Environment Agency Fines Donald Trump for UK Aviation Emissions

Republican candidate and outsider for the United States presidency Donald Trump has been hit with a fine by the Environment Agency due to the excessive carbon emissions produced by his aircraft in the UK. Trump has fallen afoul of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which means that he will now be forced to pay a fine of £1,610 to the governing body.

Trump, a self-proclaimed climate change denier, might find the fine difficult to swallow due to his beliefs that carbon emissions are not affecting our planet’s atmosphere in the slightest. Back in 2012, he called the notion of global warming a concept “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

What Is the ETS?

The ETS is a framework of regulations put in place by the EU in conjunction with the Environment Agency in a bid to curb harmful pollution caused by aircraft across the globe. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the aviation industry contributes as much of 3.5% to the total effects of global warming in 1999 and in the intervening 17 years, the numbers of flights taking place has risen significantly. In fact, as of 2014, three billion air travel seats are sold every year, with roughly 8.3 million people taking to the air each day.

Despite these alarming statistics, the aviation industry was omitted completely from the COP21 climate change talks in Paris, which focused mainly on improving air quality via the reduction of transport-related pollution and introducing limits on industrial emissions. This allowed the aviation sector something of a free pass in terms of curbing its emissions. The ETS is a method of addressing this discrepancy by introducing mandatory carbon permits (often available for free or a nominal charge to airlines) – or alternatively by charging a fixed fee of £75 for every tonne of harmful emissions.

The news of the fines comes in the wake of talks by NASA at the beginning of the year, who indicated that the US aviation industry could save as much as $250 billion and reduce their emissions by 75% if they took steps to incorporate existing green technologies into their aircraft.  

Trump in Good Company

Trump is not the only individual or company to fall afoul of the regulations. In fact, in comparison to some of the other amounts being charged to companies, his fine looks positively trifling.

21^st Century Fox, for example (owned by Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch), was charged £17,463, while the Bahrain royal family were hit with a penalty of £60,698. However, the biggest fee was reserved for construction company JCB, who were told they must pay a whopping £157,596.

In total, 25 companies were charged for not complying with the ETS regulations. The ruling comes as especially bad news for Trump, who lost a court case blocking the construction of a wind farm nearby his golf course in Aberdeenshire earlier in the year.