Flygindustrins gröna löften är mest luft – lobbar mot hårdare reglering

U.N.’s climate effort has been watered down, saving airlines billions.

“Wanna offset carbon?” Southwest Airlines Co. asks its passengers. The low-fare carrier invites customers to buy carbon credits to “show our shared planet love.”

Southwest shares in the credits by using them to offset its own emissions, according to its website. British Airways did the same in 2021, according to a spokeswoman.

Frontier Group Holdings Inc. calls itself “Mother Earth’s preferred airline” because it uses less fuel per mile, per seat than any other major U.S. carrier, the airline says. Yet Frontier doesn’t report or appear even to measure its carbon emissions, which form its carbon footprint.

The airline industry is a significant producer of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Yet airlines tout green credentials that hardly mitigate their emissions.

At the same time, industry groups are fighting rules on emissions. Last week they succeeded in watering down a United Nations-sponsored effort to offset emissions, saving the industry billions of dollars.

Southwest says its program is beneficial because it gives customers loyalty points and matches their purchases of carbon credits. A spokeswoman for British Airways, a unit of International Consolidated Airlines Group SA, said the use of customer-bought offsets to reduce its reported net emissions in 2021 was an error. The airline won’t use that approach going forward, the spokeswoman added.

Frontier says it is the greenest U.S. carrier because its aircraft are fuel efficient, it discourages baggage and it fits more passengers onto planes.

Global industry trade group International Air Transport Association has lobbied for years against climate rules. It warned that European proposals to make airlines pay more for emissions would “mark the end of low-cost air travel” on that continent. IATA fought against strengthening the U.N. emissions program at a global aviation assembly held last week in Montreal.

“Airlines have trade associations doing their dirty work,” said Jo Dardenne, aviation director at Transport & Environment, a green campaign group. “The airlines commit to net-zero publicly and then lobby behind closed doors.”

An IATA spokesman said the industry is committed to meeting the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 but wants to get there via the best route. “We know this is going to be expensive,” the spokesman said. “We just want to spend our money in the wisest way.”

The airline industry’s carbon emissions doubled between 1990 and 2019, data from industry organization Air Transport Action Group show. The group forecasts passenger numbers will more than double to 10 billion a year by 2050.

The airline industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to rise from 3% of the global total to 22% by 2050 as other industries reduce emissions, according to accounting firm Deloitte, unless an alternative to using fossil fuels for flying emerges.

There isn’t much to be done right now. Low-carbon or renewable jet fuels are scarce and expensive. Batteries that will allow cars and trucks to run on renewable electricity are too heavy for most aircraft. Other fuels such as hydrogen are still unproven.

Airlines and regulators are largely focused in the short term on getting carriers to buy carbon credits to offset their emissions. The money typically funds projects such as renewable energy that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions or the preservation of forests that absorb carbon dioxide. IATA predicts that airlines will rely on carbon offsets for 97% of their carbon-emissions reductions in 2025, and the number will still be 77.5% in 2035.

The industry’s main vehicle for carbon credits is a U.N. program that it helped develop called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or Corsia. The program, created in 2016, requires airlines to buy carbon offsets or use lower-carbon fuel to cover future emissions that go over a certain level.

Corsia was the result of a series of compromises that reduced its potential effectiveness. “Corsia is unlikely to materially alter the direct climate impact associated with air travel,” the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, concluded in a 2020 report.

Some of the biggest polluters such as China and India aren’t due to be covered until 2027. Domestic flights, most private jets and noncarbon greenhouse gases aren’t included.

A spokesman for the U.N. agency helping to implement the program, the International Civil Aviation Organization, said Corsia is only one part of a carbon-reduction strategy for international aviation and isn’t designed to cover domestic flights.

Another weakness of the program is the quality of the carbon credits it allows airlines to use to offset their emissions. When Corsia was being created, trade groups such as Airlines for America, which represents 10 of the largest U.S. carriers, lobbied for a range of credits “to ensure there is a sufficient volume of eligible emissions units.”

The projects that generate carbon credits vary widely in their effectiveness at mitigating carbon emissions. Each credit is supposed to offset one ton of carbon emissions, and their cost ranges from a few dollars to around $20. Cheaper credits typically come from projects that are seen as having little or no environmental impact.

Most of the credits purchased by airlines in the Corsia program are cheap, according to a Wall Street Journal review of pricing data from carbon market analytics firm AlliedOffsets. The recent estimated costof 30.4 million credits bought since 2020 by the 30 airlines ranged from $2.60 to $17.78, averaging about $9.40 a credit.

Programs such as Corsia often exclude credits deemed to be poor quality. Corsia excluded just a small portion of credits.

“The way Corsia decided eligibility was a bit of a blunt tool,” said Donna Lee, co-founder of Calyx Global, which rates the quality of carbon credits. The group’s analysis was superficial, she said. “You need to go deeper to separate the wheat from the chaff,” she added.

Corsia isn’t comparable to other programs because it “is the only market-based measure covering an entire sector of industry worldwide,” the spokesman for the U.N. agency said.

The latest effort by the airline industry to water down the Corsia rules is tied to the level of emissions that must be hit before airlines are required to buy offsets. The program originally required them to buy offsets if emissions rose above the average level for 2019 and 2020. The pandemic decimated flying in 2020, sharply lowering the average of those years.

Airline trade body IATA argued that averaging the 2019 and 2020 emissions levels would set the baseline so low, some countries might pull out of the program because of its high costs. That baseline would force the industry to spend an estimated $42 billion from 2024 through the 2035 end of the program, IATA said.

Corsia already had allowed the use of 2019 only numbers through 2024. That will likely “delay climate action by the civil aviation industry for several years,” the International Energy Agency said.

The industry succeeded in wiping out the 2020 levels from the program when countries last week set the Corsia rules for 2024 onward. As a compromise, it agreed that the baseline above which they will have to buy credits would be 85% of 2019 emissions. IATA said the bill for that will be $28 billion.