EPA poised to target airlines with carbon rules

The forthcoming rule, which could come as soon as Friday, will likely shy from a strict legal definition of harm that environmental groups have been vying for to limit the threat the emissions pose to global warming.

Many scientists say the man-made emissions are causing the Earth’s climate to warm faster, causing more severe weather, droughts and flooding.

Instead, the EPA’s legal determination — known as an “endangerment finding” — will fall in step with the airline industry’s desire to harmonize emission limits globally through a special agency of the United Nations, rather than have the EPA decide targets for the industry.

“[I]t’s critical that aviation emission standards be agreed to globally — rather than individual countries adopting different standards – because aviation is a global business,” said Melanie Hinton, spokeswoman for Airlines for America, a trade group for the commercial airline industry.

The U.N. group, called the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, is developing emission standards that can be applied across a broad swath of countries. The endangerment finding the EPA is poised to make would assist the U.S. in adopting those regulations once completed, according to Airlines for America.

But environmental groups want the EPA to go further and faster in implementing its own standards. They sued the agency in 2010 to initiate the determination to ultimately regulate carbon from airlines under the Clean Air Act.

Sarah Burt, a senior climate attorney with the environmental group Earth Justice, said the EPA’s finding won’t be significant enough to establish strong regulations to reduce carbon.

She noted that the airline industry’s emissions are just below Germany’s and greater than Canada and Korea, “but unfortunately, given the magnitude of this source’s contribution to climate change, the tentative approach that EPA is considering is not up to the task.”

“Instead of using its Clean Air Act authority to reduce these harmful emissions, EPA proposes to follow the lead of the International Civil Aviation Organization … and set a ‘business-as-usual’ standard that will lock in emissions increases for decades to come,” Burt says.

“The U.S. share of the problem is considerable, and a more robust U.S. action could help ratchet up the international standard,” she said. She said her group is pressing the EPA to reconsider it approach and “fulfill its Clean Air Act obligations by proposing a rule that accomplishes meaningful reductions in pollution from aircraft.”

The standard that the international group is working on “won’t deliver substantial reductions because they are setting a standard that 90-95 percent of aircraft already meet,” Burt said, defining what she means by “business-as-usual.” The standard “won’t apply … to existing aircraft (which have 20-30 year lifespans) and are considering applying it only to new designs, which would push back the phase-in even more,” she added in an email.

Hinton, speaking on behalf of the industry, said “any regulatory action EPA takes must be consistent with both the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act, as well as the expected ICAO standard.”

She said the EPA and the Federal Aviation Administration have been engaged in the U.N. organization’s “work to develop a carbon dioxide standard for new type aircraft for approval in 2016, and that the EPA is moving forward with prerequisite action — required under the Clean Air Act — to ensure the U.S. is legally able to adopt the future international standard into U.S. law.”

Hinton says the record for U.S. airlines reducing their carbon emissions and improving fuel efficiency has been strong.

The industry, which she said accounts for 2 percent of U.S. manmade greenhouse gas emissions, has improved fuel efficiency 120 percent between 1978 and 2014, “saving 3.8 billion metric tons” of carbon dioxide emissions. That is nearly the equivalent of removing 23 million cars from the roads in each of those years.