Plane Drain: UK's climate ambition now departing from Heathrow Airport

Any politician who says that Heathrow Airport expansion is compatible with the UK's obligations as set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act, and the 2015 Paris Agreement is:

1. ignorant
2. deluded
3. lying

I don’t know which apply to Chancellor Rachel Reeves. All I can say is that six months is evidently a very long time in politics because the Labour government's journey from climate champion to pursuer of growth-at-all-costs has been remarkable. It has made clear that the economy is to be prioritised above environmental concerns. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer even took to the right wing climate-denying Daily Mail to pen a column titled "My Labour Government will stop the time-wasting Nimbys and zealots from holding the country to ransom". The leader of a supposedly left of centre political party blamed the lack of progress of vital new infrastructure on Extinction Rebellion activists, and campaign groups attempting to use legal challenges to reduce environmental harms. Perhaps the justification for writing such an unhinged opinion piece was that he was trying to connect with a section of the country that needs to be on board with net zero. I fear the real explanation is much simpler. This wasn't his latest move in some game of political chess. He really means what he says.

Thanks for reading Eccentric Orbits! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The UK isn't alone in wanting to support increased aviation which continues to rebound from the Covid19 lockdowns. Plans for its global decarbonisation, already pretty threadbare, are now in tatters with passenger numbers and emissions reaching all-time highs. The industry likes to talk up decreasing carbon intensity. But these efficiency gains are being swamped by the large increase in the total number of flights. In 1990 global aviation emitted 0.5billion tons. Since then the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for every passenger mile has halved. The problem is that passenger miles have quadrupled. Emissions now stand at 1billion tons a year.

The industry continues to peddle the fantasies of sustainable aviation fuels, or electric and hydrogen aircraft. But such innovations are years away from commercial deployment. We need rapid decarbonisation now. The only response to that imperative is the empty promise of carbon offsets. The real reason airlines offer carbon offsets is to sell more tickets. They hope that any feelings of climate guilt you may feel when contemplating jetting off to the Bahamas can be effectively offset by an additional small payment that will fund tree planting, or giving people fuel efficient cookstoves, or protecting forests. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these schemes do not work. They may even be counter-productive. No matter. Their purpose is to ensure airlines can continue to make increasing profits and so deliver greater value to shareholders.

This is all very much in keeping with the net zero approach to the climate and ecological crisis which is to proudly claim you are taking effective action while carrying on with business as usual. It was always a matter of when, not if, net zero would be firmly put in its place behind the demands of economic growth. That burst of enthusiasm around 2018 seems a very long time ago. Do you remember what it felt like? Governments and companies around the world were declaring climate emergencies which soon translated into big leaps of climate ambition. Net zero by 2050, became net zero by 2040, even 2035 which when you look at the fair allocation of available carbon budgets for 1.5°C is the date at which the UK should reach net zero carbon emissions.

And then the Covid19 crisis, a moment when governments remembered they have the capacity to act, that the law of supply and demand is not some immutable law of physics but is something the emerges from human interactions. Just as important, government’s refusal to include behaviour change in net zero policies was exposed as moral cowardice by their sudden implementation of draconian controls of people’s movements. If governments can demonstrate such sudden ideological change, then perhaps we do have a chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. Perhaps we can salvage something from this tragedy and #BuildBackBetter. I find it almost pitiful that we seriously entertained that idea for a while.

It's understandable how people give up, how the hope slowly dies. At a time of rising concerns around potential acceleration of warming, disintegration of ice sheets, collapse of ocean currents and other tipping points, of colossal looming economic damage – despite all these and other alarms blaring, we are seeing a decrease in climate ambition, and action. My current ire is focussed on my government. To be honest, I haven’t even really begun to process what four years of President Trump will do to our collective futures.

At some point there will, finally, be the realisation that incremental, growth-based, climate policies spectacularly failed. The risk then, and the risk that I am currently focussed on as I think it is largely absent from discussion about climate strategy, is that societies pivot away from collective efforts on mitigation towards self-interested efforts to minimise their loss and damages, perhaps accompanied with a surge of effort to deploy geoengineering. This may happen surprisingly fast because it will be the result of reinforcing doom loops that could completely derail efforts to deal with the drivers of climate change.

How can we manage these risks? Laurie Laybourn and I have some ideas. I’m convinced that whatever emerges from this work, it will need to supply new strategies while dangerous climate changes unfolds. That means increasing resilience to the coming climate and political storms will be vital. We must ramp up mitigation and adaptation, and recovery from loss and damages. This will not be easy. I’m sure some would argue that it is currently impossible given everything else that is happening in the world. They would rather take flight on fantasies that nothing needs to fundamentally change. Heathrow expansion is very much in keeping with that.

With their pursuit of endless economic growth, politicians continue live in a land of make believe. But like all dellusions and dreams, reality will inevitably reinsert itself. The risk is that this will be abrupt and with significant violence. The old adage applies: it's not the falling that kills you, it's the stopping.

Thanks for reading Eccentric Orbits! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.