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To Fly or Not to Fly

Ellie Keen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:53:44 +0000

The plane is over the English Channel when the pilot’s voice crackles over the loudspeakers.

‘Just to warn you that there’s been a bit of trouble at Heathrow with people protesting about the impact of air travel on climate change. Nothing to worry about, but when we land you may see a bigger police presence at the airport than you would normally expect.’

The tone is jocular and clearly intended to draw us all together into a kind of community of ‘sensible’ travellers who might have to suffer the disruption of ‘extremist’ campaigners.

So what exactly am I doing here, in August 2007, given that I feel a much greater sense of kinship with the Climate Camp protesters down below than with the pilot’s cosy set of assumptions? It’s a good question. I’m on my way back with my family from a holiday in Italy. Last time we went, a few years ago, we drove there and back, via Luxembourg and Switzerland, taking our time and making many stop-offs on the way to break the journey. This time when we booked, almost a year in advance, we knew our time would be squeezed between work commitments and being back for our daughter’s exam results. So, not without qualms, we took advantage of ludicrously cheap flights that would get us there within a couple of hours rather than a couple of days.

I tell you this to indicate my starting-point when I began to research this magazine – for all that I bike to work, compost like crazy and am vegetarian, I am far from being in the environmental vanguard, and certainly don’t feel able to lecture people about what they should or should not do.

Given this, I was not exactly burning to pick up the topic of Ethical Travel. I had no problem considering the effects of tourism on the Majority World. But since most tourism depends on air travel I knew I was likely to find myself in the unenviable position of having to offer readers some guidance as to when flying is acceptable and when it isn’t.

And the more I sounded people out, the more my suspicions were confirmed. People are concerned and looking for guidance on an issue which has leapt to public attention in recent years – at least in Britain, where the debate about flying rages much hotter than it does in Australasia or North America.

Mind-boggling statistics

My earliest research left me shocked by the statistics on aviation emissions. Put simply, jet aircraft not only emit carbon from vast quantities of kerosene fuel, they also do it at high altitudes, where it has a much greater warming effect than it would in the lower atmosphere. In addition, jets emit other greenhouse gases, including nitrous oxide and water vapour (‘contrails’). The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the net effect of all these emissions from jet aircraft at 2.7 times the carbon consumed in the fuel. The chart below shows that an individual’s share of carbon emitted on a return flight from London to New York exceeds the carbon used up by a full year’s modest driving of an average car.

How such statistics are calculated is always a contentious issue. But the exact numbers are less interesting than the broad-brushstroke comparisons: you can easily dump more carbon into the atmosphere from one return flight than from the gas and electricity you use in your house for an entire year. This was, to be frank, a quite mind-boggling discovery for me, which couldn’t help but challenge my attitude to flying.

Travel has played an enormous part in my life. I cannot easily conceive what kind of person I would be had I not been able to board an airplane. But I do recognize that the profound implications of climate change (and the fight to prevent it) are going to force us all to take stock of our lives, to challenge all our assumptions. Just how far, I wonder, are we prepared to go in challenging the flying culture?

My tentative proposal to the NI editorial team was that we should oppose the expansion of aviation – especially the development of new airports or runways – and encourage readers to reduce the amount they flew. But we should stop well short of calling for an end to all holiday flights.

A great deal of heat was generated in the discussion that ensued, but not a lot of light. It soon became plain that the issue of flying is a particularly thorny one, in which emotions are perhaps too readily engaged. And this was despite the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, there was no-one in the room arguing that the magazine should rule out flying for leisure or experience altogether. One or two people argued that it would be so impossible to pin down reliable estimates of the emissions of various forms of transport that we would be treading on dodgy ground even to enter the flying debate.

Adam Ma’anit

I DEFINITELY AGREE with the need to deal with aviation’s impact on climate change. My worry is about the focus on individual consumption, on individuals taking flights. I think the emphasis needs to go back towards political, economic and environmental policies. Too much of the flying debate is about individual one-upmanship and not about real substantive change. It’s natural for the environmental movement to go down that path because it’s easier to appeal to their base – environmentally minded folk who will accept the wisdom of flying less and peer-pressure each other – but the movement shouldn’t shy away from the difficult questions.

Lifestyle politics may be a hit with the hairshirt crowd, but it’s small fry compared to the huge socio-political changes needed to avert the worst excesses of climate change. Just as telling people to eat better won’t solve the obesity crisis, so too will the ‘you fly, we die’ message fall on deaf ears. And let’s not forget the importance of building up the alternatives. Telling people to fly less and travel by train instead when the rail system in many countries is so mind-boggingly expensive, over-crowded and unreliable is hardly a convincing argument. Rather than solely appealing to people’s better consciences, let’s focus our energies on the big wins that can be made with modest political will.

Aviation’s growth is very worrying and that does need to be curtailed. The big target is short-haul flights to destinations that could easily and comfortably be serviced by rail, bus or ferry. But those services need to run well, they need to be just as heavily scrutinized for their environmental impacts and they should be reasonably affordable and safe. At the moment, they’re often not, so it’s no wonder people take to the skies. But not flying has become an iconic badge of environmental commitment and I think that’s misguided.

If there were the political will to do something about climate change so much could be done in so little time and aviation would play a relatively small role in reducing the global footprint. For example, if government said tomorrow we’re going to ban all electronic devices with standby mode it would reduce electricity consumption by a huge amount at a stroke. How many people factor the standby mode into their purchasing decisions? Not many. But if you deal with it at a macro level you actually take it out of the equation.

Same with government-sponsored housing insulation, combined heat and power units for residential blocks, support for micro-renewables. Stopping the war would deliver massive carbon savings and free up resources that could be used to steer us away from climate disaster. There are lots of things that simply can’t be done at an individual level and have to be done by society as a whole – reining in corporate power and wasteful energy transmission, decentralizing energy grids and promoting renewables, stopping subsidies of fossil fuels, ending aviation’s tax-free fuel ride. And that’s just for starters... There is so much we can do now. So let’s stop the incessant navel-gazing and agonizing over our personal carbon ‘footprints’ and build the momentum for real change.

Mark Lynas

It’s worth looking at work travel as well as holidays because that’s probably the largest component of most people’s carbon footprint. When people fly for their work, are the ethical considerations their own responsibility or their employer’s?

None of these things are completely black and white and it’s finding a way through the greys that has become an ethical minefield. There’s a cultural value shift going on and things haven’t quite settled yet when it comes to what’s moral and what isn’t. But in the mean time there are a lot of accusations and counter-accusations.

Is there a danger that focusing individuals on their own carbon footprint is a distraction?

You need to know where you stand in terms of what your contribution is to the collective problem. Of course, simply doing things at an individual level is not going to be enough – it’s got to be a collective approach to a collective problem and that comes down to politics, to building a movement. That’s more important than what you do at home but you’ve got to do both – they’re complementary.

When a right-wing group in the US got hold of Al Gore’s [massive] electricity bill it played well for them because it sowed cynicism and that in turn has an effect in paralyzing social action. I wrote defending Gore because it does strike me that this ‘green hypocrisy’ argument about individual behaviour has gone too far. Some people’s aggregated impact on the climate should be seen as positive despite their air miles.

I make the calculation – we all do. And it’s not just flying, though that has become symbolic because of the big numbers attached to it; it’s everything – every time you turn on the heating in your house it’s worth a certain amount of CO2.

But flying consumes much more carbon even than heating...

It does, but only when you look at it from an individual point of view. When you look at it from an aggregate point of view, the flight component of a national carbon budget is still very small because most people don’t take trips to New York. The biggest source of carbon is still space heating, which is a lot less interesting but is much more important than flying. On the other hand, flying is a relatively easy thing not to do. Here in Wolvercote [his village] we’re going low carbon and we’ve found that most behaviour hasn’t really changed except that people have been taking fewer holiday flights.

Don’t you find it problematic, saying people shouldn’t fly when you’ve travelled so much yourself?

I can’t imagine how I would have been had I not spent a lot of my life in the South. I’m happy to rule out future holiday travel for myself – I’d felt yucky about being in places as a tourist for a long time, so that’s easily done. But it’s such a big sacrifice for other people to make and that’s why I think aviation is the one thing for which we need a ‘technofix’. We’ve got a totally globalized world with families all over the place and you just can’t unpick all the threads.

The low-hanging fruit is insulating your loft [attic]; stopping aviation is the highest-hanging fruit there is in terms of the bang people get for their carbon buck.

Say to the industry: ‘Look, you’ve got 15 years to do this or you go out of business’ and I think they’d come up with something. There has to be a role for technological innovation and Manhattan Project-type approaches to this.

George Monbiot

It’s possible to have a technological effect on almost every other area of climate change apart from aviation. You could run almost the entire energy system on renewable power if you did it in the right way. Aviation is the one area for which there is no available technological solution in the foreseeable future. We’re not likely to see battery-powered jetliners.

It’s not just a question of blocking future airport expansion; we have to reduce what’s already there. We have to cut aviation emissions by 95 per cent if we’re going to keep overall emissions to the level we need to. That means people can fly only 5 per cent of the amount they are now – and that’s a maximum.

People shouldn’t be flying for leisure or tourism purposes at all. They also shouldn’t be flying for business. If you’ve got a pressing family obligation, a relative who’s sick or dying, then fair enough. And if you’re doing something important with human rights or raising awareness of the environmental threat and there’s no other way of getting there, you might be able to justify it. But even then you have to think very carefully because it’s going to be rare that the importance of the work will outweigh the damage done by the flight.

What about damage done to communities in the Majority World that are currently dependent on tourism?

I do accept that some communities are going to be hit hard by this. But you have to set that against the enormous and much greater damage that will be done to other communities all over the world by climate change. We have to make it a priority to help those communities and countries to develop better ways of surviving and thriving that do not depend upon transporting 150 pounds of human halfway across the planet and back.

What would the world be like without the intercultural exchanges that derive from air travel?

Cross-cultural international connections don’t depend entirely on flying. You can travel by boat or by train almost anywhere – it just takes a lot more time. So travelling without flying is still possible.

And in terms of bringing about change, it isn’t really necessary to travel to become an internationalist. At the time of the Make Poverty History campaign most of the people in the West who became deeply concerned about Africa had never visited there but had been moved by what they had seen on television. You don’t become an internationalist by travelling – just as travelling in itself doesn’t make you an internationalist.

You started as a travel writer, though – you’ve benefited in all kinds of ways from international travel that have helped make you the person you are. How can you deny those benefits to young people now?

I do feel bad that I’m having to say to young people now that they cannot have the opportunities I had for guilt-free experience of other lands and cultures. But there’s no alternative. That experience of travel is simply not available to people now. It’s another example of how the sins of one generation have been handed to the next generation who have to pay the price.

There was also an argument that for the New Internationalist to concentrate its attention on individual behaviour – when and whether people should be travelling by plane – would be a mistake. There are much more important battles to be fought than this in the war on climate change, ran this strand of thought, than encouraging people to think about their ‘carbon footprint’. I invited one of my editorial colleagues, Adam Ma’anit, to lay out this position (see box, above).

There is no doubt that the primary need is for governments, rather than individuals, to take action.

Climate change is the greatest issue of our time, yet politicians the world over continue to funk it, fearing that if they derail the globalized consumer bandwagon it will cost them their jobs. Given how huge is the task in front of us, the primary requirement has to be to campaign, to do all we can to change the political landscape so that it reflects the real (planet-)burning issues rather than the pre-eminent concern with the dollar in our pocket.

But I still felt it was important to include in the magazine some recognition of the dilemma faced by individual readers concerned about the ethics of flying in an overheating world. Those of us who try to reduce or constrain our carbon footprint are not likely to be distracted from campaigning for the big-picture political changes. One can reinforce the other. Don’t we all feel much more comfortable campaigning for a cause if we are doing our bit? That way at least we can’t be charged with hypocrisy. And our own individual actions may have a ripple effect, whether by inspiring others or by contributing to a statistical trend. Changing our lifestyle could reinforce pressure on politicians to pull us out of this tailspin. After all, we know more clearly than ever that every kilogram of carbon we propel into the atmosphere is doing some very dirty work.

Consulting the oracles

One of the main proponents of the ‘carbon footprint’ way of looking at this problem is Mark Lynas, author of High Tide, Six Degrees and Carbon Calculator: Easy ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

When I met Mark, he was just back from a mammoth journey by boat to Norway. ‘It took 10 days – it was a disaster,’ he said ruefully. ‘If I’d done it in a plane trip in a day it would have been a hell of a lot easier than dragging the whole family out there for 10 days. You can go a bit too far in terms of being puritan on this. Mind you, it always plays well because people always ask how you got there. And it’s nice to be able to say: “Well, train and boat!” It even makes headlines in the papers because people don’t expect it.’

While he has ruled out holiday flights for himself, he readily acknowledges the moral complexity of the issue – as well as stressing that he too sees individual effort as secondary to the vital job of building a movement that will shift governments. And he hankers after a technofix (see box, below), even though, he added: ‘George will kill me for saying so.’

The George in question is Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and author of Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning. The chapter of Heat on aviation (‘Love Miles’) lays out very starkly the damage done by air travel – and the impossibility of meeting any meaningful emissions targets if we continue our love affair with it.

‘A 90-per-cent cut in carbon emissions means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there… It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations… If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.’

Ulp. You can’t get much more categorical than that. Reading my interview with George (see box, overleaf), you might wonder why I didn’t ask him the most obvious follow-up question: how many times have you yourself flown somewhere in the last year? Actually I didn’t need to ask him – he was so primed for that question that he misheard one of my others and answered that he has taken two flights in the last 18 months, both to climate-change events where he judged that he could make more of a difference by attending in person than by not flying.

I was more concerned to probe how he, who began as a travel writer and has benefited in all kinds of ways from experiencing other countries and cultures, feels able to say that young people now should not avail themselves of the same opportunities. His answer is pretty much that, however bad he feels about it, the problem is so huge and so all-trumping that there is simply no alternative.

I cannot bring myself to say the same. As I write, my daughter is experiencing her first day of teaching in a village in Malawi, having just spent a week of ‘orientation’ in the capital, Lilongwe. I am proud that she has chosen to spend her gap year before university working in Africa. What she learns about the world and its injustices and inequalities will reverberate through her entire life and will give her a connection with Malawi, and with Africa as a whole, that no amount of book reading or film watching could have achieved. Should I really have said to her, at a time when the rest of the world seems to be leaping on a plane at the drop of a hat to sun themselves on a beach or to go shopping, that she should forego the whole experience because we have just begun to understand the climate-changing contribution of aviation? I don’t think so.

What would happen in a no-fly world?

What would happen at New Internationalist if we introduced a no-flying policy? The issue has already caused some soul-searching within the co-operative. People travelling to the Frankfurt Book Fair, for example, have had to weigh the environmental impact against the cost (since the advent of budget airlines, ridiculously enough, it is actually cheaper to fly from Britain to Germany than to go by train) and the significant extra time involved. Even if a company has a policy that supports (and is prepared to pay for) an employee wishing to go overland, there are often family or work reasons why that person is loath to be away longer than need be.

Given that we have editors in Canada, Australia and Holland, and that we focus on the concerns of the Majority World, eschewing flying altogether would not look to be an option for us as an organization. Certainly the need for editors to be in touch with the realities of everyday life in Africa, Asia and Latin America – on which the magazine’s reputation stands – depends upon their being able to hear ordinary people’s testimonies first hand rather than just relying on printed reports or local journalists.

And New Internationalist is, after all, only the tip of the ‘One World community’ iceberg, which has been founded upon international travel in both directions – on people visiting and migrating to our own countries from far-flung locations, and on our learning from and adjusting to other peoples and cultures.

What would happen to a world in which the only people who travelled by plane were those most committed to its rapacious exploitation? Would airways become the de facto province of the most unscrupulous corporations? Besides, where is the sense in rejecting one aspect of international aviation (tourism) while accepting other aspects (air-freighted goods and foodstuffs, air mail and so on)?

No more new runways

But in the context of an ever-warming world, if we continue to fly for our pleasure and education, we need to ensure that such tourism is not itself damaging, and that it genuinely benefits the host communities at the other end. In the articles that follow I’ll look at what is wrong with most tourism now and whether more sustainable forms of travel that benefit local communities are actually possible.

It also means we have to increase pressure on policy-makers to contain and reduce air travel. Governments all too readily point the finger at individuals rather than demonstrating leadership on the issue. I encountered an example of this recently when, at a Christmas party, I got talking to a civil servant working on transport issues. I was explaining why I thought the British Government’s intention to build a third runway at Heathrow to meet anticipated demand was the purest folly. ‘It’s not up to the Government to take a lead on this issue,’ he said, ‘it’s up to individuals to stop taking advantage of cheap flights.’

As an evasion of responsibility, this takes some beating. Yet it mirrors the approach of most Western governments, which simply put a blind eye to the telescope and continue to chase economic growth whatever the environmental cost. Pointing to booming demand, they plan for new runways and new airports that will soon fill to capacity just like the extra lane for cars on an expressway. As a result, air travel is growing at a rate of some five per cent a year, meaning that air passenger kilometres are set to triple by 2030.¹

Air travel urgently needs to be contained – and physical limits (not enough runways to meet demand) are actually a very practical, sensible method of containment. It also doesn’t take an expert to see that the current convenient practice of excluding international air travel from all national emissions targets is absurdly ostrich-like. Besides, the boom in air travel cannot be accounted for by ‘ordinary hard-working people taking their one holiday a year’, which is the routine claim of the media and the travel industry. British Government statistics show that 62 per cent of adults did not make even one return flight in 2006. Among the richest 20 per cent of the population, 61 per cent took one or more return flights. Only four per cent of people took four or more flights.²

So even in the rich world we are talking about a tiny minority of people who may be flying an insane amount.

The spread that follows this article suggests ‘Ten steps to reduce flying’ – and some of these will affect only that tiny minority. But others will apply to you and me as well, because even if the primary focus has to be on forcing governments into action, we still need to do our individual bit.

In a way, putting this issue together has been a gesture in this direction since, three trips to London by train and bus aside, I have made a point of avoiding travelling (always, depressingly, the most ethical course of action of all). On the home front, my family has already decided to holiday this year in Cornwall, on the English coast, rather than further afield. But, on the other hand, the following year we have long planned to revisit friends and familiar places in Canada – we lived in Toronto for a year in the mid-1990s. And now my brother’s family is on the verge of emigrating to Australia – without one or other of us flying we would never see each other again.

It’s a tangled web, as this article – if it has done nothing else – has made plain. Good luck to all of you as you try to sort out what you think about it.

Darling Ducked the Difficult Decisions

Ellie Keen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:28:38 +0000

Like the Lord Almighty, the Chancellor giveth, and the Chancellor taketh away. On the one hand a 10 per cent increase in plane duty will force aviation to pay more of its environmental costs and help reduce emissions. On the other, Alistair Darling’s explicit support for the expansion of both Heathrow and Stansted airports will force emissions ever upwards. A higher rate of first-year tax on polluting 4×4s will reduce emissions. But postponing the increase in fuel duty will increase them.

If his Budget speech to the Commons is to be believed, Darling has made up his mind: climate change is the greatest challenge facing us all, and “there will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act”. In response to this, with great determination and steely efficiency, the Chancellor . . . fails to act. There was no more money for the cash-strapped low carbon buildings programme, so the UK domestic renewables sector will continue to decline. Aviation can expand virtually unchecked. By caving in to the roads lobby and postponing the increase in fuel duty, he is making fossil fuel slightly cheaper in real terms, helping to increase consumption.

Darling also wants to “encourage sustainable biofuels”, apparently not realising that in today’s world the phrase is an oxymoron. He is happy to jump on the Daily Mail’s plastic bags bandwagon – a campaign of marginal importance environmentally – but unwilling to do anything to encourage manufacturers to produce goods more sustainably. And so it goes on.

Big decisions have been postponed. Instead of agreeing that the UK’s reductions targets should be bumped up to 80 per cent by 2050, in line with the latest science, this decision has been handed to the Committee on Climate Change and put off until December. There were no headline announcements on road pricing; it will be subject to further study. There was no announcement on feed-in tariffs to support micro-renewables, despite this being heavily trailed.

New houses will be zero-carbon from 2016, and commercial properties zero-carbon from 2019. But there is nothing substantial to reduce pollution from the existing housing stock, which at 27 per cent of UK emissions is one of our big gest sources of CO2. The government will give £26m to something called the Green Homes Service, but that has yet to be launched – and £26m really isn’t very much money. At this rate of progress, our existing homes will be carbon-neutral by about the year 5000, when most of Britain will be under water.

The inescapable conclusion is that if the government does pass the Climate Change Bill as intended and set itself legally binding cuts in carbon, it will be hard-pressed to achieve them – particularly if the 2050 target is indeed raised to 80 per cent, as the green coalition group Stop Climate Chaos and many others are demanding. A little-noticed win for the climate-change movement was achieved recently when the government agreed to annual indicators of progress on carbon cuts, rather than just the five-yearly budgets. But this will make it even more difficult for ministers to duck difficult decisions, as Darling is doing by pledging commitment to acting on global warming while doing nothing substantial to reduce emissions.

The beauty of the Climate Change Bill approach is that it will forcibly iron out these inconsistencies in government policy. Future chan cellors will not be able to stand up before the country and simply pledge action; they will be judged by what happens with carbon emissions from year to year. If a future Alistair Darling wants to make petrol cheaper for motorists, thereby increasing emissions, he must force even deeper cuts in another sector of the economy to make up for it. There is no middle way.

But the bill still has a rather large hole in it – one large enough to fly a jet or sail a tanker through. International aviation and shipping are still excluded from our domestic targets, on the grounds that this aspect of our carbon footprint is shared with other countries. Ministers pretend that the issue is terribly complicated, but it really isn’t. We could simply count all the emissions from each departing plane or ship, but ignore those that arrive. It’s all the same to the planet.

Terminal Disaster for the Environment

Ellie Keen — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:47:52 +0000

Yesterday was the start of another inglorious chapter in the story of air travel as Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5) officially opened for business. After the whopping £4.3 billion quid spent on essentially a better-lit new cattle shed, it should have been a red letter day for triumphant British Airways management. But the only red on show was that of hundreds of 'Flashmob' protesters who - having previously milling around the check-in areas looking innocuous - simultaneously ripped offvtheir over-garments to reveal matching red t-shirts emblazoned with the simple message, "STOP AIRPORT EXPANSION".

They made a peaceful protest, chaperoned by plenty of police and a fair number of machine guns - and took full advantage of the presence of national corporate media there to cover all the opening day razzmatazz.

The day then went from bad to worse for BA as all the many millions they have spent on preparation and full public dummy run trials of the new set up proved largely wasted. Staff couldn't log on to new computer systems, baggage handlers struggled to park near planes or get through security before new 'fasttrack' check-in machines malfunctioned and T5 ground to a complete halt. Tens of planes had to be cancelled, costing BA a fair few quid no doubt, and thousands of passengers got the kind of airport experience that might lead them to give up all air travel for good. Or, failing that, the misery that they deserve.

Either way, it was another shambolic big project implementation by corporate Britain - not that we're complaining. (Why oh why can't our corporate overlords do everything with ruthless efficiency and eliminate all those stupid mistakes... not!)

But beyond a few headlines and some disgruntled customers, it was all just a temporary blip and they will no doubt sort out the teething troubles. After all it's only a question of money - and BA accumulates plenty of that. They made over a half billion pound profit in just six months last year, even despite a £270 million fine dished out for their part in colluding with 'competitors' over passenger fuel surcharges.

And mentioning competitors in inverted commas is particularly relevant to T5. The new terminal opening is seeing the biggest ever UK reshuffle of airline kit and personnel. The airport is being organised to reflect the way the US-EU so called 'Open Skies' Agreement is panning out. In fact, that deal, spun under the inevitable 'Free Trade' tag, is a great demonstration of the tendency of unregulated markets to contract into cartels and monopolies.

Over recent years, major airlines have been flirting rather than fighting, and all the big players have signed up with each other to form three main 'strategic alliances' with their erstwhile competitors. Sharing resources, they sell each other's tickets, advertise seamless coverage of more routes and reap the additional profits to be had. Working together gives them more global reach and the power of collective muscle flexing when it comes to keeping the airport operators, politicians and regulators acting in their favour.

And now they are gradually realising those alliances in physical space at airports around the world. It'll all help in their plans to continue massive growth of air travel - and leave them better placed to lobby against all those annoying climate change doomsayers.

Which they appear to be doing extremely well - T5 is estimated to be enabling up to 80,000 new flights, even before the planned new third runway the government seems so keen on is built - to be followed by T6 and T7 we presume...

For more see http://www.planestupid.com and http://www.notrag.org

Aerotoxic Updates

Ellie Keen — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:57:38 +0000

In the last issue of the Corporate Watch Newsletter we revealed how the air supply aboard commercial jet airliners is regularly contaminated with highly toxic chemicals which can poison and seriously injure pilots and passengers. This contamination can happen because, as a cost-saving measure, airliners take compressed air for the cabin from the engines. Jet engine oil, however, contains powerful toxins, including organophosphates, a chemical linked to Gulf War Syndrome.

In spite of a powerful and growing body of evidence presented by aircrews, campaigners and independent doctors and scientists, the airline industry has issued blanket denials of all such allegations. Meanwhile government committees such as the UK’s Committee on Toxicity seem determined to ignore any evidence that might threaten airline profits.

Now two recent stories threaten to blow the lid off the industry’s dirtiest secret… or would if the mainstream media had the guts to write it up.

FLYBE PILOTS ‘FUMING’ PROTEST

In October, news broke that crew working for Flybe were boycotting some of the airline’s planes, after several very serious toxic fume incidents. According to BBC Five Live, ten incidents had occurred on Flybe’s ageing BAe 146 planes in the last 15 months. Several of these incidents resulted in hospitalisations, when air crew were incapacitated by fumes, and in one case a plane flying from Belfast was forced to make an emergency landing on the Isle of Man, with the pilots using emergency oxygen supplies.

A well placed source told Corporate Watch that a number of Flybe air crew have been given letters by the company doctor saying that they should not fly on particular planes for health reasons.

Flybe, which has been rebranding itself under the slogan ‘low cost… but not at any cost’, is reluctant to talk about the issue. Flybe’s press enquiries are handled by The Red Consultancy, a leading UK PR company.

We asked them the following questions (which they would only take in writing):

Can you confirm or deny that Flybe’s company doctor has issued letters for air crew saying that they should not fly on particular planes for health reasons?

Does Flybe accept that there were hazardous ‘fuming incidents’ aboard flights, (as described in the Radio 5 report ‘Cabin Fever’)?

Has Flybe conducted any cabin air monitoring tests aboard its BAe 146 aircraft? Did the company’s crisis communications plans include dealing with ‘fuming events’ aboard the aircraft? If so, how long has this been planned for?

Flybe (and Red) directly refused to answer these questions. Instead they issued the following statement:

Flybe is completely confident that its aircraft are operated and maintained to the highest industry standards. We have over 700 commercial pilots within Flybe and to date, not a single one has ever refused to fly one of our aircraft.

In line with many previous public announcements, Flybe took a commercial decision several years ago to reduce the number of aircraft types it operated from three to two. As a result the BAe 146 fleet will have been withdrawn by February 2008.

In spite of the seriousness of this potentially lethal hazard, this appears to be the only statement made to the press at the time of writing.

BAEs GOLDEN GAG

In another twist to the tale, documents were recently presented to the Australian Senate which show that the manufacturers of the planes, BAe Systems, were aware of the fuming problem with the 146 model as early as 1993 and acted to suppress the story. Two Australian airlines, Ansett and EWA, had brought legal action against BAe claiming that a design fault in the BAe 146 airliner was producing ‘obnoxious oil and other fumes’ in the cabin. The documents show that BAe agreed to pay out A$750,000 in a settlement. Allied Signal, the US company which manufactured the engine parts responsible for the leaks, also paid out US$1,235,000. Confidentiality clauses were included in both deals so that the story was kept out of the public domain.

The agreement also blocked any future actions: ‘Ansett and EWA hereby jointly and severally agree that the said sum of A$750,000 shall be paid by BAe to EWA as liquidated damages in full and final settlement of any and all claims which Ansett or EWA may have against BAe either now or in the future in respect of oil or other fumes adversely affecting the cabin environment’.

In 1999 Ansett gave evidence to the Australian Senate’s Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport, which was investigating the contaminated air issue. An Ansett executive said that Ansett had not initiated any legal proceedings against BAe.

It is currently unknown what other similar deals may have been made between other airlines and aircraft manufacturers.

COT

Research into the contaminated air issue is currently being conducted by the government-appointed Committee on Toxicity (COT). Their most recent report, released in September 2007, proved inconclusive and recommended further research. The campaign group the Global Cabin Air Quality Executive (GCAQE) is fiercely critical of COT’s work and produced a detailed report on errors in COT’s research. We asked COT for a response to the GCAQE’s accusations that their report is ‘industry biased’ and ‘contains many technical inaccuracies and misinformation which were previously highlighted to the Committee On Toxicity and the Department of Transport by the GCAQE, other unions, interested parties, doctors and scientists from around the world.’ We also wanted to know why COT has ignored so much evidence submitted by GCAQE and other independent scientists.

The contact person for the committee, Khandu Mistry, was unreachable, despite repeated calls. We subsequently tried the Department of Health press office who said they would get back to us. They did not. We called back; the press officer responsible had gone on holiday. We were told that it wasn’t really their responsibility and that we should talk to the

DoTR. The DoTR press office didn’t think it was their responsibility either and sent us to the Health protection Agency who also denied responsibility. After some discussion of transparency and public accountability the HPA spokesman promised to get back to us, with some answers. He did not. After two weeks of failed inquiries we again tried Khandu Mistry, the committee’s contact person, and were surprised to catch him in the office. He also claimed that it was not his responsibility to answer press enquiries and that he would pass on our questions to the DoH’s press department.

A few days later we received a reply to one of our two questions, asserting that the ‘COT review process was open for discussion… There were many observers at all meetings where this item was discussed. Importantly the COT review was considered a good piece of work by BALPA who submitted the original evidence.’ They failed to answer the more important question as to why so much input from GCAQE and others has been ignored.

For more information see the website of the Aerotoxic Association.

Flight Fight

Ellie Keen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:20:03 +0000

It is the best of times and the worst of times to be a climate change activist. The topic is more potent than it has ever been, yet political action on climate change still limps far behind the science, and the science itself fails to keep up with what is actually happening to our climate. Nowhere is this inertia more evident than in the attitude of the government and the public to flying.

From international hubs to tiny airfields, airports are expanding across the UK. The government is currently holding a consultation on the expansion of Heathrow, where a proposed third runway could see the number of planes rise from 473,000 to more than 720,000 a year. Almost every major hub is pressing for more flights, extra runways and new terminals, while, at the other end of the scale, even tiny airfields like Lydd in the Kent marshes have their sights set on growth. But equally remarkable is the scale and variety of protest against these airport expansions. Virtually every project is being opposed, by campaigns both locally and nationally.

‘Climate change and noise are the two factors driving the campaigners. What initially gets residents campaigning is the noise, the sheer number of planes going overhead. But for most of the large environmental groups climate change is the key factor,’ says John Stewart, chair of the national umbrella body Airport Watch. ‘Local and national are brought together. Government can’t be serious about climate change and continue with an aggressive programme of airport expansion.’

Campaigns have sprung up against a background of perceived failure in government climate policy towards aviation expansion. In December 2003, the government white paper, The Future of Air Transport gave the go ahead for a massive programme of airport building at Heathrow, Stansted, Newcastle, Bristol and many other sites to facilitate the growth of what it sees as an economically crucial industry. In this rush to expand, the looming issue of climate change has been virtually ignored, as have the persistent local complaints about aircraft noise and the destruction of countryside.

Airport expansion campaigners say that the current 6-7 per cent share of UK greenhouse gas emissions caused by flying will grow rapidly in the coming decades. According to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, even if the aviation industry grew at only half the rate it did in 2004, by 2050 the industry would consume between half and all of the UK carbon budget necessary to prevent ‘dangerous’ climate change. And because the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are released at such a high altitude, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that the climate changing effect of flying is around two to four times greater than if the carbon dioxide produced were emitted on the ground. Far from doing their bit to avoid climate change, airports and airlines are being allowed to trample over the efforts of the rest of society.

Coming together
Airport Watch, founded in 2000, reflects the scope of opposition arranged against airport expansion. It loosely links together major international environmental bodies, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, with conservation groups like the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the National Trust. Also joining the movement have been wildlife organisations including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, local anti-noise campaigns, the World Development Movement and more radical direct action groups like Plane Stupid and Rising Tide, to name a few.

Co-operation between groups with very different initial concerns has in many places led to major success, not least because by working together groups can neutralise the most regular criticisms levelled at them. Noise campaigners who have also taken on board messages about the melting ice caps are harder to dismiss as ‘nimbys’, whereas a green group allied to the local parish council is better placed to resist ‘tree-hugging’ stereotypes.

In August 2007, the Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow attracted international attention, helped by the Independent newspaper who revealed that BAA were seeking an injunction to not only keep groups like Plane Stupid away from the airport and large parts of the London transport network, but also to restrict members of the National Trust, the RSPB and the Woodland Trust because of their affiliation to Airport Watch. By building such a wide coalition against Heathrow, it has become harder for the airports to portray opposition as a radical fringe.

Not only are different groups uniting at an organisational level, but residents’ campaigns are being increasingly influenced by the tactics of the direct action environmental groups.

‘Local residents have politely and obediently responded to planning applications, written to their councillors or MP, written to government ministers – and all the other polite middle class things to do … and been fobbed off time and time again,’ says Sarah Clayton of Airport Watch.

‘They are becoming frustrated, and increasingly realise that some form of direct action is the only way to actually get the powers-that-be to sit up and take notice. Middle England ladies in pearls and twin sets are becoming, cautiously, quite interested in direct action out of desperation and despair at the conventional democratic process. Climate Camp was a remarkable success in many ways.’

Divide and rule
Yet there still remains a split between the concerns of residents and those of the environmental groups, and this can allow airports to divide and rule campaigns against them. In 2006, the Duchy of Lancaster proposed a £3million plan to expand the capacity of Tatenhill, a former second world war airfield near Burton-on-Trent, to accommodate 20,000 more flights a year on top of the current 30,000. During a planning inquiry in November last year into the development, the local opposition – Tatenhill Action Group – dropped its challenge after the Duchy agreed to noise restrictions, limited operating hours and restrictions on jets. Friends of the Earth was left alone, still opposing the expansion on climate change grounds.

‘The place where you have the most success is where all parties play all cards regarding local and national issues,’ explains Chris Crean, the Midlands regional campaigner for Friends of the Earth, who continues to fight Tatenhill’s expansion, ‘and equally where they are aware of how the application fits into planning policies, be they local, regional, or national.’

Integration of the climate change argument is increasingly important in any campaign, as it continues to move up the political agenda. Pat Mathewson, of Airport Concern Exeter, argues that, ‘In Exeter there was a consensus not to use the climate change argument; to keep it local; to focus on noise; to sound as if we were not against the airport as such; asking for sympathy for those under the flight path and so on. I think in retrospect this was a mistake. I did, personally, use climate change in my personal arguments to the local councillors.’

The potential of the anti-expansion coalitions is plain to see. Combining a wider green agenda with stiff local defiance, many campaigners see parallels with the opposition to road building schemes in the 1990s. Yet without clear expansion flashpoints, environmental groups may lose their newfound allies and be unable to carry the momentum against airports into the wider movement against climate change.

Just as the composition of anti-expansion groups is complex and changing, so are their methods. Direct action has proved to be the most successful in attracting media attention, with the Camp for Climate Action last August making headlines and the blockade of a Manchester airport security check-in by Plane Stupid and Manchester Climate Action in October also receiving widespread media attention.

Direct action pros and cons
‘Other forms of protest simply don’t work anymore,’ claims Robbie Gillett, an activist for Plane Stupid. ‘Marching from A to B and passively listening to a speaker at a rally will not be enough to stop climate change. At best these can help people get involved. But at worst, they can leave people feeling disempowered.’ ‘For example, the action last October at Manchester airport involving seven people locking on and blockading the domestic flight departure lounge got more media attention than the march in December with 5,000 people in London.’

Yet the media coverage of direct action is very often tinged with alarmism in the shadow of 9/11, with the Sun, for example, running headlines such as ‘Activists plot Heathrow hell’ when the climate campers assembled last summer. Some activists, although by no means a majority, have warned that high-profile national direct action risks scaring off more ‘moderate’ support for local campaigns.

‘The legal controversy around the [climate] camp was useful, but generally direct action is a distraction and can damage our support amongst more moderate people,’ says Jeremy Birch of Bristol Friends of the Earth, which is currently campaigning to prevent a doubling of passengers at Bristol International Airport.

However, as long as public opinion increasingly demands action on climate change, and aviation protesters can demonstrate they have a broad base of support, then direct action will become an increasingly powerful tool for those who feel powerless using traditional channels of protest. It looks set to overtake marching and petitioning as a tactic to gain the media’s attention over aviation expansion, especially as a small group of direct activists are far better able to deliver an ‘on message’ argument to the press.

Gary Dwyer, part of the media team for the Camp for Climate Action, says: ‘Imagine if those 1,500 people at the camp had signed a card to their MP and tell me what you think would’ve happened.’

‘Direct action opens doors, it ramps up pressure, it beckons the spotlight over. But it’s more than just aggressive lobbying; it empowers those who take part. They go away enthused and fired up, feeling like they can be heard and that they do have the right to directly affect things that affect them. Once tasted, you keep going back for more.’

The resort to direct action is partly a result of the lack of success campaigners have had convincing local politicians to stand up to central government policy. But there have been a few victories. In November 2006, Uttlesford district council rejected a planning application from BAA to allow a big increase in flights at Stansted, after it was bombarded with objections from local communities. Although a new runway is still a possibility, Ruth Kelly has indicated that the expansion of Heathrow, not Stansted, will be the government’s priority, and is now the focus of the battle against airport growth in the south east.

A public consultation into the building of a third runway and a sixth terminal at Heathrow is due to be completed on 27 February, but campaigners say that often ‘consultations’ are far more ornamental than real. ‘Feedback’ is sprinkled over essentially unchanged plans.

More likely to trip up the government are EU pollution limits, due to come into force in 2010, which John Stewart says are already exceeded in parts of London under flight paths. The idea touted by the government that better plane and car cleanliness will by 2020 have reduced pollution to European standards, despite a new runway, is utterly implausible, he says.

The influence of the state-backed expansion juggernaut means that local politicians are often no more willing to listen to the arguments against airport growth than the government. Campaigners from Airport Concern Exeter claimed that certain councillors had conflicts of interest that ‘bordered on corruption’, citing that the leader of East Devon district council, who will receive Exeter airport’s planning application, councillor Sara Randall Johnson, is also the head of PR for budget airline Flybe.

Changing government policy
Even if they are willing to oppose expansion plans, the difficulty that local authorities face is that after a planning or public inquiry into an airport’s application for expansion, the final decision is made by one or more departments of central government. Power over airport expansion is centralised, and therefore the ultimate aim of most major groups remains policy change from the government.

‘The number one aim is to get government policy to change,’ concludes Sarah Clayton. ‘Government is the first target, as well as the EU. Airlines just do what they are allowed to, to make money. Government can control the future projections, future expansion or not, and so on. So a primary aim is getting the aviation white paper modified, so it is in line with UK climate change policy. Ministers at the Department of Transport are dimly aware that there is a massive inconsistency in policy, and at some stage something has to give.’

There was minimal change to the aviation white paper when it was reviewed in 2006, and proposals to include aviation into the European Union’s emissions trading scheme by 2011 have been repeatedly attacked as inadequate by Friends of the Earth Europe. Nonetheless, the lack of any current international framework on aviation has not prevented governments from taking unilateral action on domestic flights. As part of France’s recent ‘grenelle de l’environnement’, President Sarkozy announced taxes on domestic flights where the same route has a TGV connection, for example from Paris to Lyon or Paris to Bordeaux.

Governments may be unwilling to act to stem the explosion in aviation and airport building, but ultimately only they hold the power to do so. Campaigners will have most success if they manage to combine broad-based, localised opposition with the desperate need for urgent policy changes to avert climate change via creative and inclusive direct action initiatives.

More information:
www.airportwatch.org.uk
www.stopheathrowexpansion.com
1

Toxic Airlines

Ellie Keen — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:34:37 +0000

John Hoyte is a tall bluff 51 year old. A pilot all his working life Hoyte had begun to develop a mystery sickness in the years before he retired. He was working for a budget airline when he became ill; blurred vision, memory problems, depression. Worsening symptoms forced him to resign as he felt unable to fly safely. He began to fear that he had CJD or early dementia. Rumours about contaminated air on planes had existed in pilots' circles for years, but it was not until he was invited to take part in tests at University College London that his illness was connected with this issue.

The tests were conducted by Doctor Sarah Mackenzie Ross, a clinical neuropsychologist. She conducted psychometric tests on Hoyte and 17 other pilots and found that, in addition to physical symptoms, they were suffering 'alarming cognitive failures', including: 'being unable to retain, or confusing, numerical data and information provided by air traffic control regarding altitude and speed; completing tasks in the incorrect sequence; setting the wrong cleared level for the aircraft to climb or descend; and being unable to recall important matters such as whether the undercarriage has been raised or lowered.' Independently, the pilots had blood and fat samples analysed. These showed exposure to toxic compounds including the organophosphate, tricresyl phosphate.

Evidence is emerging that the air supply on modern jet airliners is regularly contaminated with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. Due to the altitude planes fly at, crew and passengers need compressed air to breathe. This is supplied from the engines - unfiltered - and is sometimes still blended with pyrolised (heated) engine oils and hydraulic fluids. The engine oils contain the organophosphate, tricresyl phosphate (TCP), a powerful toxin. Illness caused by exposure to the chemical contaminants in cabin air has been dubbed Aerotoxic Syndrome.

John Hoyte has now set up the Aerotoxic Association to inform crews and passengers about the health hazards to which they are exposed, to provide support and advice to sufferers, and to campaign for official recognition of Aerotoxic Syndrome.

Pilots and aircrew who are regularly exposed may develop symptoms. Sometimes the contamination is strong enough to cause health damage with a single exposure. Corporate Watch spoke to one passenger who flew to Orlando, Florida on a charter flight aboard a Boeing 757, earlier this year. On the flight the family became quite ill and spent their holiday in bed with a mystery illness. They suffered breathing difficulties, exhaustion, cognitive problems and severe flu like symptoms. When the return flight was delayed the passenger was able to talk to around 40 other passengers who had been on the same outbound flight and found that most of them had suffered similar symptoms. The family were still incapacitated when they returned home and their GP was unable to identify any cause of the mystery illness. They complained to the airline and to the Health Protection Agency and discovered that their aeroplane had an 'air valve bleed' which could have contaminated the air supply.

Ex-pilot and aerotoxic sufferer Captain Susan Michaelis has investigated the extent of the problem by surveying pilots. She wrote to 350 BA 146 pilots, and received responses from 242: 86% had experienced contaminated air events; 57% experienced some aerotoxic symptoms; 27% reporting medium to long term symptoms and 8.5% had retired for medical reasons. Michaelis has also written the Aviation Contaminated Air Reference Manual an 844 page guide to the issue detailing numerous independent studies and over 1000 contaminated air events in the UK alone.

A Canadian scientist, Chris Van Netten, became interested in the issue and decided to conduct his own studies. He took swab samples from inside a number of airliners and tested them for tricresyl phosphate. In total 40 planes of different types have been tested in this way in Australia, the USA, UK and Europe. 34 tested positive for TCP.

Governments around the world appear to be deeply uninterested. The issue is currently under official investigation in the UK by the government appointed Committee on Toxicity (COT) and the House of Lords, Science and Technology Committee. Campaigners allege that both investigations are seriously flawed. Of twelve parties selected to give evidence to the House of lords investigation only one was an independent scientist and only one representative of air crews.

The Global Cabin Air Quality Executive (GCAQE), an international coalition of concerned unions, has written to the Committee of Toxicity to point out serious flaws in its evidence gathering. The COT has, for instance, only accepted as evidence one study of TCP contamination of an aeroplane, although they have been informed by campaigners of at least eight other independent studies which found evidence of contamination. The blood and tissue tests mentioned above have also been ignored and the committee has failed to follow up evidence provided by a number of independent scientists. The unions' coalition has written to the COT secretariat, informing them of more than 20 crucial factual errors and limitations in their report. Each of these errors it represents, downplays or ignores the evidence for contaminated air and its dangers.

Captain Tristan Loraine of the GCAQE commented that, 'the COT appear to be looking after industry interests rather than passenger and crew health and flight safety'. COT is expected to report back some time Autumn 2007.

See www.aerotoxic.org and www.toxicfreeairlines.com