Deutsche Lufthansa AG (LHA), Europe’s second-biggest airline, said European Union emissions-trading expenses will add 130 million euros ($168 million) to costs in 2012, prompting the carrier to raise ticket prices. Spending that results from the EU’s carbon-emissions cap- and-trade program, which start for airlines this year, will be taken into account when Lufthansa calculates fuel surcharges, the Cologne, Germany-based company said today in a statement. The trading program “burdens European airlines with yet another cost which makes flying in and over Europe more expensive for passengers,” Carsten Spohr, head of the company’s German airlines division, said in the statement. The EU decided in 2008 to include aviation in the project after the industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions in the region doubled over two decades. Germany has allocated 3 billion euros of free carbon permits until 2020 to airlines operating in the country, and the carriers have to pay extra for their needs beyond that.
