Bad for the Environment, Good for Your Wallet: A One-Year Stay For EU Carbon Fees

I have mixed feelings about this one, as you can probably tell from the headline. Having just lived without power for a week, due to a 100-year-storm that came just one year after another 100-year-storm, I'm taking climate change quite seriously.

And I think the European Union's attempt to off-set the use of carbon in planes with the imposition of fees on the airlines (part of an emissions credits trading system) has merit.

But the political pressure on the regulators was too great, it seems. It was announced today that the European Union will hold off on charging these fees to non-EU carriers for a year while the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organization considers a global policy. The policy will still apply to flights that hop from one European country to another, just not flights that link Europe with the rest of the world. If the International body can't reach and agreement by April of 2014, the EU will re-institute the carbon caps.

Had they been imposed, the fees would have come to just a few euros per passenger.

Here's an article on the EU's about face.