From the very beginning, the airplane has struggled against weight. Physically, that's its nature and the condition for its success. Economically, it's a habit and has become a distortion. There's no value-added tax on airplane tickets. There's no tax on aviation fuel, by virtue of the interpretation of a sixty-five-year-old international agreement. This fiscal weightlessness has contributed generously to the extraordinary boom in aerial transportation. If jet fuel were taxed as gasoline is, a Paris-New York ticket would cost 500 Euros more! In a world that seeks to pollute less, this exception is no longer tenable. The sector alone is responsible for 2 percent to 3 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. Even though the airlines are confronting a brutal crisis today, they have finally conceded that the current situation is indefensible. But how is the airplane to be brought back to fiscal earth? The companies, logically, aspire to settling the problem on their own. They rightly emphasize that the replacement of their fleets by more efficient planes will reduce their consumption and propose a whole series of solutions, from better traffic management to landing approaches that use less fuel.

    Governments deem just as logically that those efforts will be inadequate. At the European level, it has consequently been decided that the airline sector will no longer elude the CO2 emissions quota regime, as of 2012, with the ceiling set at 97 percent of their average emissions from 2004 to 2006. The companies that pollute more will have to buy quotas. At present, the Commission is endeavoring to establish the emissions ceiling, a crucial figure for the companies' profitability. But it did not put a sensor at each jet engine's outlet! So the Commission is engaging in complicated calculations, the results of which it was supposed to publish the beginning of August. It had to delay publication under pressure from the airlines, which are disputing the figures in order to raise the ceiling - that always falls within their rationale. But for once, the Commission is showing unfailing determination on this issue. The companies, and consequently, their passengers, will have to end up paying. And that's so much the better, as long as they find a good way to make a landing that doesn't turn into a crash for the airlines. There will still remain the more delicate question, given the present state of the relevant technologies: how to conciliate respect for the environment and aerial transportation.

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    Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.