IT IS the time of the year when many of us begin leafing through glossy brochures to plan our holidays. And with increasingly cheap flights, there are plenty of bargains to be had.

But in a special article for the Kent Messenger Group, Kent Green MEP Dr Caroline Lucas argues that while competition has brought cheaper deals, the unchecked expansion of the aviation industry will, in the long run, be bad news for Kent.

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As the seasonal chill sets in, the prospect of winter sun becomes ever more attractive. With millions of Brits jetting off on cheap flights to warmer climes over the winter and many of us looking ahead to the summer, the popularity of plane travel shows just how air dependent our lifestyles have become.

Unfortunately, the consequences of the expanding aviation industry are everywhere to be seen.

Here in Kent, the proposed developments at Manston and Lydd threaten to clog roads, increase air pollution and noise levels, harm local wildlife and destroy areas of environmental importance - such as Romney Marsh, where the RSPB has campaigned vigorously against airport growth.

It has been calculated that if aviation continues to grow, its emissions will account for the EU's entire carbon budget by 2045. Since aviation is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases, you might think that EU leaders would be falling over themselves to bring the aviation industry in check.

Yet governments seem to have a blind spot when it comes to applying their climate change rhetoric to this powerful sector.

In the European Parliament, MEPs have been fiercely debating how best to handle this challenge. The proposal on the table is to include aviation into the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) which seeks to put a limit on aviation's overall emissions.

The airlines are allocated a certain number of permits to cover them; if they don't need all the permits, they can sell them and if they need more, they have to buy them.

But the only way this can reduce aviation emissions is if there is a rigorous overall cap and a curb on the number of extra permits aviation is allowed to buy. These two provisions were sadly absent in the Commission's proposal.

A recent Parliament vote on aviation was an important, faltering step in the right direction. Instead of allowing aviation to receive free permits - with the potential for huge profits - MEPs agreed that they should at least pay for a quarter of them (still short of Green proposals).

A Green amendment was passed to place some restriction on the amount of permits the aviation sector can buy, meaning airlines will not be able to simply pay their way out of trouble.

A predictable bunch of airline representatives trooped out to criticise and condemn the new proposed legislation, which they claim would cause irreparable damage to the industry.

No one mentioned that aviation has been quietly omitted from the world’s first Climate Change Bill. Nor that the world’s airlines currently enjoy a complex array of tax breaks and hidden subsidies - worth more than £9billion a year in the UK alone - which are outdated and incompatible with global climate goals. Nor that the growth of the industry is severely damaging our natural world.

And before swallowing the industry's arguments that opposition to cheap flights is 'anti-poor', it is worth considering growing evidence that decreasing ticket prices mean the wealthy fly more often.

A recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that the top three social classes take more than 75 per cent of low cost flights.

Areas like Kent simply cannot cope with an unfettered expansion of aviation, with the noise pollution and congestion that it brings and the planet certainly cannot cope with the increased warming.

As we contemplate the results of the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, we must hope for a new international framework for tackling climate change that will bring the aviation sector to account.

But if the past record on reigning in the sector is anything to go by, it looks like the blind spot will persist.

* Dr Caroline Lucas is a member of the European Parliament's influential Environment Committee and was the Committee's rapporteur on aviation and climate change in 2006.