Emissions Trading :The EU gets up China's (and other peoples' ) nose cone

China has been unequivocal in its condemnation of the EU's inclusion of airlines in in its Emissions Trading Scheme from 1st January this year. It will refuse to pay and nor will it pay any resultant unilaterally imposed "fines". Good for the Chinese.

The notion of one area of the world unilaterally imposing its own ETS on any others wishing to fly into or over it is disturbing and extraordinarily arrogant.It does the EU and its standing in the world no good at all but it does show how this massive and barely democratic beaurocracy can behave when it thinks it can get away with it. In short just like any other massive and barely democratic beaurocracy. It also shows a supreme insensitivity to the needs in particular of many poorer non EU states. For decades ICAO, IATA and others have fought for the opening rather than closing of international airways and the reduction of charges. Russia and China which stand astride the fastest routes from Europe to Asia had been particularly restrictive and only truly opened up in the last 15 or so years. Now all carriers are able to fly these fast routes and recently even more over the North Pole have been opened up, albeit some of the very recent only to selected operators.

The benefits in terms of international business travel and the tourism on which many tropical developing countries depend have been enormous. Added to the manufacturers' and airlines' efforts to build ever more efficient aircraft and to operate them more cleverly these have lowered fares and made air travel affordable to much wider and more socially diverse markets. Air travel has boomed as result.

Now it's as if all these efforts have been wasted. An unholy alliance of stay-at-home-with-the-lights- out environmentalists and rapacious tax-thirsty governments are doing all they can to bleed the industry dry and leave what is left of it as the preserve of the wealthy, a notion which if they gave it a moment's thought is socially and politically highly objectionable.

Back to the Chinese though. Already by way of retaliation a Hong Kong order for 10 Airbus A 380s has been put on hold. Boeing will be salivating at the prospect of becoming a near monopoly supplier to the world's greatest buyer of new civil aircraft. It is also reasonable to assume that if Chinese aircraft were banned from the EU there would be immediate retaliation, not only for EU operated flights between the two areas but those taking by far the shortest routes between Europe and Asia which of course overfly China. What then? The beneficiaries would be non Chinese Asian airlines and the ever growing Gulf ensemble flying via intermediate points.

Hopefully by creating the possibility of an ever escalating and expensive (mainly to the EU) impasse and crisis ,China has forced an eventual sensible resolution and a Brussels rethink. The USA and others who have objected to the unilateral imposition of the scheme but been less clear about their response should now come out from behind their couches and declare quite simply "No",-and then not blink.