Richard's blog

Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys in the EU are at it again! Not content with straightening our bananas and making us all speak Flemish, they're now trying to take away our God-given right to fly polluting planes everywhere. You couldn't make it up!

Luckily, those plucky chaps in Whitehall are on the case. They've been pressing the flesh, trying to persuade all those Eurocrats to exempt aviation from a general target of 20% renewable energy by 2020. But that's not all - they're also trying to make targets on clean energy in homes optional, so we don't actually have to follow them.

They're doing a great job: so far they've managed to reduce our reduction from 20% to 15% because we've historically been so crap on renewables, and are trying to persuade Brussels that nuclear energy and electricity from carbon-capture and storage coal is renewable. Three cheers for the civil servants - they're showing Jonny Foreigner what's what!

So it’s goodbye to Ruth Kelly, bane of environmentalists and apostle of airport expansion, who has resigned to spend more time with her family. Who will be next? No one seems to know (but everyone has an opinion), so rather than play musical cabinet chairs, I’m going to throw my hat in the ring. Gordon, if you’re listening, I’d be very happy to take over as Secretary of State for Transport.

I know that I’m not a Member of Parliament – although that didn’t stop you opting for Digby – but I have taken transport issues to the very top of the House of Commons. That’s got to count for something, right? After all, from what I’ve seen Transport Ministers are just meant to get in bed with aviation bosses, and how hard can that be?

There's something refreshing about the credit crunch: the high-pitched sound of the City of London starting to panic. After years of making oodles of money the fat cats are worrying about how they'll make the repayments on that Maserati they impulse bought last summer.

Luckily for the huddled masses of London's famous Docklands there is a panacea: expanding Heathrow airport. Despite London business group London First (like Earth First! but with hierarchy and massive environmental degredation) calling for a "better, not a bigger Heathrow", a coalition of 100 businesses has demanded the airport expand to serve their bloodthirsty cries for more economic growth.

Interestingly those calling for expansion include Severn Trent Water (former workplace of current BAA wanker Colin Matthews) and Hilton Hotels (who make a living by giving people a place to stay when they jet off on business). So they're hardly unbiased. Perhaps if these corporations focused less on supporting airport expansion, and more on running their own businesses we wouldn't be staring head first into a recession, hmm?

Fresh from appointing BA Chairman Willie Walsh as an advisor on making London a global city (whatever that's supposed to mean), Mayor of London and tossle-haired tosser Boris Johnson has given his backing for the expansion of City Airport.

City Airport sits in the heart of Docklands, and flies very important people in suits about to meetings that probably could have taken place by telephone. It already blights some of the most deprived areas of East London, with aircraft noise, pollution and chaffeur-driven traffic. The latest plans will add 50% more flights - mostly to destinations reachable by train in roughly the same time.

The Mayor did add a small caveat though, saying that it would be hard to justify any further expansion. I'm sure that's a great relief for the sleep deprived residents. If Boris thinks City is so great for the local area, perhaps he'd like to dump it in the heart of Kensington. Thought not...

Boris Johnson - Kyoto opponent and lover of gas guzzling automobiles - has pulled together a list of people to advise him on making London a 'world class global city'. Who's in? Step forward BA Chairman Willie Walsh, the rabid supporter of Heathrow expansion who won't be happy until the whole of West London is one giant airport.

Silly Willie isn't someone I'd trust for advice: last year he was infamously rebuked for telling the entire British Airways 'Executive Club' that the third runway would reduce emissions (something to do with stacking, apparently), and his airline is about to pay out lots and lots of wonga after agreeing to rip off passengers by price-fixing fuel surcharges with Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic.

But the six million dollar question is: what advice will Walsh be giving? We already know the answer to that. Walsh is addicted to expanding Heathrow, and is unlikely to agree with BoJo's support for a new airport in the Thames Estuary. His whole argument centres on making London a world class global city - just the remit of Boris's committee. During the election the mop-on-a-bike signed up to a cross-candidate statement against expansion - doubtless to appeal to the Tory-voting West London residents. Is a volte-face just around the corner?

2008 is the year of greenwash. After years of denying climate change was real, or paying people to pretend that CO2 emissions weren't causing temperature rises, big business finally woke up to the fact that people aren't that keen on exploitation of the planet for material gain. Everyone, from Ariel ('wash at 30 degrees') to BP ('we're Beyond Petroleum. Please don't mention the Alaskan Tar Sands') was getting in on the act, with green adverts and strategies and targets and travel plans.

As ever there was just one teeny-weeny problem: for all their green plans, most businesses just make token gestures on climate change. Take flying: a survey out today by Barclaycard showed that although many businesses had green travel plans which discouraged flying, just 1% of the 3,000 business people interviewed thought they applied to them. The other 99% were obviously far too important not to fly wherever and whenever they liked.

Things are hotting up over the channel. Campaigners against the expansion of Frankfurt airport have been squatting the forest of Kelsterbach, where the airport's bosses plan to clearcut 100,000 trees to build a new runway. The runway would double the number of flights, destroying any last remenant of peace and quiet for local residents.

This week the protestors have been hosting a direct action camp, with training, information and networking. Today is when everything starts to kick off, with intense action planning meetings; days of action kick off on Friday. There's more information (in German) on the group's website, but expect action and excitement later this week!

P.s. the photo is from a 'Banneraktion' in Frankfurt's Terminal 2 in early August.

What if you threw a consultation and nobody came? Not a problem for the Scottish Executive, whose recent consultation into the Climate Bill garnered 21,000 responses, most demanding that international aviation be included in the emissions reductions targets. Despite what civil servant automatons claim, it's not too complicated - basically you just convert 'bunker fuel' into emissions and include it within your calculations. An A grade GCSE maths student could probably do it.

But like their British counterparts, it all got too hard for the Scottish Government. They really, really don't want to include international aviation, because then they'll either have to tackle wanton flying or miss their emissions targets. Faced with thousands of responses, the Government did something rather sneaky - they lumped all the responses together into 8 different responses (one for each NGO that got its members to respond) and promptly announced that just a third of respondents wanted aviation emissions included.

Dr. Richard Dixon, head of WWF Scotland, was understandably pretty pissed off. "When the government themselves solicited tens of thousands of responses on the smoking ban, they were delighted to count them all. However, with more than 20,000 people telling the government to do the right thing by including flying in the climate bill, it is hugely disappointing that they have gone out of their way to sideline these responses." Some faceless civil servant responded, "Difficult to assess emissions... international effort... more than one flight... can't be arsed... going to miss my flight."