraft.

A self-rightous lycra-clad cyclist popping along to his local station thinking ‘aren’t I being wonderfully green today’ may pop his bike in a space which could otherwise seat three passengers – causing similar emmissions to driving a car too.

So even if this argument might be a little tenous, it is equally preposterous to claim that cycling is carbon free, when it clearly isn’t. It is just as bad as claiming that electric trains, nuclear power, wind turbines or battery powered cars are ‘carbon free’ – when none of them are, as all have additional hidden environmental costs.

Cycling is bad for the environment – that is an indesputable fact, in that cycling creates carbon dioxide emmissions, and in that there is a huge knock-on requirement in the food production cycle. However, cycling is still relatively good for the environment, if we are to assume that most trips are using calories which need to be burned off anyway, and that the alternative would be to go by car. Just remember though – there is no such thing as a carbon-free lunch.

ICARUS fell out of the sky – I hope Flybe’s planes don’t

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So, congratulations to Flybe on winning the ICARUS award, which is actually an award for environmental progress, which I am sure they very strongly deserve, given their commitment to fleet modernisation and environmental labelling.

But I can’t help from wondering which idiot came up with the name ICARUS for this award. Do they not know the story, or do they have a different version? In the one I know, Icarus flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, so he plummeted straight out of the sky. The story is supposed to be a warning to those who have too lofty ambitions.

Now we’ve come a long way since the legend of Icarus – and yes, one day we might be able to float around like birds with massive wax wings. Correction – some people already like to put on silly bird suits and throw themselves of mountains. Good luck to them – I’m sure it is a great adrenaline rush. But this is just NOT the best name to associate with an award for an airline. To me, it sounds just too much like the Darwin Awards for human stupidity. Oddly enough, there is an airline called ‘Darwin Airline’, and in a cuthroat industry where only the strongest survive, I’m amazed to say that they are still going (double check, yes they are). I flew with them once from Berne to London City – even though that route has since become extinct.

So I might get myself in trouble for saying this, but I think you’d get the same answer if you asked any traveller in your local pub – which airline would you most associate with an ‘Icarus Award’ this year. Answers on a postcard from Rio please.