Regarding ‘EU children still exposed to Internet risks‘, a worrying statistic highlights that almost half of children who use social networks have no idea how to change their privacy settings or how to adjust their profiles.

It is a sad fact that parents may inadvertently cause their children to be exposed to the innumerable risks that an unprotected social network profile can lead to. Raising awareness by educating children and especially parents on safer Internet use can significantly improve children’s online safety.

With fewer and fewer people vulnerable to online dangers and able to remain secure on the Internet, more and more people can engage confidently in cross border e-commerce, for example, contributing to the creation of a digital economy in Europe.

Organisations such as ECDL Foundation recognise the need to raise awareness of the risks and to ensure that both parents who lack digital literacy and their children can learn how to protect themselves online. They have launched a new ICT skills development certification programme to address the gap in IT security awareness, and provide Europeans with the skills they need to avoid the hidden dangers of surfing while safely benefiting from the many advantages the Internet can offer.

Through the Safer Internet Programme 2009-2013 the European Commission has taken action in a number of areas, namely awareness raising through Safer Internet Centres, supporting law-enforcement bodies in combating online child sexual abuse material online, setting up a knowledge base on young people’s use of technologies, involving civil society and filtering and content labelling. Education is also essential in enabling parents and children to properly understand how they can actually protect themselves online.

First and foremost, it is up to the parents, teachers, primary care givers and guardians to protect our children, make them aware of the dangers and then provide them with the necessary knowledge and ICT skills to recognise and mitigate against the dangerous predators, cyber bullies etc. that unfortunately are ever present on the Internet.

Skills development programmes can enable users to educate themselves in safer internet use and should be incorporated into future EU-level recommendations.

Fiona Fanning

Secretary-General

Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS)

Regarding ‘Brussels defends 5% budget increase for 2012′:

Oxfam is shocked that the proposed increase in the 2012 EU budget announced by European Commissioner Lewandowski remarkably seems to include a €70 million reduction in the budget for overseas aid.

We are astonished that development aid is seen as the easiest way to “reflect austerity” and “cut where it is needed” even though its impact on the poorest people has been proved time and time again.

While €70 million is a tiny amount compared to the whole EU budget, it represents a huge sum of money for developing countries.

EU aid is saving lives and increasing the economic prospects of millions of people, and in the last ten years alone international aid has helped 33 million children into school. As the world’s largest donor the EU has been instrumental in this achievement and we expect it to maintain this leadership.

But at a time when the EU looks to negotiate its budget for the period 2014-2020, the proposals now by the commissioner to cut the EU’s overseas aid is sending out a very worrying message.

We hope that the European Parliament and the EU member states will right this wrong when they state their positions on this proposal in the course of the coming months.

Nicolas Mombrial

EU Policy Advisor

Oxfam International

Although my Swiss S&T Foundation has been warning of the developing economic might of the East and its social and economic effects on the West for two decades now, western economies are now forewarned that China has now entered the fourth phase of its economic blueprint and the head of their central bank has advised their government to offload some US$2 trillion of reserves – or in other words US$2,000,000,000,000.

Indeed, the bank advises that they invest at least this amount of the US$3.04 trillion they presently hold in reserves, in technologies and investments that will enhance the nation’s future prosperity further. Not many economists warned at the start of the 1990s of the dire effects that this massive balance of economic power transference would have on the West and only in relative recent times have they come to realise this (no more than a decade ago).

This enormous buying power, which is increasing at around US$200 billion a quarter in further Chinese reserves, will see vast numbers of Western corporations and therefore Western jobs fall into the hands of the Chinese (and other eastern corporations).

This is just the start of the fourth phase of the Chinese blueprint and China’s ultimate goal is to capture the dominance in global innovation that will provide for them an unassailable lead in global wealth in the 21st Century. Our charity has known these facts for years, but no Western government has taken any notice. Now this sheer complacency on the part of our politicians and industrialists will simply reap absolute havoc on Western economies and their people.

But the big question is, when will these same pillars of our Western establishment realise that the only way to stem this vast economic and social threat to our people is to develop and put in place a creative infrastructure that allows all people’s thoughts to bear down onto this great economic imbalance?

Again, our Swiss charity has been calling on governments for two decades to implement this world-leading pre-eminent thinking, but again, unfortunately they simply have not listened. For it is the only way to turn the tide and create whole new industrial global bases. In this respect we need the ideas people to be fully harnessed and allowed to flourish. If we do not understand this, we shall simply see over the next two decades a vast unprecedented decline in our living standards.

Therefore our politicians have been advised and warned again, but if this time if they do not listen, they will see their people impoverished like never before. Wake up, Western governments, to the realities that reside on the horizon for us all if we do not change our economic thinking radically.

Dr David Hill

Executive Director

World Innovation Foundation

In a mere twenty years’ time to 2031, the UK and the EU will be reaching the limits of despair when trying to capture any major future foothold in the global economic stakes. This will not be due to its people, but their governments with regard to their current and medium-term policies.

These policies are inherently based in the old thinking that by joining universities and business together we can achieve economic dynamism in the future. It forgets that there are three crucial elements to achieve this – the ‘ideas’ phase, the R&D phase and the corporate commercialisation phase.

I say forget, as the primer of this most important energiser for economic wealth creation, the ideas phase, is not taken seriously. It is the most important and fundamental missing factor. For without world-changing ideas first, the process cannot even begin.

The British and EU systems do not comprehend what the history of S&T tells us: up to 75% of all the inventions that have made the modern world what it is today did not emanate from within the confines of our universities or advanced corporate research centres of excellence, but in the minds of ‘independent’ innovators, far removed from the final two innovation elements that constitute the ‘innovation chain’.

Indeed, the ‘independent’ ideas element is more or less non-existent in UK and EU economic policy. This is unlike what is emerging in the East, where they are now starting to see that the ideas people are the most important commodity that a nation has.

In twenty years’ time, therefore, with this lack of foresight and new thinking in Britain and the EU, we shall in reality just be hangers-on in the global economic stakes. Therefore for its own good, the United Kingdom and the EU have to start thinking ‘out of the box’ and give total prominence and resources to the initial ideas people. For if they do not we shall see in our own lifetime the inevitable collapse of living standards, the like of which we have never seen before and our offspring will live to be totally subservient to the economic might and power of the East.

That is why it is so vitally important that we create now the innovative infrastructure throughout Europe for our ideas people to flourish and thereby equip our nations with the dynamic products and services that we shall dearly need.

When will the UK and the EU realise this is the big question, for it has the most overriding repercussions and consequential economic effects that have ever been seen before for the 500 million+ people of the European Union?

We really have to start thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ like our Eastern counterparts before it is far too late to stem the economic decline that is now upon us all.

Dr David Hill

Executive Director

World Innovation Foundation Charity

Regarding ‘EU to help music companies keep Elvis, Beatles royalties‘:

I have often argued that attempts by the media industry to deal with digital media, especially on the Internet, are examples of people who used to game the system and now can’t, so they resort to the law to make it illegal for them not to game the system.

That’s one of those glib statements that is easily disputed by folks saying “what the hell does that even mean?” I figured I’d take some time to explain. And in the process I’ve laid out my thinking on intellectual property and my position in the debate about copyright.

I’ll start by using politics as an example of gaming the system, show how that applies to media, talk about how things would be if we always had infinitely copyable files, and then point in the direction of where we should go next.

Gaming the system, what the heck does that mean? – an example from politics

Here’s what I mean when I say ‘gaming the system’. Democracy offers us an excellent example. Let’s say the principle of a given representative democracy is to vote for the best person to represent your local interests in a large assembly of representatives from different locales. Then in that assembly the representatives decide to pick the best person to be the overall leader of the assembly, and thereby, the government. It’s a beautiful idea. If all goes as planned, the best people bring their perspectives and choose the best leader.

Until people begin to game the system. It starts when someone decides they desperately want to be the representative. They can’t bear the thought of someone else being chosen as the best person to represent their local area. They must win! This impulse to win is admirable and part of what moves the species forward. But it has side effects.

Instead of allowing everyone to go unpersuaded to the polls and pick the person they think would make the best representative, our power-hungry hopeful representative tries to convince everyone to vote for her or him. They campaign. But campaigning is tricky. It takes money, time and effort to sway people, especially once other people who also want to be representatives start doing it too. So it makes sense to band together with like-minded folks, and representative wannabes from other locales, to form an organisation that helps raise money, devotes time and puts in effort to campaign. Eventually through competition, only a few, or maybe two, parties can collect enough support to keep going.

Now the parties have control of who runs for election. They have gamed the system. What started as a pure idea of selecting the best person from the community has become a competition between two or three organised elites, which need to consider popular opinion but can foist their own selected people into the race for the job of representative.

We could easily get distracted into a discussion of what this means for government and democracy, but I’m stopping here. This is a natural outgrowth of human society in a democracy. Within a standard deviation, this is what happens in most democracies that avoid becoming one-party dictatorships. It’s natural. It’s taking an ideal system and working it to your advantage.

So how does this apply to media?

Up until the last decade the media had gamed the system in many ways. Let’s use music as an example, though similar arguments can be made for movies, newspapers and other forms of media. Our ideals in music is that a musician makes great music, and we support that artist as best we can. In the 20th century that had progressed from passing the hat at the pub to paying for records and concert tickets. In all cases though, ideally the best artists made the most money.

In reality record companies figured out a similar manipulation as political parties. If somebody wanted to make their band more successful than another band, they could join a record label and use the time, money and effort available to persuade people to pay attention to their band. A better band might exist, but if it wasn’t on a record label, it might never get heard. And even if it was heard, marketing might persuade the less particular members of the audience that the label’s band must be better, because it seemed so popular. When the main conduit for hearing bands was the radio, a tight system came into place.

Radio had a limited number of songs it could play. In fact it found the more it limited its playlists the more popular it became, all complaints about repetition aside. Record companies provided free records to radio stations in exchange for exposure. Among the limited number of songs they played, some became popular and the radio played them more and thus they gained more exposure. To support the artists you heard, your easiest choice was to go to a record shop and purchase an object which had their songs recorded on it. In rarer instances, the artists might come to your town and play a concert to which you could buy a ticket.

Your only other choices were to go see bands who were not on labels at smaller venues like bars. That never threatened the major system. It didn’t have the quality control or the reach. And those bands had limited distribution, if any, for recorded objects. The easiest thing to do was go to the shop and buy records you heard on the radio.

Then came the Internet. Buying records you heard on the radio at the shop was easier than scouring bars for bands you liked and buying their albums directly from them. But downloading music from the Internet was much easier than leaving the house and going to the shop. Now bands could market their music directly to consumers, social networks could allow you to share discoveries with thousands of like-minded people, niche websites and Internet radio stations could help you discover music you never would hear otherwise and radio no longer had a lock on how people discovered new music. Fans could show their appreciation for a band by starting a fan site, visiting the band’s website, buying t-shirts or even signing online petitions for the band to come to their town. This didn’t break the recording industry system, but it eroded it.

And so we saw two major initiatives to attack this threat, both attempts to formalize the previously-gamed system into law.

One was done against Internet radio. If people had millions of ways to discover music, then labels lost some control over which bands became popular. An effort was made to make Internet radio stations pay a punitively high licence to play music. Radio had never had to pay this fee, because the service they provided to music was so valuable.

But Internet radio was a threat not a service. In the waning days of this battle, the industry has turned to assaulting radio, figuring if they can’t reduce the number of venues for discovery on the Internet, then the service provided by radio is no longer as valuable, and radio better start paying.

This approach has failed because the ways of discovering music on an infinitely-copyable medium are not limited to streaming radio stations. Straightforward Internet radio proliferation has certainly been hindered but only to see innovation in streaming services that license music for sale like Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and the like. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter also serve as discovery mechanisms, as do artists themselves with fan pages. The assault on Internet radio has succeeded only in making Internet radio worse by driving people away from trying it. It has done nothing to preserve or promote the recording industry.

The second assault is the assault on piracy. When the only way to get music was to buy it in a shop on vinyl, the recording industry was in heaven. Here was a gold mine. Up until that point all you could do was buy sheet music and play it yourself or wait for a concert. Now you could have the artists in your home. And through the limitations of technology and the fact of physical objects you had no choice but to pay for the privilege.

Then recordable tape, particularly cassettes, arrived and a threat was perceived. Consumers could make their own recordings. They could record music off radio, or at concerts, or even reproduce the physical objects they purchased from the stores and then hand them out for free as ‘mix tapes’.

The recording industry’s reaction was to fight this hard. They fought it in the courts, lobbied for laws against duplicating tapes, and laws against selling the electronics (like dual cassette players) that allowed it. In the end they lost and gave up the fight as they realised the damage was minimal, and they could adapt in other ways.

Cassettes had sound limitations, so CDs were pushed as a much better way to hear music. Sure you could duplicate cassettes, but it was low quality. CDs were the real thing and unparalleled.

Then digital music came along and made it possible to not only duplicate CDs but actually digitise all kinds of music and share perfect copies. The recording industry went back to the exact same strategy they tried against cassettes (and videotape).

They wanted to preserve the way they gamed the system. When you couldn’t get an artist’s music any other way, you paid for copies. But now you didn’t have to. You could get perfect copies of music and once a file is made, the cost of duplication and distribution is almost nothing. There is no system to game. So the industry moved to change the laws, or interpret old laws to apply to preserve the system they learned to game so well.

What if the Internet had always existed

What if there had never been a music industry and we had always had infinitely copyable music files and cheap distribution of recordings? Would there be no music? The industry implies this as the subtext of their arguments, but it’s false. Before recorded music, there was plenty of music: of high quality and low. We don’t lose musicians by having the Internet.

That doesn’t mean musicians all have to be poor and play music for free. How could musicians game the system then? Obviously in a system where media is infinitely copyable, you don’t game it by trying to sell files. Let’s go back to the start.

The idea is we have musicians who play music and we want ways to support them and reward them for what they do. In the ideal, individual artists put their music online and we give the best artists our money, possibly for tickets to concerts, for merchandise and maybe even as donations.

But if they organise they can increase the time, money, and effort put behind getting attention to their music and receiving money for it. They can better plan and promote events and appearances, and sell unique items and collectibles and better argue why you should donate to their causes. There is a role for an organisation like a music label. They just need to provide different services to the artists than they used to.

So what do we do now?

All of this applies to movies, publishing and journalism in various ways. One major question then, will this industry be as big as it used to be? The answer is ‘it doesn’t matte’. We shouldn’t base our laws on whether we can preserve an industry’s profitability level. If that were the case, we should have outlawed automobiles for the damage they did to the buggy industry.

The problem is the industry is waging a massive campaign to keep you from discussing that point. They want to distract you with arguments about thievery and artists getting paid. There can’t be real thievery when the original item is left, and there are plenty of other ways for artists to get paid. Maybe not as much in aggregate, but paid nonetheless.

The industry organisations seriously argue that we may not have newspapers, books, movies or music if they don’t get their way. They are patently wrong. THEY won’t make the same levels of money from those things, true, but that’s a much different argument than saying they will disappear entirely.

More reasonable arguments assert that quality will drop if the industry doesn’t make its previous levels of money to support good projects. This is most frequently applied to journalism. But where has this quality been? Is it common to hear people rhapsodising about how amazing the movies from Hollywood are? Have we lived in a paradise where everyone not only reads the daily newspaper but raves about how amazing the journalism is?

The fact is that there is good media and bad in the current system, and it doesn’t seem that the good is so incredibly common. It’s not apparent that the good to bad ratio would even change if the system was overhauled. It might even get better. There will always be a market for high quality art and journalism, just as there will always be a market for overwrought fluff and vapidity. We just need to change how we monetise it.

And I don’t think the industry executives are villains for wanting to maintain profitable businesses. It’s perfectly natural not to want to change a business model that has worked for so long. What if you change it the wrong way and go broke? That’s frightening. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to put up with ISPs spying on us, restrictive bandwidth caps being put in place, and draconian copying legislation being shoved down our throats, just so media executives can sleep better at night.

So what should we do? What we do now is hold off enacting more laws to preserve old ways. We stop thinking of digital media as physical objects. We stop fretting that we will lose our culture if we don’t do something drastic, and we realise all that will be lost is a very small number of people’s money.

We repeal laws like the DMCA that work only to stifle innovation and keep us in this quandary longer than we need to be. We re-evaluate intellectual property law with an eye towards re-focusing it on the purpose of encouraging the arts and promoting innovation, rather than keeping revenue streams going for certain companies.

We face the fact that nobody is making sure your kids still get paid for the work you did 40 years ago, so why should that be true for others? And we spend our time and energy on figuring out new ways to support artists, journalists, writers and musicians, based on the realities of a world where the majority of works of art are no longer unique objects that can be sold because of scarcity.

Artificial scarcity is not the answer. And that’s good. Because it forces us to once again put a truer value on what is being created and possibly limit the effects of people trying to game the system. And that, in my humble opinion, is a good thing.

Tom Merritt
 http://www.subbrilliant.com/blog/?p=268

Is the United Kingdom symptomatic of the wider issues and problems that the EU faces in the long-term?

For Britain in economic terms is bleeding to death and no-one seems to care. Over the last three decades the UK has lost 23 global businesses with the loss of millions of jobs to overseas predators in the main. Over the same period of time the UK has created only three global companies, such as Vodafone, for example.

The USA in comparison has lost only four global companies to overseas ownership but has created 17 global corporations over the same period. China has created 29 global firms over the last 10 years alone, 50% of which are in manufacturing. Spain and other EU nations have stopped crucial sales of the nation’s assets on grounds of national interest and Britain has not.

The UK’s three main political parties signed up to concentrating on an ill-thought out strategy to forget about manufacturing and concentrate ultimately on service industries, thus placing all their long-term economic eggs in one basket.

Indeed, in two decades’ time, most financial institutions will have moved from London to China, thus creating a further economic disaster for the United Kingdom. Through this strategy and taking inflation into account, Britain’s wealth has substantially decreased and it will be 2032 at the earliest by the time it has the wealth again that it had in 2005, if it actually can (cited from a leading economist).

This is in contrast to China et al, who march on relentlessly to economic domination. Some twenty years ago my institution warned of the dire threat from the growing manufacturing might of the East. No-one took any notice and predominantly not governments.

The reason? China, for example, is run by first-class engineers and scientists who knew a quarter of a century ago when they really started their strides towards economic dynamism that the wars of the 21st Century would not be military, but economic. In contrast, the UK is politically run predominantly by lawyers who have no comprehension or understanding of the power of innovation and what wealth it creates.

Indeed, when over forty ‘independent’ world-class scientists, engineers and technologists (including eight Nobel Laureates in the sciences) advised Blair and his government in 1997, when Labour came to power, they took no notice of these globally-applied thinkers.

Unfortunately the current coalition government in the UK is the same in this respect. ‘Independent’ thinking, totally removed from vested interests, is not entertained. This is the great weakness of government and all political parties with regard to economic thinking. Consequently Britain’s trade and industry strategies have failed us miserably and the UK’s decline is more-or-less assured by keeping to this status quo of yesterday’s thinking.

Unfortunately in a further two decades the United Kingdom, using this destructive mentality of ‘closed door’ accepted wisdom, will in real terms be poorer than most of the developing nations currently. I do not get any pleasure whatsoever in stating the consequences here.

Therefore this terrible state of Britain’s decline squarely lies at the feet of successive governments and in the UK, Whitehall’s uncompromising judgement that in the long term has literally been devastating for the nation.

It is therefore time to change and introduce unbiased ‘independent’ thinking, or we, our children and future generations will pay a terrible price for our innovative neglect.

Dr David Hill

World Innovation Foundation

Regarding ‘Countries rally behind UK on EU flight data collection‘:

With respect to the headline ‘Countries rally behind UK on EU flight data collection’ and the UK’s unending desire to collect data on every aspect of its (and other EU) citizens’ lives, the example was given of a drug smuggler that files into Lisbon from a non-EU country hangs around for a bit and then takes another flight (and thus lacks any PNR) to another country.

At the risk of providing aid to criminals but working on the basis that whilst stupid (well, you would be if you smuggled drugs) they nevertheless possess a brain and a pair of eyes – they could equally have hired a car or taken the train. No PNR trail with the added benefit that most car hire places I have ever been to seem to be devoid of metal detectors and other similar security apparatus, ditto train stations.

Europe is not so large that, once ‘inside’ the Schengen area, surface transport becomes quite practical. Perhaps the Brits would like to return to the old pre-Schengen days? However, even then most borders were pretty porous. So collect PNR data on internal flights if you must.

However, if you do, most of the criminals are likely to move to car hire or trains. Then watch as the security obsessed Brits try to persuade gullible mainland euros that they should fit ‘security’ to train stations. At least the Germans and the Austrians are not taken in by British security obsessions which would be funny if they were not so pathetic.

Your sincerely

Mike Parr

PWR

Regarding ‘Europe can make 30% emissions cuts, EU figures show‘:

This article does not acknowledge that the 20% target for savings in primary energy consumption set out in the Energy Efficinecy Plan is measured against a projected consumption of 1842 Mtoe in 2020. It is not measured against current consumption, much less the baseline year for calculation of CO2 emission reductions (1990).

Abby Semple

ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability

Regarding ‘Europe can make 30% emissions cuts, EU figures show‘:

The Low-carbon Economy Roadmap establishes that a cost-effective pathway would reach 25% emission reductions by 2020. There is no inconsistency in modelling itself. For the Energy Efficiency Plan, no specific modelling work was carried out on reaching the 20% efficiency target. A simple calculation was made to show what 20% energy savings would mean in terms of 2020 energy consumption.

It is correct that the Low Carbon Economy Roadmap modelling does not assume that the indicative Energy Efficiency target is automatically met. The modelling shows that in the current circumstances the carbon market will not create sufficient incentives to reach the 20% energy efficiency target. The indication in the article that implementing the 20% efficiency target would lead to 30% emission reductions is incorrect as it mixes up targets and measures. It assumes that a carbon price would be in place to reach 25%, which is not the case, and then adds energy efficiency on top of that.

The roadmap impact assessment (p.55) includes a detailed calculation showing that reaching the 20% indicative energy efficiency target would in principle enable GHG emission reductions of 25%, but not 30%.

In a decarbonised EU, energy consumption would change substantially. The overall use of energy resources would decrease significantly across all scenarios, reducing to 1740 Mtoe in 2020 and going to around 1650 Mtoe by 2030. Decreases would be even steeper after 2030, resulting in a projected gross inland energy consumption of between 1300 and 1350 Mtoe by 2050.

According to the impact assessment for the Energy Efficiency Plan, the effects of the crisis and implemented policies until December 2009 will deliver 164 Mtoe of energy savings compared to the 2007 baseline, whereas full implementation of the energy savings objective would require a reduction of primary energy use by 368 Mtoe in 2020.

Thus, the remaining gap to achieve the 20% energy efficiency target in 2020 is a further reduction of primary energy use equivalent to around 200 Mtoe.

Translating this into additional GHG emissions reductions indicates that around a further 400 Mt CO2 would be reduced in 2020 if the energy efficiency target is fully achieved, or the equivalent of a further 7% reductions of GHG emissions compared to 1990.

If this is achieved on top of the GHG reductions in reference by 2020, this would enable the EU to reduce internal emissions by 25% or more by 2020.

Finally, Friends of the Earth appears to misinterpret some of our data and “double count” some savings in their calculations.

Isaac Valero-Ladron

Spokesperson

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard

Last week’s piece ‘EU’s airline emission goals under scrutiny‘ suggested there was confusion in the media after the European Commission launched the 2050 vision for transport in Europe.

I can’t account for why the media seemed confused, but it seems to us that the Commission’s vision regarding aviation seems to be realistic, pragmatic and is only surpassed by the ambitions of the industry itself.

Aviation is in fact the only industry to commit to a set of global emissions reduction targets to cap the growth of its net carbon emissions from 2020 and halve its net emissions by 2050 compared to 2005. These are global goals, rather than Europe-wide targets, but the European Commission’s 34% reduction for aviation is certainly achievable – through a joint effort of industry and policymakers.

Aviation is a vital ingredient in the connectivity of European citizens and an irreplaceable conduit of trade and tourism around the world. While it contributes to 8% of global GDP, aviation represents 2% of man-made CO2 emissions. We acknowledge that this is still too much, and we agree with the Commission that efforts to reduce emissions from aviation require operational, technology and infrastructure investments – both in the air and on the ground. A key area for such investments is biofuels.

Indeed, biofuels present a major opportunity for the aviation industry to significantly reduce its carbon footprint. Technically, we know they can work – we have flown six test flights so far and will this year start operating passenger services on a mix of biofuels and regular kerosene: now comes investment and commercialisation.

We are confident that a commercially viable and, importantly, sustainable supply will provide at least the 40% of the fuel mix identified by the Commission in 2050. To achieve this objective, incentives should be in place for those producing sustainable aviation biofuel, and for the airlines which will need to purchase it. Biofuels should also be primarily reserved for aviation, as there are no viable alternative energy sources for the sector (while the car industry can shift to electricity or hydrogen, for instance).

To understand the breadth and depth of the various projects undertaken across the industry, information is available on www.enviro.aero. From this site, you will see that we have our plans in place and a clear vision.

Yours,

Haldane Dodd

Air Transport Action Group

Geneva