politicians

When Governments face rebellion in the back benches, they traditionally defer whatever is causing the problem. This buys them enough time to offer out peerages and cushy jobs to the rebels, defusing enough of the protest to win a vote when the division bell sounds. But Transport Secretary Geoff 'Buff' Hoon may live to regret delaying the Heathrow decision, because this rebellion shows no sign of dying out.

West London Labour MPs who recognise they'll get a kicking in the next election (and a fair few who would benefit from high-speed rail) are now demanding a vote in the Commons - and the Tories or Lib Dems may be able to provide one. Senior Cabinet Ministers are now openly briefing against expansion, concerned that the "strict, local environmental limits" will be broken. BAA even tried to talk up an independent board to analyse the airport's eco-impact, only to be laughed off the Today programme.

The latest plan is to scrap the runway and opt for mixed-mode; such a political option. Mixed-mode - where the airport uses both runways for take-offs and landings - is not as sexy as the destruction of an ancient village, and there would not be as many extra flights. But it's still nonsense. It really doesn't matter whether your emissions come from new runways or old ones; what matters is whether they are increasing or not. Mixed-mode will increase emissions, so it must be sent packing - along with any residual plans to build another runway.

Looks like some hardcore lobbying might be paying off: the influential Climate Change Committee, which is advising the Government on its climate change targets, has just announced that it wants international aviation to be included in the Climate Change Bill.

The Government has always been opposed to this, because it's harder to meet emissions targets if you have to count things that actually pollute. It would much rather focus on all sorts of areas which can be sorted out with superficial changes - like new lightbulbs or a draught excluder. Crucially the CCC also recomended an 80% cut in emissions, which Brown all but promised to accept during his Labour Party Conference speech.

So is this a total victory for climate campaigners and people who don't want the earth to transform into a microwave dinner? Sadly not; important as the Bill is, it won't mean a thing unless the public forces Government, civil servants and corporations to act on CO2. Amid all the self-congratulation we mustn't lose sight of the urgent need to physically block any efforts to build new coal-fired power stations, roads or runways. Failure simply isn't an option.

Breaking news: of course it could never be so simple. As the smoke cleared it's become apparent that the CCC had not actually called for international aviation to be included. Instead they want international flights to be counted seperately and airlines asked very nicely if they'll reduce their emissions. If they fail to then other sectors will be expected to pick up the slack. For god's sake people, grow a backbone and stop including pathetic caveats to exempt an industry that has consistently failed to sort itself out.

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."

The EU has finally agreed to include aviation emissions in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). This might look like good news - after all, it is the first and only international emissions agreement to include air transport, and indeed the only policy measure the British government has on the table to address aviation's role in causing climate change. But don't get too excited just yet - because this measure is not actually intended to reduce aviation emissions.

Instead, it is expressly intended to allow them to continue to rise, by enabling airlines to purchase credits under the scheme from other sectors who have successfully reduced their own emissions, or worse, from 'accredited' offsetting schemes in far-off lands such as China. But the extra warming impact of aviation emissions over ground-based CO2 emissions is unaccounted for in the plan. Which means that permits to pollute that are sold to airlines by, for instance, power companies, will actually lead to 2 to 5 times more global warming than if the power companies had never reduced their emissions in the first place. MEPs had proposed a way to factor this in to the scheme, but, somewhat unsurprisingly, the aviation lobby successfully got that thrown out by the Commission.