"We accept that climate change is happening ... we accept that there must be radical cuts in carbon dioxide emissions and that aviation should enjoy no special treatment," I heard him say as I brushed my teeth this morning. These words came out of the mouth of Simon Baugh, head of government affairs at BAA, but they must have bypassed the analytical part of his brain, because he certainly hasn't grasped their implications.
The UK has to make carbon cuts of 80-90% to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding more than 2C of warming - the target we've set ourselves because it gets a lot nastier after that. We cannot achieve this if we continue to expand our airports.
The appropriate way to express these views, according to Mr Baugh, is through the "full government consultation" taking place this autumn. A word on this consultation. It will not consider climate change issues. What it will do is present the results of a secretive two-year study carried out by the Department for Transport to try to show that levels of nitrogen dioxide (an exhaust gas that aggravates asthma and other respiratory conditions) will not be a problem around the airport if a third runway is built. Levels are already over EU limits that will be legally enforceable from 2010, but thanks to a raft of mitigation measures ranging from the optimistic to the implausible, the government will demonstrate that it can add a third more planes (with the traffic that brings) while simultaneously bringing pollution levels down. They did not wish to discuss this with us while the study was ongoing. But your views will be sought on the results.
Separately, there is a consultation out asking whether the aviation industry is paying the costs of its climate change damage. The rider to this is that if the answer is yes, then it is responsible to carry on expanding airports (never mind that the emissions that will generate are excluded from our national targets by a piece of Enron-style accounting). In other words, you put a cost on the lives and ecosystems being lost to climate change, make sure the tax-take covers it, then keep on destroying those lives and ecosystems. Your views are currently being sought on this until October 30.
Or, if you think it's more urgent than that, get down to the Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow. There will be vegetarian food and nice people fixing bikes. And on Sunday, the organisers are promising a day of mass direct action. So long as that remains peaceful, it's a perfectly legitimate tactic against a government and an industry that now make a show of listening, before nodding and carrying on as before.
