The Nag

hello everyone

here’s my work so far on the flying nag. i’ll next be able to work on it on thursday so any thoughts by then would be fantastic.

We want to help make trains cheaper than planes. Air fuel isn’t taxed at the moment so we’re interested in the possibility of taxing it in the UK and Europe, and using the money to make trains cheaper.

i wanted to sum up for you some developments into our insights on the politics.

1. the chicago convention (a piece of international law agreed in 1945) is the main thing stopping european states from taxing kerosene
2. the uk’s official position is that it’s up for re-opening the chicago convention
3. there are no legal restrictions to taxing kerosene on domestic flights, or on flights between two countries. the netherlands and norway already tax kerosene on domestic flights. that means we could tax kerosene in the UK and use the money to make trains cheaper, and if we want to re-open the chicago convention, then we should put our money where our mouth is and do it here. then we could also tax kerosene for flights to and from the netherlands and norway – there are no legal restrictions on that either. so that’s a key message to ruth kelly, and to european transport comissioners (transport minsters from other european countries)

4. I spoke about it with david miliband the other night, and he said, forget the icao (A UN body now dominated by aviation industry lobby groups, that supports the Chicago convention), the chicago convention is an agreement of governments so it is governments that will need to re-open the agreement. He said the UK had always been up for that, but that it was other governments that were blocking it. i asked him which; he said the obvious, which I took to mean the US, china and Australia.

Now, I’m checking this out with an international lawyer, but as far as my clever friend Menka and I can tell from our studies in politics, Europe should be able to do what it wants within europe, provided it doesn’t hurt other countries. It’s a really important sovereignty issue. America should not be able to push europe around on EU policy. So if europe as a body wants to tax kerosene for flights within and between EU countries, it should be able to go ahead and do that.

5. Miliband also said that the end is more important than the means. So, the important end that he supports (and i’d agree) is that forms of transport reflect their environmental cost. The means that are being pursued at the moment is emissions trading, which has far more buy-in than tax. So he says, you’ll need a very strong argument for why emissions trading won’t lead to the cost of air travel reflecting its environmental cost before people will take calls for taxation seriously.

I’m in the process of putting that argument together – i’m about to speak with a friend of mine who’s been working on the emissions trading pilot for hte last couple of years and i’ll get back to you on that once it’s a bit more finalised.

So that’s the background.

Key messages i think:

1) Britain and other European countries, tax kerosene on domestic flights – particularly if you publicly are calling for the re-writing of the chicago convention

2) European countries – come together to collectively withdraw europe from the chicago convention, and tax kerosene on flights within and between member states

3) ICAO – rethink your position on kerosene taxation, create a membership representing a more balanced range of interests – and hire someone more independent than IATA to conduct your review (IATA is a coalition of 240 airlines. The last time the ICAO reviewed its anti-kerosene tax policy, IATA wrote the paper).