ATW Daily News

Report: EC to postpone aviation emissions cap announcement until 2010

Thursday October 1, 2009

The European Commission won't formally announce a baseline aviation sector CO2 emissions standard until mid-2010, postponing the announcement for the second time, Bloomberg reported.

The EC originally was supposed to set a 2012 emissions cap for flights into and out of the EU over the summer. The directive including aviation in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme from 2012 gave the EC an Aug. 2, 2009, deadline for publishing a CO2 baseline for the sector, but the Commission postponed the date after Europe's main airline associations voiced concern over methodology and the accuracy of the data used to calculate the average annual sector emissions of the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.

In August the EC confirmed to this website it had decided to postpone announcement of the cap until this autumn because it preferred "accuracy over deadline." The Assn. of European Airlines has called on it to adopt a revised timeframe for inclusion of aviation in the EU ETS given the delay.

by Cathy Buyck

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