It’s a vendetta. It’s class war. Those killjoy greens are trying to demonise the air industry and the package holiday. How dare that Mr Osborne and that Mr Cameron ask airlines to pay for the pollution they create. Don’t they know that air travel has broadened the horizons of millions? Don’t they know how much I spent on my holiday villa? Look, we all know flying is only a blip in global warming. So why pick on that?

When the debate boils over, when intelligent people tout the cheap return to Málaga as a totem of civil liberties, it is time to step back and look at the figures. The air industry has run a powerful campaign that has successfully lodged in many minds a reassuringly small figure of 2 per cent. But 2 per cent of what? It is correct to say that flying represents about 2 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But that is not terribly relevant. That the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions are only 2 per cent of the world’s has not stopped our leaders from pursuing drastic reduction.

When facing the confusion and complexity of climate change, it is more sane to consider what is within our control. Flights make up 5.5 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, according to the Department for Transport. But this only counts outbound journeys. Brendon Sewill, a former Treasury adviser, puts the figure at nearer to 8 per cent if you include return journeys made by Brits. That’s still not much. But you must also account for the extra intensity of the greenhouse effect when aircraft burn kerosene at high altitudes. This, it is generally accepted, strengthens the greenhouse effect of planes by between two and four times. Even the most conservative estimate is going to take you past 10 per cent. It means that British air passengers are contributing almost as much to climate change as British car drivers, with far less hope of switching to a cleaner technology.

Even on these figures, electricity generation is about three times more polluting. But air travel is not negligible. The Government estimates that its rapid growth — at 4 per cent a year for passengers and 7 per cent for freight — will provide 25 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions by 2050. The cross-party House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change have gone farther, saying that unchecked aviation could actually bust the 60 per cent carbon budgets that the Government announced on Tuesday, even if every other industry slashes its emissions.

So no policy on climate change should ignore air travel. Yet this week’s Climate Change Bill does not include aviation in its targets. Asking an independent carbon committee to ignore the airlines in its annual report on the country’s carbon emissions is a bit like asking Mervyn King to control inflation without data on runaway house prices.

The blind spot about air travel is everywhere. I was recently in a meeting with a large corporation hoping to go “carbon neutral”. As a first step, it had commissioned consultants to measure its carbon “footprint”. This did not include employees’ business air travel: it is apparently a convention among consultants not to do so. This is Enron-style accounting, and any company that falls for it will soon find that the only thing it has neutralised is its PR.

Could this blind spot have something to do with air travel often being a free perk for many of the richest people, including some of the journalists who write most furiously in its favour? The revolution is fomenting in West London, not Walsall. Is this why the airlines are still able to run the biggest tax-avoidance scam in the world, by avoiding tax on fuel? If the Chancellor taxed aircraft fuel at the same rate as petrol for cars, he would raise a cool £9 billion, which could be used to fund tax cuts or invested in low-carbon technologies.

It is now a principle of British and European law, of several American states, and soon to be federal US law, that industries should meet the costs of the pollution and global warming that they generate. But not the air industry. While aviation will be part of the European emissions trading scheme from 2012, this will never take account of the extra toxicity of travelling at high altitude.

A fuel tax is also needed. The Treasury dismissed this weekend’s Tory proposal, that domestic flights should pay tax on fuel, as a unilateral action that was inappropriate in a multilateral context. But the Netherlands, Japan, India and the US already tax fuel on domestic flights. All that we have done is to impose air passenger duty, retrospectively, and with zero environmental impact. Empty planes pay nothing.

Politicians are acutely aware of the opportunities and educational benefits that flying brings. They fear that any tax would hurt the poor. The Institute of Public Policy Research and the Institute of Fiscal Studies disagree. They say that 80 per cent of flights are made by the top half of earners. That half of the population do not fly in any one year. That the main growth in flights has been from well-off UK citizens taking more holidays. For those people, flying is much more than 2 per cent of their contribution.

Three years ago I tried to give up flying. Not with total success, I confess, but almost. This was not because I bore a grudge against Ryanair. It was not out of some exhibitionist desire to thrust green smuggery down other people’s throats. It was simply because I discovered, courtesy of some of those carbon calculators you can now get online, that my flights accounted for a quarter of my own contribution to global warming. The most effective thing I could do personally, I felt, was to cut down on flying.

That doesn’t mean I want everyone to live in mud huts. But as long as ticket prices fail to reflect the true damage we are doing, it will be hard to convince anyone that flights do make a significant contribution to climate change. They do.

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