“Imposing a carbon price ten times higher for private jets than for cars”

DOf all sectors of activity, the aviation sector is one of the most difficult to decarbonize. It is responsible for 3% of global CO emissions₂and its emissions have more than doubled since 1990. If you take a Paris-New York round trip, you will be individually responsible for the emission of 1 ton of CO₂the emissions equivalent of 430 liters of gasoline.

The technical solutions for decarbonization remain uncertain. There is a lot of talk about e-fuels for air travel, produced from green electricity. Alas, 1 ton of e-kerosene would cost 3,500 euros, compared to 700 euros for a ton of kerosene made from petroleum! As burning 1 ton of kerosene emits 3 tons of CO₂each tonne of CO₂ avoided would cost around 1,000 euros, at least ten times more than many other decarbonisation actions, such as replacing coal with natural gas to produce electricity, or replacing an oil-fired boiler with a heat. It would therefore be very inefficient to ask the airline sector to quickly switch to these new sustainable energies, even though the European electricity mix still contains a lot of coal, or the potential for installing heat pumps is still very little exploited.

Social inequalities and transition

These very high decarbonization costs also suggest that carbon pricing will have little effect on the efforts of companies and their customers. A price of around 100 euros per ton of CO₂, which is currently that of the European Union Emissions Trading System (ETS), only increases the price of a round-trip plane ticket between Paris and Toulouse by 27 euros. Does this mean that the carbon pricing instrument is ineffective? No, but it only indicates that we should start by decarbonizing other sectors of the economy where the efforts produce more ecological impacts per euro spent.

Despite its modest weight in global emissions, the case of aviation is also emblematic because its users are much richer than the average. Allowing this sector to continue to grow when we are going to have to demand very significant changes in lifestyle and production in other sectors raises the question of the relationship between social inequalities and ecological transition.

Faced with the challenges of social acceptability of the transition, it is therefore appropriate to set up a higher carbon price for the products preferentially consumed by the most privileged social classes. Why not, for example, impose a carbon price ten times higher for private jets than for cars? At the level of 1,000 euros per ton of CO₂ avoided, we arrive in an area where the cost of e-kerosene becomes lower than the price of fossil kerosene plus the carbon tax, inducing a more sustainable technological shift. A compromise must be made here between the collective additional cost of this action and its impact on reducing inequalities, favorable to the social acceptability of the ecological transition.

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