The Heathrow issue

Letting Heathrow expand is the climate’s worst nightmare. But the government seems desperate to feed big, greedy, carbon-guzzling monster businesses instead of boosting simple things that would benefit lots of people’s lives. 

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Friends of the Earth not only opposes the expansion of Heathrow but also any airport expansion anywhere. 

This is not because we are tree-hugging hippies who don’t believe in human progress. Far from it. In fact technology is going to play a massive part in tackling climate change and the other big environmental crises we face. 

But there are three key factors which mean the government is wrong to give the go ahead to airports like Heathrow to expand. 

The first of these is climate change. The pragmatic government Committee on Climate Change (CCC) suggests that by 2050, emissions from air traffic in the UK should have returned to the levels they were in 2005. But they allow for a huge 60 per cent growth in flights during this time.

We don’t think these numbers stack up because they assume that the UK will successfully clean up every other part of its economy in order to create space for air travel to expand so much and that airplane technology will improve massively. 

Planes are quieter and more fuel efficient than they were, but the technological change required to allow a 60% increase in flights while reducing total emissions would probably need us to re-write the laws of physics, or rely on substitute fuels, which in fact lead to more emissions elsewhere in the world. 

The second reason why it’s daft to allow Heathrow or Gatwick to continue growing is that as well as harming the global environment, more flights mean more misery, noise and air pollution for people on the ground. 

The Neath Ferret's view is that money would be well spent in improving the access routes to Cardiff and Bristol airports.   The best suggestion we have heard is to have a dedicated UK airport for freight only, leaving others for passenger traffic.

The dedicated freight airport should of course be in conjunction with a rail terminal for the UK distribution of the imported and exported goods in order to reduce road haulage.    An intergrated transport system in the UK is long overdue.

+ NOTE .... Our headline (Re: Huff Post) has been altered for clarity following comments in Readers Letters.