2023-07-12 06:17:00
Suppose aviation simply paid all taxes for which other sectors are also charged, but from which it is now exempt. Then airline tickets will become more expensive, travelers will fly less often and CO2 emissions will therefore decrease. And then, according to calculations by a European environmental organization, an extra two billion euros will end up in the Dutch treasury.
It’s a known fact. European aviation generally does not pay tax on kerosene and does not have to charge VAT on tickets. It is also treated leniently in the European Union’s emissions trading system. In that system, companies have to pay for their CO2 emissions. But aviation gets 75 percent of those emission allowances for free and the emissions from intercontinental flights do not count.
Road transport pays 54 cents per litre, aviation nothing
What if these exceptions expire? The European environmental organization Transport & Environment (T&E) started calculating. For example, she sees that road transport in Europe pays an average of 54 cents in tax per liter of fuel, and aviation pays nothing – except in the non-EU countries of Switzerland and Norway.
In its calculations, T&E assumes that there will be a kerosene tax of 38 cents per litre. That is not taken out of thin air. In Brussels, a plan for such a rate has been on the table for two years, only for flights within the EU, but there is great resistance to that plan. If that rate does apply, and then on all flights departing from Europe, it will jointly generate 14.5 billion euros in additional tax revenue for the countries involved.
KLM would have to pay 1.5 billion
Similarly, T&E estimates additional income from VAT. A number of European countries already have them, but always only on domestic flights. If you do that for all flights and you charge 20 percent, as is normal for many products, then 18.8 billion euros in tax will flow in.
Together with the extra revenues from emissions trading, if allowances are no longer free, the revenue will amount to 34.2 billion, for all European countries together, including those outside the EU. All these sums apply to 2022, a year in which aviation had not yet fully recovered following the corona pandemic. In 2025 it might be 47 billion. For the Netherlands, this sum will amount to 2 billion for 2022 and 2.4 billion for 2025.
T&E has also calculated how individual airlines stand out. KLM would have to pay an additional 1.5 billion in tax. KLM and other airlines have always fiercely opposed taxes that only apply in Europe, such as a kerosene tax. This only leads to companies avoiding Europe and even detouring for it.
‘End preferential treatment’
T&E does think taxes help. Of course, she is not interested in that extra income, although it does help if it is invested in sustainability. The environmental club wants to use real taxes to encourage aviation itself to do something regarding the climate damage it causes. This will happen automatically thanks to those higher taxes: the ticket price on, for example, intra-European flights would then rise by 24 percent, and that would put the brakes on the growth of air traffic.
The Dutch organizations Milieudefensie and Natuur & Milieu call on the government ’emphatically’ to put an end to the preferential treatment of aviation. First of all, the flight tax (now 26.43 euros per ticket) should be increased. “The tax should be higher for long-haul flights, which are much more polluting than short-haul flights,” the two say in response to the T&E study.
Cabinet does not want a flight tax for transfer users
There will be no flight tax for travelers who only visit Schiphol to transfer from one flight to another. No EU member state has a flight tax for these so-called transfer passengers, and the Netherlands does not want to be an exception. Minister Harbers (infrastructure) wrote this just before the fall of the cabinet.
According to research agency CE Delft, depending on the rate of that flight tax, the number of transfers will decrease by a maximum of 38 percent and the number of flights from Schiphol by a maximum of 13 percent. As a result, a number of intercontinental connections from Schiphol will be lost. Travelers will opt for other airports or refrain from flying, the latter leading to a reduction in CO2 emissions worldwide. But Harbers thinks preserving Schiphol’s network is more important.
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