Green tinge for the red roo?

The scheme seems to be a pre-emptive move to allay wider community concerns about aviation’s contributions to global warming.

“There’s no denying that the air transport industry is the fastest growing of all the transport industries and it’s very important to make a real attempt to minimise our footprint,” Geoff Dixon said. Aviation’s challenge is that there is no easy way of significantly reducing aircraft emissions.

“When you look at the sources of emissions, you realise there are going to be some types of emissions that you can really only offset,” Minister Turnbull said. “I think aviation for the foreseeable future falls into that category. ” To launch the scheme Qantas pledged that September 19 would be its ‘Fly Carbon Neutral Day’, where it would pay approximately $500,000 to offset the 40,000 tonnes of carbon emissions generated flying 100,000 passengers on almost 950 flights worldwide, including on Jetstar and QantasLink. That money will be used by the company CO2 Australia to plant 90,000 Mallee eucalyptus trees at various sites around Australia, with the trees, as they grow, to sequester the equivalent carbon emitted by the Qantas Group flights.

From September 20 the scheme began operating on a voluntary basis, with offset costs ranging from $1. 28 for a one-way Melbourne- Sydney sector to $4. 36 for a Sydney-Perth leg and $17. 17 for a Sydney-Los Angeles trip. Accredited carbon offset schemes will use the money to plant trees and invest in renewable energy.

Functionally Qantas and Jetstar’s implementation of the scheme differs, with Qantas passengers having to make a separate transaction to buy carbon offsets, while Jetstar passengers can opt to offset their flights as part of the flight booking process.

With the Qantas Group joining Virgin Blue, Australia becomes the first country where all its major airlines offer a carbon offset scheme, although anecdotal evidence suggests the take-up rate of similar voluntary schemes overseas has been slow.

“This is going to be interesting,” Dixon told Australian Aviation. “Given our size and prominence, I think it will give to us, and we can pass on to others, information on just on how supportive the populace is of these sorts of things. ” Certainly Jetstar’s incorporation of the ability to offset flights at the time of booking seems to be a relatively successful approach, if early indications hold true. The airline reported that 10 per cent of passengers elected to offset their flights in the scheme’s first week of operation.

Introducing the scheme across the group required much work in quantifying the airline’s emissions.

“We needed to go through the process of getting our emissions measured which we’ve done. They’ve been not only audited by the AGO but also by KPMG our external auditors, it’s part of our annual report,” Qantas chief risk officer Rob Kella explained. “Now . . . we can say that if you want to participate as an individual consumer we’ll give you the ability to. We’ll have the reporting available shortly for our corporate customers which will tell them effectively what their carbon footprint has been for the last quarter, giving them the ability, if they want, to invest through our scheme or another scheme, how they might offset those emissions going forward.

“How can we do that? Because we spent three years at a minimum really pursuing the whole (fuel) consumption pattern, how can we reduce consumption.

So we’ve got information by sector, by type of equipment, which we can then easily take into an offset scheme. ” But longer term the aviation industry’s involvement in a mandatory emissions trading scheme (ETS) offers a more effective, longer term solution to reducing emissions.

“Obviously an ETS gives us a whole of sector, whole of industry perspective,” Kella said. “If it’s built the right way, if it’s got the right signals and pointings, if you will, I think it is something we can work with. ” But Dixon warns, “Anything that does end up being done, and this is what people have got to watch, will always be passed on to the consumer. ”