Video of yuppie City Airport demo

By Richard on 01/10/2009
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I love the sound of yuppies in the morning, and hope the people of Newham do, because there's soon to be thousands (well, 32) descending on them to take advantage of British Airways's latest scheme: a luxury business-class only flight to New York for people whose accounts departments really should be checking their expenses more closely.

As Fight the Flights, the anti-City Airport expansion group, have noticed, Newham Council and and London City Airport really care about the local people. LCA is overjoyed at the benefits that increasing flights by 50% will bring to a borough already suffering from below average air quality and higher than average asthma rates.

Not so overjoyed as to actually ask them for an opinion, mind. Their latest consultation seems to have been conducted on the don't ask, don't tell principle. Somewhere between 10,000 and 16,000 households were asked for their views, which the council claims cost them £130,000. Given that there were 92,000 households in Newham back in 2001, we can only conclude that the council decided to spend its money on gold-plated consultation papers costing about £10,000 per household rather than soliciting the views of everyone who lives in its area.

Fight the Flights has challenged the whole expansion fiasco, and is taking Newham to court for a whole host of charges, mostly related to not considering certain Government policies, not consulting properly, and generally being a bunch of tossers (that's a bona-fide legal term, in case you were wondering). Fingers crossed that they didn't save some of the consultation budget back to bribe the judge with, although I wouldn't put it past them.

British Airways launches new yuppie flight amidst protests

By Richard on 30/09/2009
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Protestors were out in force when City Airport’s first transatlantic flight to New York took off at 12.50 yesterday. Local group Fight the Flights was joined by supporters from Plane Stupid and HACAN to protest about the new all-business class flight which sends a handful of yuppie scum to New York and - most irritatingly - brings them back again afterwards.

The campaigners - dressed as City yuppies - had come together to celebrate sarcastically at London City Airport with banners proclaiming 'We love carbon emissions' and 'global warming is cool' and also making a lot of noise using whistles, drums and horns.

Alan Haughton, from Fight the Flights said, "We had a lot of fun but the message was deadly serious. The super-rich are getting pampered. The super-poor are under the flight path getting the noise and pollution. No wonder people are angry."

Elizabeth Baines, from Plane Stupid, said, "This makes a mockery of all BA’s claims that they want to cut their emissions. This sort of flight should have no place in a world threatened by climate change."

Photo by Mini Mouse. You can see more at his gallery.

London City Airport gets a makeover

By Anna on 25/09/2009
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Source: Flickr

Q: What do you get if you take an idiotic government policy, add a dash of self serving business interest, a sprinkle of corruption, a handful of cash incentives and a short sighted local council, rub them all together and leave them to bake in one of the poorest boroughs in London?

A: London City Airport!

When central government asked all airports in the country to figure out the most effective way to shit on local communities whilst increasing carbon emissions as much as humanly possible – otherwise known as putting together an airport masterplan – London City Airport's owners, Global Infrastructure Partners, began rubbing their grimey money-grabbing palms together with glee. Their time had surely come!

And to be honest, they're doing a pretty good job of taking the piss. Heathrow's third runway may be threatening to bulldoze 700 homes, create a carbon emitting monolith and wipe out any possibility of meeting any climate change targets whatsoever. But do BAA have the self serving arrogance of LCA's owners with their audacious claims that a 50% increase in air traffic from City Airport - achievable only by enticing the business elite to pump increasing levels of noxious emissions and noise across one of the poorest and most polluted areas of London - will actually benefit the local community?

Luckily, even though the airport has bought out the local council (or is it that the councillors have bought the airport?...), and despite their determination to bribe the local community and ignore the fact that we're heading for climate catastrophe, the rest of us are fortunate enough to be able to see through their lies.

So it comes as no surprise that City Airport has been getting a bit of a makeover lately. A little reminder that this battle has only just begun. They'd better watch this space...

Airlines launch media campaign to tackle climate change

By Richard on 22/09/2009
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Source: Flickr

It's official: climate change is over, and the aviation industry has come in out of the cold. Their latest campaign 'Save the Airlines from Copenhagen Cuts' will see a 200% increase in the number of press releases from starving airlines, all focused on one thing: making you think they're doing something about their emissions.

This campaign launches today, as BA Chairman Willie Walsh will make some announcement about a plan to reduce emissions from aviation by 50% below 2005 levels by 2050. It's a great announcement, which, as one of the commentators on the Guardian says, is, to its advantage, "unclutterd by any method of achieving the aim". Why bother with methodology or pathways when your target is so far off that you don't have to achieve it any time soon.

Indeed the new SaCC campaign has just one target: December's talks in Copenhagen. The industry really doesn't want to be lumbered into a Kyoto2 deal, so it figures that some good PR right about now will disuade cut-ready politicians from locking them into any legal framework. And what's better than offering to halve the Government's new target?

But there must be some hint at how the industry plans to achieve this preposterous new target. Let's look at it in a bit more detail. In 2005, according to the DfT, the industry emitted 37.5 million tonnes of CO2. In 2050, again according to the DfT, the industry was, as of January 2009, expected to emit around 59.9 million tonnes. But the airlines now think that they can reduce emission to 19 million tonnes.

But how do they plan to achieve this? Oh, right.

Carbon trading...

Heathrow expansion not great value after all

By Richard on 18/09/2009
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Source: Flickr

One of the best things about being a monetising economist is getting to pretend that ideology has nothing to do with anything. Monetisers, for those of us lucky enough not to have to deal with them, are tasked with asigning a value to something which has no obvious price. Cheese, for instance, has a value: a block of it might be worth one pound, or two pound, or eight pound if bought from a fromagerie in Knightsbridge. But community? Or a quiet park in the city? Or time? What are they worth?

To answer that, you turn to a monetiser, who will weigh everything up and then find a way of pricing it cheap enough that some developers will still get to pave all over it and erect a car park. That 10th C Norman church? £10,000 to you squire. The cost of climate change? Too cheap to prevent the sort of behaviour which might prevent it happening.

But a concerted effort by those greenies at DECC has revised the value of carbon, increasing it as time goes on. A tonne of CO2 now isn't worth much - about the price of a night out in Soho - but by 2050 it's risen to the cost of a Fiat Panda, because a tonne emitted in 2050 is more likely to put us over our carbon limit and require another cut somewhere else. DECC's revision has made the value of carbon equivalent to the cost of achieving that extra reduction. Emit CO2 now or in 2050 and you'd pay for someone else to reduce their footprint to make up for it.

So far, so gravy. But then those clever boffins at the Liberal Democrats ran the cost of carbon through the Heathrow calculations. They discovered that the marked increase in the cost of carbon basically wiped out any economic benefits accrued from the third runway. In earlier versions the cost of the 181m tonnes of carbon dioxide the runway would emit between now and 2080 was £4.8b. Now it had risen to £9.3bn to 2080, wiping out the £5b benefits.

What does the Government think? Not much sadly: according to a recent PQ they haven't had a chance to look at the new benefit-cost ratio, but are pretty convinced that it will still be robust. Nothing to see here then, time to move along.

Boris flies to New York to diss video conferencing

By Richard on 16/09/2009
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Source: Flickr

It's a hard life being the Mayor of London - especially when you'd much rather be the PM. But Boris and his Bullingdon chums are never more than a hop-skip-jump away from a freebie, so this week he's flown off to New York to promote British Airways's latest campaign against video conferencing.

That's right: the Mayor of London, who opposed expansion at Heathrow and who is supposed to represent the caring-sharing face of Compassionate Conservativism is taking backhanders (well, four business class flights) from an airline to expressly oppose the idea that we could do quite a lot of what we do without sitting in a tube of metal half-way above the Atlantic.

BA's 'Face to Face' campaign is nothing short of an attempt to derail the recession-inspired decline in flying, which was driven by accounts departments suddenly remembering that it's perfectly OK to call someone with whom you would like to do business instead of packing a bag and heading to Heathrow. Can you imagine a more cruel and heartless world than one where business deals are not concluded in the top floor bar of the Hilton Cairo with a nod, a wink and a large glass of wine?

So, great that Boris enjoyed his holiday. Now BoJo, would you mind staying in the States permanently? It's not like you do any work while you're here - except for phasing out perfectly accessible buses for less frequent, less spacious alternatives...