So once again the UK government has seen fit to raise its Air Passenger Duty to try and cover its 118 billion pound deficit in 2010. Amusingly, it is still being presented as an environmental tax, even though the revenue raised now far outweighs the cost of a tonne of carbon and, just as before, not a penny of it goes on environmental projects.

What’s also interesting is that the move to make it a per-flight tax rather than per-passenger has been scrapped. While this is good news for regional and short-haul air transport, it does create the anomaly that the most efficient and necessary form of flying (on those routes that could not possibly be replaced by rail), long-haul, is being taxed more heavily. BATA, the British Air Transport Association, has some interesting figures on the increases that have occurred in recent years. During times of economic success the UK was able to stomach these kind of costs; it will be interesting to see if that continues during times of economic difficulty.
 
All this comes just as the Chairman of the Government’s Climate Change committee admitted that aviation can expand while overall emissions reduce – in stark contrast to the doom-mongerers out there who see flying as the major culprit of our climate woes. With the battle for the expansion of Heathrow reaching new proportions with BAA’s announcement that it’s prepared to accept an independent watchdog to monitor noise and emissions, it looks like the pressure on the industry to set out a path to a sustainable future is going to get even stronger.
 
- Image by Flickr user pictalogue