Paper for the 12th Air Transport Research Society (ATRS) World Conference in Athens, Greece from 6 to 10 July 2008

摘要

In December 2006, mainly motivated by the expected high growth of aviation and the related impacts on climate change, the European Commission (EC) released a proposal on including airlines in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). In this study, three different allowance price scenarios (40?, 20? and 5?) to analyse the EC proposal are considered. Their possible impacts on the aviation industry (employment, domestic demand), on CO2 emissions and macroeconomic activity (GDP, employment) in the EU as a whole and its member states are examined. The analysis involved development and usage of the Energy-Environment-Economy Model for Europe (E3ME), a dynamic simulation model estimated by time-series econometric methods. The model allows the researcher to look at the EU ETS impacts on air transport in interaction with other sectors. For all price scenarios examined, the impacts on the aviation industry as well as the macroeconomic effects considered are small, supporting the findings from previous literature. Somewhat surprisingly, the impact on the numbers of industrial employees was slightly positive and reductions of industry level CO2 emissions were more significant than estimated by previous research. These results, however, are sensitive to the assumptions of the model, and in particular, to the anticipated number of allowances available for purchase by the aviation sector and by the ability of the power sector to switch to lower carbon fuels.