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Carbon Taxes In The Skies

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by Yves Smith and Felix Salmon
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Jun 13 2007 12:00am EDT

Carbon Taxes in the Skies

The UK Conservative Party has a bright idea on the carbon-tax front: a tax on air flights which is directly linked to that flight's carbon emissions. At the moment, the taxation system gives airlines no real incentive to be carbon-efficient, even though emissions from airplanes are particularly harmful from a climate-change perspective. The UK's opposition Conservatives want to change that, and propose a tax which gives every UK citizen one "free" flight per year, after which carbon taxes start kicking in.

This week, London mayor Ken Livingstone, who is at least as far to the left as the Tories are to the right, supported the proposal, which has, inevitably, been attacked by the airlines as a "tax on fun". Maybe the trick, at the outset, would be to make the new carbon tax lower, in aggregate, than the £10 to £80 Air Passenger Duty it is designed to replace. If it can be spun as a tax cut, it might garner less opposition. Then, as a "sin tax", it can always be raised later.

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