A European Union adviser has said Europe may decide in the next five months to extend a freeze on emissions limits for foreign flights to as long as 2020.
EU politicians will consider the position of nations, including the United Kingdon, that are unwilling to have the bloc’s emission limits imposed on flights outside the region, Pierre Dechamps, an adviser for energy and climate change at the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, said.
Bloomberg newsagency reports the bureau reports to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
The EU’s suspension of emissions curbs on international flights applied to 2012 and was called stop-the-clock.
Unless the bloc renews or changes the rules by April 30, airlines have to hand in allowances to match their 2013 emissions.
Bloomberg reports the UK said last month it would seek to extend the halt, which was brought in to avoid trade conflicts and enable global talks on ways to curb aviation emissions.
“I perfectly understand the point of the UK in this,” Mr Dechamps said at the Westminster Energy, Environment and Transport Forum in London.
“It could well be that, in the end, we rather go toward an extension of stop-the-clock until 2016 or even maybe 2020. It’s probably still in the right direction.”
Mr Dechamps said he was speaking in a personal capacity rather than on behalf of the European Commission, the EU’s regulatory arm.
The bloc’s carbon market, the world’s biggest, allocates tradable emission permits to polluters, which must surrender them to cover discharges or pay fines.
The EU expanded its program last year to cover airlines, triggering protests from Saudi Arabia to the United States that prompted it to suspend the carbon curbs on foreign flights for a year.
The United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) agreed in October to complete a plan in the next three years for an aviation emissions market to start in 2020.
Bloomberg reports envoys at the meeting in Montreal declined to validate the EU’s plan to include foreign flights in its Emissions Trading System (ETS) before the start of the global program.
The EC is proposing to make the regional portion of foreign flights subject to emission curbs from 2014, which the UK is seeking to modify, according to the country’s Department for Energy and Climate Change.
The commission’s proposal “doesn’t reflect global politics or reality,” Niall Mackenzie, head of industrial energy efficiency at the UK’s DECC, said at the Westminster Energy, Environment and Transport Forum.
“If the main prize is a global system, and we’re working towards that, why do you go and antagonize third countries?”
Some nations that support a global carbon market for airlines are “horrified” by the EC’s proposal, Mr Mackenzie said, without identifying countries.
Before Europe suspended carbon curbs on foreign flights, President Barack Obama signed a bill shielding US airlines from the rules and Russia announced it was considering limits on European flights over Siberia.
Airbus said in June that orders from China for A330 wide-body jetliners were in limbo after the government there froze the contracts.
“People who are on our side are threatening to walk away,” Mr Mackenzie said.
“I’m not sure how we can get the Chinese to buy our products, without their agreement. Threatening them all the time isn’t going to work,” he added.
