The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to impose tougher emission standard on commercial airplanes in the United States, a move that experts say will lead to carbon taxes on airline passengers in the near future but one that could ultimately trigger the de-industrializing of America.
The order will not impact smaller planes or military aircraft.
The New York Times reports the directive is part of the Obama administration’s larger climate change agenda, but this step may have been unavoidable.
“The agency didn’t really have a choice here. This was going to be a non-discretionary decision,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Will Yeatman.
According to Yeatman, the die was cast on this policy and much more when the Obama administration made a fateful choice to pursue it’s climate change agenda through the Clean Air Act, a strategy rejected years earlier by the George W. Bush administration.
“The Clean Air Act is an interlocking mechanism, such that regulation begets further regulation. The upshot is when this administration made the choice to use the Clean Air Act as its vehicle to mitigate climate change, it, in essence, locked itself in on this course,” said Yeatman, who says lawmakers on all sides of the climate change debate believe the Clean Air Act was a terrible tool to implement an environmental agenda.
“There is agreement among them that the Clean Air Act is simply an inappropriate vehicle for this particular policy. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, when people were scared of global cooling. The act is meant to deal with pollutants like ozone and sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. It is meant in no way to deal with a pollutant as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide,” said Yeatman.
However, Yeatman says there are far more serious concerns about this policy than how tougher emissions standards might impact airlines and their passengers. He says the future of the American economy is at stake.
“It doesn’t stop here. The dominoes will keep on falling and the logical end, which is pretty scary, is something known as a greenhouse gas National Ambient Air Quality Standard. That would effectively necessitate the de-industrialization of the United States of America’s economy. That the sort of frightening end game. It’s where we’re headed due to this administration’s foolish choice to get this ball rolling,” said Yeatman.
Yeatman elaborated on the dominoes we’ve seen and those allegedly still to come.
“The program for cars that they started in 2010 triggered the program for stationary sources. They promulgated that in 2011 for power plants. They’ve actually got a pending rule for existing power plants and that triggered the one for airplanes. That will trigger the one further down the road for marine vessels. Ultimately, the Big Kahuna, the end game, the last trigger is this regulatory program known as National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS,” said Yeatman, who fears increasing emissions restrictions threaten the feasibility of American industry.
And what does the proposed regulation on airplane emissions mean for the industry and for passengers? For airlines, not much changes anytime soon.
“No one has a larger incentive to decrease greenhouse gas emissions because they are a function of fuel efficiency. No one cares more about fuel efficiency than the airline manufacturers (primarily Boeing and Airbus),” said Yeatman. “There’s nothing that direct regulation will be able to do. They can’t command some sort of miracle technology that will do beyond that which these manufacturers already strive to do.”
It’s a different story for passengers, who could be forking over higher airfares in the form of a per picket carbon tax if this rule is implemented.
“Who knows ultimately what it would be, one to five dollars or perhaps even greater. I’ve not heard any definite numbers bandied about, but that’s what we’re looking at, another surcharge on your airline ticket to join the 30 other surcharges. This one comes courtesy of the EPA and environmental special interests,” said Yeatman.
One of the few surprising political elements of this story is that the EPA is moving forward on the rule change despite opposition from the Obama administration.
“The administration didn’t want to do this. There are international negotiations ongoing about addressing aviation emissions and so the administration didn’t want its hands forced by the green groups, but that’s the way the law works,” said Yeatman.
“This administration bit off more than it can chew and now the chickens are coming home to roost if you will,” he said.
