WASHINGTON (AP) – A U.N. panel on Monday proposed long-sought greenhouse gas emissions standards for airliners and cargo planes beginning in 2020 for new aircraft designs and three years later for designs already in production.
The International Civil Aviation Organization said the agreement reached by 170 international experts sets a cutoff date of 2028 for the manufacture of planes that don’t comply with the standards. The standard must still be adopted by the agency’s 36-nation governing council.
Environmental groups quickly condemned the new standards, which they said were not stringent enough to meaningfully reduce pollution or slow climate change.
“These dangerously weak recommendations put the Obama administration under enormous pressure to take U.S. action against airplane pollution,” said Vera Pardee, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney who has sued the U.S. government over aviation emissions.
Last June, the Obama administration proposed regulating aircraft emissions, saying they are a threat to human health because they contain pollutants that help cause global warming. But a final U.S. decision on adoption of international standards is likely to be left to the next presidential administration. EPA officials said at the time that the earliest the agency is likely to propose adoption of ICAO standards would be in 2017.