They're enjoying record profits, plunging fuel costs and sky-high ticket prices. But all that is not enough for the airlines.
As the Paris climate summit enters its final days, the aviation industry is working overtime to get its skyrocketing carbon pollution exempted from the international agreement aimed at averting global warming's worst dangers. Shipping companies are pulling the same trick.
And U.S. negotiators at the U.N. COP21 climate talks don't seem to be fighting this reckless plan to let airlines fly away from their ever-growing carbon trail. There's been radio silence on shipping and aviation from Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern.
The Obama administration must understand a simple truth: Exempting these two highly polluting industries from the Paris treaty would be dangerous for all of us. But it would spell disaster for millions of people in sea-level-rise-threatened countries like Bangladesh -- and the literal end for small island nations like the Maldives.
By excluding aviation from the Paris agreement, negotiators would sacrifice the futures of some of the world's poorest people -- many of whom will never fly on an airplane.
That's because curbing pollution from ships and planes is critical to the growing push in Paris to limit warming to 1.5. degrees Celsius. That crucial goal -- which is suddenly drawing surprising support from the United States and other developed nations -- could limit sea-level rise enough to help protect low-lying countries.
But we just can't achieve that target without a treaty that curbs aviation and shipping pollution.
If aviation were considered a country, it would rank seventh after Germany in terms of carbon emissions. Aviation's impacts already account for some 5 percent of global warming. Shipping adds about another 3 percent.
And both pollution sources are projected to grow rapidly: Aviation emissions will more than triple by 2050, and shipping emissions will rise by as much as 250 percent.
Airplanes alone could generate 43 gigatonnes of planet-warming pollution through 2050. That would consume almost 5 percent of the world's remaining carbon budget -- the amount we can emit before exceeding livable temperatures -- according to a recent report from my organization.
Negotiators from the Obama administration have a special responsibility -- and exceptional power -- to tackle this issue. The U.S., after all, is the largest carbon polluter in the sky: U.S. aviation emissions are seven times as large as second-place China.
But our negotiators don't seem to be pushing for strong action. That's incomprehensible: The Obama administration cannot realize its climate goals if it buckles to airline pressure and allows climate negotiators to again green-light airplane pollution.
Eighteen years ago, airlines managed to evade obligations under the Kyoto Protocol by punting the task of tackling their greenhouse gas emissions to an industry-dominated U.N. sub-agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
ICAO has ignored that mandate ever since. Over almost two decades, the organization has rejected every measure to curb aircraft-induced global warming, including efficiency standards, fuel taxes, emissions charges and global emissions trading.
Even now, as airlines try to use ICAO as a fig leaf in Paris, the organization is discussing weak emission standards that would barely bend the industry's carbon growth curve.
Shipping has followed the same route, with responsibility for carbon controls handed over the industry-dominated International Maritime Organization, whose secretary general has rejected any need to cap shipping emissions.
In response to ICAO's ignoble intransigence, the draft Paris negotiating text called upon aviation to do its part to hold temperature increases below 1.5/2 degrees Celsius.
That's good news, since airplane pollution could be reduced dramatically. A recent International Council on Clean Transportation report showed that some of the top 20 transatlantic air carriers can drive down greenhouse emissions by as much as 51 percent using existing technology and operational improvements. Certainly the aviation industry's increasing monopoly status should provide no immunity from climate responsibility.
But will strong language on ships and planes make it into the final Paris treaty? Official U.S. support for calling aviation to account still seems to be lacking.
That must change. State Department negotiators and President Obama must actively and loudly support this simple goal during this last, crucial week in Paris: hold aviation and shipping to the international goal of keeping temperature rises at a livable level.
It's not only fair -- it's the only way to fly.