Advisers demand airlines pay for carbon removal to expand Heathrow

The Climate Change Committee has proposed, with admirable moderation, that Heathrow’s expansion be permitted only on condition that the airlines fund the removal of the carbon they intend to produce. This is a sound principle, and it wants only the courage of its own logic to become a truly modern instrument of governance. For if removal may stand in for reduction - if a ton of carbon exhaled over Berkshire may be answered by a ton extracted, on paper, from the general atmosphere at some future date by some future machine - then there is no reason whatever why the removal must precede the emission, or indeed occur within the lifetime of anyone presently drawing salary from the arrangement.

I propose, therefore, that the aviation industry be permitted to purchase Certificates of Retrospective Removal against the third runway’s full projected traffic, the certificates to be redeemable at such time as direct-air-capture technology reaches a scale and cost that render redemption practical - a date the Committee itself has been admirably careful not to name. The airlines pay now, in a sense; the atmosphere is cleaned later, in a sense; and the sense in both cases is financial rather than meteorological, which is, after all, the only sense in which the scheme was ever going to operate. Heathrow’s board need not concern itself with the distinction, since the Committee’s condition asks only that money change hands, not that carbon dioxide do so.

There will be objections that this merely formalises what critics already call greenwashing by installment. I answer that formalisation is precisely the service rendered. An informal evasion embarrasses everyone; a certificated one embarrasses no one, and generates fee income for whichever ministry is charged with auditing it. The passenger boarding at Terminal 5 for a weekend in Faro need feel no more responsible for the scheme’s eventual redemption than he presently feels for the whereabouts of his pension fund’s underlying assets, which is to say, not at all, and correctly so, since the arrangement was designed by people considerably more sophisticated than himself to spare him precisely that feeling.

Consider the family in the departure lounge, the father checking his phone for the gate change, the child asleep against the trolley - they are, in the fullest sense, paying customers of a removal industry that does not yet exist, purchasing on behalf of the airline a promise the airline has purchased from a market that has, in turn, purchased it from the future. Nobody in that chain has removed a single molecule. Everybody in that chain has behaved with complete rationality according to the incentives given them by an advisory committee whose only fault was believing that a market invented to defer a cost would ever be used to pay it.

The alternative - that expansion be permitted only after removal, actual, measured, verified removal, rather than removal notionally contracted for - would of course achieve the Committee’s stated aim at once. It would also halt the third runway indefinitely, since the technology does not exist at the necessary scale, and probably will not for decades. This being politically unacceptable, I trust the certificate scheme will be adopted promptly, and the runway opened on schedule, its departures rising into an atmosphere that has, on the relevant balance sheet, already been cleaned.