By Anders Lorenzen

Around the world, new airports have been popping up right, left, and centre, but none has been so controversial as the proposed third runway at London`s main airport, Heathrow, the UK’s most important and busiest airport. Over the years, successive UK governments have dithered on this issue, mainly due to opposition from green and environmental groups and local people.

In a growth-focused speech delivered to UK businesses last week by the UK’s Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has struggled to stimulate growth since the Labour Party secured a landslide victory six months ago, declared the government’s support for the third runway at Heathrow. 

People and organisations are divided on whether they are for or against the runway. Still, Heathrow also presents a much bigger issue: what is behind the explosion in aviation growth. Except for 2009, the financial crisis year, and 2020, the pandemic period, aviation has grown every year between 2006 – 2024 and preceding that. 

Once a luxury

Not more than a couple of decades ago, air travel was seen as a luxury. Since then, ticket prices have decreased considerably, and air travel in many developed economies is almost as regular as any other form of transport.

One of the reasons that flying continues to be so cheap and sometimes rivals the price of train tickets is due to the number of exemptions the industry receives.

The exemptions the industry receives

For instance, jet fuel is exempt from fuel duty in the UK and EU. This means that airlines don’t pay the same tax on fuel as other transportation modes, like cars. Additionally, European airlines do not pay fuel duty, a tax all motorists pay – which means that European airlines receive billions in subsidies annually. The EU’s carbon market, EU ETS – the world’s largest, exempts most flights departing from Europe and provides many free allowances.

According to the non-profit organisation, the Aviation Environment Federation, all these exemptions have contributed to the popularity of air travel and the significant growth of aviation-linked CO2 emissions, which have increased by over 125% since 1990. 

Additionally, airlines have remarkably few legal requirements to reduce emissions, and carbon offsetting is voluntary for airlines and passengers.

Many policymakers, economists and climate advocates have argued that it is well overdue to bring the airline industry along with other transport sectors. Stating there should not be one rule for aviation and another for the others. Generally, subsidies are something you give to an upcoming sector to help it establish itself, and this may have been the case for aviation at one point – but it is fair to say this is no longer the case.

Unfair competition

Aviation competes with train travel for domestic routes in the UK and other countries. France and Spain have made the progressive move by banning domestic flights that can be made in under 2.5 hours by train or car. The proven carbon footprint of air travel is far more climate-damaging than almost all other transport forms, so there is an increasingly vocal argument that we should sit idly by and allow short domestic air journeys to be more attractive than train journeys. Generally, consumers choose the cheapest options, and the priority should be for policy-makers to ensure that a trip that can be made by car, bus, train, or ferry is not more expensive than flying.

If the public and businesses urged policymakers to initiate such a policy for fairness and competition and for the sake of the climate and the environment, then, we may be able to slow down the growth in aviation while developing robust alternatives and investing in rail infrastructure so it can compete with domestic air travel.

Progressive policy moves could stop the airline industry from benefitting from various tax exemptions and use the income to invest in rail infrastructure and other critical infrastructure to level the playing field.

To date, aviation accounts for 2.5% of global emissions, which has steadily been growing year by year.

When Rachel Reeves made her speech, she cited the growth in Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and the efficiency of aeroplanes. While these are all true, the emissions savings are minuscule due to how much SAF is deployed, and there’s also a limit to how much you can keep making efficiency gains. Additionally, there are carbon costs associated with producing even sustainable jet fuel. In some cases, for example, where it is made from biofuel and involves taking up agricultural land generally used for food production, the sustainability element drastically declines.