ETS and long-haul flights: Europe must not miss its boarding call

An aircraft doesn't take off by abolishing gravity. It takes off by mastering it. The same is true of the ETS, Europe's carbon-credit system. You can see it as an extra weight loaded onto air transport. Or as the force that compels an entire industry to become more efficient.

This July, the European Commission is expected to unveil its proposal on the mechanism's future. Bringing long-haul flights — until now exempt from the ETS — into its scope divides the aviation community, between defenders of the status quo and players, often newer ones, calling for a strong signal in favour of decarbonising the sector.

We are at a fork in the road; two trajectories lie ahead of us. Let us gain some altitude to examine them.

If air transport as a whole now falls under the ETS, airlines will have no choice but to hunt down every source of waste. Every kilo of fuel saved will count twice: it will cut not only their energy bill, but also the number of carbon allowances they have to buy. The room for improvement is immense, because the solutions already exist: optimising consumption with tools like SkyBreathe, towing aircraft to the runway with electric tugs, plugging planes into airports' electrical grid rather than running their auxiliary engines, avoiding absurd detours, making continuous-descent approaches standard, speeding up fleet renewal with the most fuel-efficient aircraft… Millions of litres of fuel are already saved this way; the ETS gives them the economic value they lacked to become the norm. Carbon stops being merely a cost: it becomes one more reason to invest in intelligence.

Conversely, keeping long-haul flights outside the ETS would offer immediate relief, but would above all risk postponing the transformations we cannot do without. Airlines would remain dependent on a variable they don't control: the price and availability of oil. They would keep enduring its swings to feed a model of the past, instead of regaining control of their costs in order to invest in competitiveness.

History shows that innovation changes the world when it becomes more advantageous than the status quo. That is precisely the role of well-designed rules of the game. A significant share of the revenues (estimated at nearly €9 billion a year) should therefore be reinvested in the aviation sector, in order to accelerate the very innovations it seeks to encourage — in particular sustainable fuels (for tomorrow) and green hydrogen (for the day after). A public policy is effective when it turns a constraint into a capacity to act.

So yes, long-haul tickets will probably cost more during this transition, but they would remain infinitely cheaper than they were two or three decades ago. That added cost also tells a truth long kept hidden: the price of a flight has never reflected its climate cost. This signal will lead us to question the necessity of certain journeys and the value we place on each trip — and, above all, it will finance the emergence of clean aviation. Like any great industrial transformation, the transition has a price. The illusion would be to believe that standing still has none!

The future of aviation will not depend on our ability to fly less — desirable, no doubt, but unrealistic given the aspirations of emerging countries in this field. It will depend on our ability to fly infinitely better.

The challenge is not to choose between flying and protecting the climate. It is to ensure that one finally makes the other possible.

First published by Le Temps and La Tribune.