Climate tsar says flight rationing unwelcome

Britain's growing hunger for flights abroad should not be rationed in the fight against climate change, the chief of the government's new climate change committee said.

Flights out of Britain already account for 6.4 percent of the country's CO2, and Britons were named in a survey last October as the world's worst offenders when it comes to carbon emissions from air travel.

Last year, the Conservative party - which is well above the ruling Labour party in opinion polls - suggested flights might have to be rationed in the future.

But aviation might need to be treated differently to other sectors of the economy, said Adair Turner, who heads the new committee created to monitor progress on cutting carbon dioxide when the government's Climate Change Bill becomes law later this year.

"It isn't okay for politicians and other elite groups to say you should ration your air travel when that would mainly affect those on low incomes," he told reporters late on Wednesday during a visit to Brussels to meet EU leaders.

From 2012, the European Commission plans to include flights for the first time in its Emission Trading Scheme, its key tool to fight global warming by making polluters pay for their carbon output.

Although airlines could initially get 90 percent of their permits to emit CO2 for free, the European Parliament is trying to make them pay for more and bring the plans forward a year.

Turner said studies had shown flying was the one area where Britons were least prepared to cut back to help the environment, and it was also an area where technology offered relatively little hope of a quick fix.

Compared to cars, where electric vehicles and hybrids are being rolled out, planes can offer incremental improvements in fuel consumption only through improved routing, less stacking above airports and minor engine changes.

"There is no reason that cars couldn't be below 100 grams (of CO2) per kilometre in the near future," said Turner, a former director-general of the Confederation of British Industry and a director of Standard Chartered Bank.

"In cars you can get dramatic savings. In the air, there is no such vision," he added.

But he said aviation would eventually have to be brought into some CO2 framework, as the planet might be unable to cope if people in countries such as China started flying with the same intensity as Europeans.