Heathrow | ukwatch.net

Actions do not match

tim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:55:15 +0000

Those behind the demand for a third runway and a sixth terminal stress the jobs that would be created, but what really motivates them is the profits that they foresee.

That might be bearable but for the severe effects that the development will have on the environment and on the lives of the people living in the region of the airport.

Pressing ahead with expansion puts the government in a difficult position, given its frequent verbal commitments to combating climate change.

Unfortunately, its actions do not match what it says.

The government claims that the planned development meets noise and air quality targets, but it discounts the reality that the entire village of Sipson, with about 700 homes, would be utterly destroyed.

Nor will that be the end of the matter.

An expanded Heathrow, with a new runway and increased passenger numbers, will put greater strain on the already existing M4 and M25 motorways that serve the airport.

It is inevitable that the roads lobby will already be preparing the case to expand these motorways or to create another, leading to the further concreting over of another part of the overcrowded south-east of England.

The government ought to reject the short-sighted short-termism of the motorway and airline lobbies.

It should expand and modernise the environmentally friendly railways, with exclusive high-speed tracks to obviate the need for short-haul flights and take a conscious decision to drive down rail prices to encourage passengers to switch their means of travel.

Tube chaos

Tory Mayor Boris Johnson owes an apology to all London Underground staff who suffered physical and verbal assault at the weekend.

He should also apologise to all citizens in the capital for the chaos to which their Tube system was reduced by a minority of anti-social elements who took advantage of the mayor’s political stunt.

What happened on Saturday night should not have surprised anyone.

It was the logical result of too much drink taken in the midst of crowds too big to control by Tube staff and police.

Rail union RMT leader Bob Crow had already pointed out the impossible task handed to staff of carrying out the mayor’s unthought-through plan to ban alcohol on public transport.

The main problem for staff is not someone who opens up a can of beer or who sips from a hip flask on a Tube.

Problems arise when people roll into stations already steaming, after hours spent in pubs or City clubs, and look to have a go at staff carrying out their duties.

The mayor’s “Look how tough I am on yobs” gimmick is useless in tackling the anti-social behaviour witnessed on Saturday night and the similar misconduct that public transport staff suffer every other night of the year.

Instead of blurting out the first thing that comes into his head, he, like government ministers, would be far better served listening to the people who are at the sharp end of this problem.

Heathrow's Strange History of Evasion and Expansion

Ellie Keen — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

London’s Heathrow airport is an ever-expanding city state that sucks in workers in the pursuit of profit. It is the world’s busiest international airport and it grows constantly with an accumulation of land, wealth and pollution for the sake of commerce.

Heathrow is a 24-hour shopping centre with a captive audience. It is a fenced-in, steel and glass cathedral to the market, and keeps running because of low wages and exploitation.

Once a minute a plane flies over the heads of those living nearby. The flights are low and loud enough that conversation has to stop. Some two million people are affected by noise and pollution from the airport.

The airport handles 67.5 million passengers a year and is the biggest single-site employer in Britain. It currently directly employs some 72,000 people and supports perhaps another 100,000 jobs.

In the London suburbs of Southall and Hounslow, the small sweatshops that hid behind the high streets in the 1960s and 1970s were closed down.

But they were replaced by the multinational sweatshops of the airline caterers, and the overpriced coffee and food chains.

Heathrow’s workers have had to struggle hard to win decent living standards throughout the airport’s history. Asian workers had to struggle to even get jobs there.

The 1970s saw a period of militancy at the airport with a number of strikes, including a massive engineering strike in 1977 over pay, which won after two weeks.

That militancy still exists. Check-in staff walked out unofficially in July 2003 against new clocking on and off procedures.

After catering staff at the Gate Gourmet firm were sacked in 2005, thousands of workers across the airport walked out unofficially in their support.

Hub

British lobbyists and the bosses talk about the need for a “hub” airport to justify Heathrow’s existence.

Their business model assumes it is more efficient to put passengers on feeder flights in and out of a huge hub airport.

Federal Express developed this “hub-and spoke” model in the 1950s in the US. It found that it could move parcels more profitably from New York to Washington by flying them 1,000 miles from New York to Memphis and then 800 miles to Washington, rather than shipping them directly by road.

Passenger airlines all rushed to copy the model. It isn’t that efficient for parcels, never mind people or the planet. But it was profitable.

During the Second World War, the aviation industry saw Heathrow – then a small airfield surrounded by market gardens – as the ideal opportunity to make a profit.

The Tory aviation minister Harold Balfour agreed with them. But Balfour recognised that he would not persuade the cabinet to go for Heathrow unless he sold it to them as an airport essential to the war effort.

So the cabinet agreed to proposals for a military airport. The RAF never used Heathrow. The embryonic airline industry had got its way by deception.

Balfour had used a wartime emergency requisition order to avoid a lengthy and costly public inquiry.

He wrote, “Almost the last thing I did at the air ministry of any importance was to hijack for civil aviation the land on which London [Heathrow] airport stands under the noses of resistant ministerial colleagues. If hijack is too strong a term, I plead guilty to the lesser crime of deceiving a cabinet committee.”

As Heathrow was born so it has grown. The location of the airport itself, to the west of London, is irrational. The site is low lying, being 25 metres above sea level, and prone to fog.

Heathrow is the only main urban airport that lies on an east-west axis relative to the city it serves.

This is a problem because prevailing winds in much of the world blow from west to east. Runways have to be aligned in this direction and aircraft using Heathrow must take off and land over densely-populated parts of London.

The perversely sited central terminals can only be reached by tunnels. Their position was based on the presumption that there would never be a need for large car parks since airline passengers would be wealthy – and therefore they would be chauffeur-driven.

Yet at the same time the original plan for the airport envisaged extension to the north.

That would have involved demolishing the villages of Harmondsworth, Sipson and Harlington. After opposition the plans were abandoned in December 1952.

The air ministry committee wrote, “No government would be prepared to consider a project that involved razing to the three old world villages of Harmondsworth, Sipson and Harlington to the ground.”

The men from the ministry hadn’t envisaged New Labour. The government is expected to oversee the expansion of Heathrow that will see the destruction of those very same areas.

The high street in Harmondsworth will be split, and a graveyard bulldozed. Sipson will disappear. In total around 4,000 houses will have to be demolished or abandoned.

Some 700 of these were built after a 1952 government guarantee that even if Heathrow expanded, Sipson would remain untouched.

Villages

The government claims that anyone evicted from their home as a result of expansion will be fully compensated, though how is not yet clear.

The villages might be almost stereotypical, with listed buildings, old churches and the like. But the people who live in them are workers in the airport.

People who have worked in Heathrow for decades are heading up the protests against the new runway.

Those who keep Heathrow running are those who suffer most directly from the pollution it produces.

They are to be evicted, and their homes consumed by the airport they work in.

That is the logic of allowing business to take precedence over people and the planet.

Airport expansion is Plane Stupid

Ellie Keen — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:25:58 +0000

Expansion at Heathrow does not only fly in the face of the scientific imperative that we reduce our emissions. It also makes a farce of the democratic process on which we traditionally rely.

On May the 2nd Britain woke up to a very different political landscape. The significant Tory gains told of the shadows to come: shadows which indicate just how dark our future could be. With Boris now mayor, London’s hopes for setting a benchmark to radicalise the Brown government’s environmental policies have faded. No longer have we a mayor who is willing openly to confront the climate-wrecking policies of New Labour.

This is, however, only a small part of the story. A Tory government may do little to alter the business-as-usual trajectory to catastrophic climate change; but Brown is certainly not taking the necessary harsh measures he once purported to advocate. Not only is he doing nothing to reduce UK emissions in line with targets, but he is actively supporting and investing in irresponsible projects that will entail massive emissions growth. At the forefront of these projects is the expansion of Heathrow.

Expansion at Heathrow does not only fly in the face of the scientific imperative that we reduce our emissions. It also makes a farce of the democratic process on which we traditionally rely. The public consultation on adding capacity at Heathrow highlighted the undemocratic nature of the government’s actions. In not allowing dissenting voices within the parameters of the document, it denied the vast democratic majority a voice in choosing the fate of their own city, country and indeed their planet. Instead, what it did, quite clearly, was to highlight the cosy relationship between Brown and big business.

Democracy is failing us. Our representative government is not representing us; we have no voice in the decisions that determine our fate. The aviation industry, already subsidised to the tune of £10 billion annually, is now quite explicitly driving public policy. The locus of power is not with the people, or even their representatives, but with profit and business. The old accusation that it is corporations who take these decisions rings truer as every new policy – whether it be in energy, transport or elsewhere – is announced. So where does this leave us?

Where institutionalised democracy fails, an alternative is needed – an alternative that reminds people what it is to have a voice and to participate in the decision-making processes that shape the outcomes of their lives. Non-violent direct action is a legitimate, if not the only remaining, response to this democratic failure. When the traditional channels of politics are rendered so corrupt, we must look beyond them.

Plane Stupid have made clear that direct action against the aviation industry and their government cronies is vital: both as a means of raising public awareness regarding the dire consequences of airport expansion and the impact of air travel on our battle to stop climate change; and as a method of collective bargaining with which the government must engage. Direct action gives a platform to those disempowered by parliamentary politics – to those that party politics consistently neglects.

This generation of activists are the last generation who can stop climate change. We have seen the failure of traditional forms of protest during the run-up to Iraq. Plane Stupid know – as do so many others, both young and old – that if we are to stop the business-as-usual agenda, that direct action is a means we must use. We also know what it is to participate directly in true democracy: with our horizontal power structures and our consensus decision-making processes, the activist community could certainly give the Brown government a lesson or two in successful democracy.

In 2007, 78% of people said that they would be prepared to change their behaviour to tackle the threat of climate change: given this, we must wonder why, in light of such a clear mandate, the government consistently fails to act.

But it may perhaps be time to leave aside such questions and begin the long course of action necessary to meet today’s challenges. We will try to stop irresponsible political decisions. We will try to reverse them if they are made. But as democracy continues to be left in the gutter it should not surprise anyone that when the time comes, Plane Stupid and many others – both inside and outside party politics – will be there to meet the bulldozers.

If we are to confront the true nature of the climate threat, the government must first scrap its airport expansion plans. The construction of the Third Runway at Heathrow would make meeting even the pathetically inadequate 60% reduction target impossible. Research from the Tyndall Centre shows that with expansion on this business-as-usual trajectory, flight numbers will treble by 2050. This is not going to stop climate change. The public has woken up to this reality: is it not, now, the turn of the government to face the facts?

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

Britain is Stealing the US Crown of No 1 Climate Villain

Ellie Keen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:06:01 +0000

This is a truly shaming moment for Gordon Brown’s government. On Monday ministers were once more accused of failing to fully assess the environmental impact of a third runway at Heathrow. The Conservative MP for Putney, Justine Greening, argued that the airport operator, BAA, had been too closely involved with the expansion plans, alleging that government collusion had resulted in environmental concerns being ignored. With Ruth Kelly and the Department for Transport seemingly determined to bust the UK’s climate-change targets, it now falls to the likes of Greenpeace and Plane Stupid to try to defend them.

The environmental activists who dropped banners at Heathrow and the House of Commons protesting against the planned third runway may have been breaking the law by taking direct action, but in a wider sense they were simply trying to uphold it. They were arrested for an unusual reason: trying to enforce government policy against the wishes of the government. The case is simple: the government is committed to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Expanding Heathrow will increase them.

Ministers have acknowledged repeatedly that climate change is the greatest threat facing the globe. Gordon Brown himself gave a speech on November 19 last year in which he stated clearly that the ongoing rise in global temperatures should be kept to less than two degrees, and that, in order to achieve this, global emissions would need to start falling within 10 to 15 years. Yet Brown seems to see no inconsistency in demanding global action on climate change while simultaneously expanding the most polluting form of mass transport known to humanity.

While government may be committed to achieving its climate-change targets, it is clearly not committed to the means of achieving them. Quite the opposite. Billions are being poured into motorway-widening schemes. As the Guardian has reported in recent weeks, government grants for domestic solar panels and other renewable technologies have been slashed, killing off a promising new sector of power generation. Instead, ministers seem minded to support E.ON’s plans for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Instead of supporting the cleanest electricity-generating technology, Brown sides with the dirtiest.

Aviation is the final straw. At a time when millions of people are clearly expressing urgent concerns about climate change, the government is about to embark on a public relations suicide mission, gearing up for a titanic battle with climate campaigners which is guaranteed to drag the UK’s international environmental reputation through the mud. At the same time as ministers jet off to UN conferences to make long-winded speeches about global warming, black-clad police will be dragging climate change protesters out of the way of BAA’s bulldozers in the full glare of the world’s media.

Imagine the ironic laughter that the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, will face from Chinese, Indian and other delegates at the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen, when he lectures them about cutting their emissions as the tarmac is laid at Heathrow. No longer will the US be the world’s primary global warming villain, particularly if the new American president re-engages with the Kyoto process. Instead the country that everyone loves to hate will be Britain. It will be a deeply humiliating experience for those in government – and there are many – who are truly committed to tackling climate change. If Ruth Kelly keeps on down this insane path, she will not be lightly forgiven – by her colleagues, let alone by the rest of the country.

But Brown’s government may yet be saved from its own stupidity – by the very people whose lives it is determined to destroy. Seven hundred homes will be flattened if the plans go ahead, including the entire community of Sipson. But these residents are not going to go without a fight. A thousand people turned up to a public meeting in Chiswick last month. More than 700 packed a small hall in Putney, and 600 mobbed a public meeting in Richmond. Thousands more arrived at a protest meeting in Westminster on February 25 – so many that security staff had to close the doors on safety grounds. More than 10,000 people are expected to join a rally on May 31 at Heathrow itself.

These campaigners are backed by a formidable political coalition. Every London mayoral candidate opposes the expansion of Heathrow. The Tories’ Peter Ainsworth addressed the Westminster meeting, as did Nick Clegg and Vince Cable for the Liberal Democrats. MPs from across the political spectrum lined up to condemn Ruth Kelly and the government. Virtually all the speakers highlighted climate change as the main reason why they opposed the new runway. And direct-action campaigners have promised a sustained scorched-earth campaign unless the government backs down. This will be the iconic climate change battle of the decade – with Gordon Brown’s government cast as the enemy. That is, unless Ruth Kelly can summon up the courage to stand up to BAA before it is too late.

A Likely Story

Ellie Keen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:59:36 +0000

Something unusual is going to happen tomorrow. The Press Complaints Commission, Britain’s only arbiter of fairness and accuracy in our newspapers, is due to make a ruling. What’s so odd about that? Well, as Nick Davies shows in his book Flat Earth News, out of 28,000 complaints to the PCC submitted over ten years, it managed to make a formal adjudication on just 448, or 1.6%(1). Most of the time it finds a reason to look the other way. This isn’t too surprising: 6 of its 16 commissioners are newspaper or magazine editors(2).

But tomorrow’s case is so serious, and the evidence that has accumulated over the past seven months so strong, that even the PCC can’t brush it under the carpet. It concerns the Evening Standard’s reporting of the climate camp established close to Heathrow last August. Soon after it opened, the paper accused the campers of putting the lives of millions at risk by planning to invade the airport and plant hoax bombs. The story was repeated by the Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the BBC. I have now seen the correspondence about this case. It makes astonishing reading.

The front page article, written by the paper’s chief reporter and headlined “Militants will hit Heathrow”, claimed that “climate change activists plan to use illegal tactics such as hoax suspicious packages to cause maximum disruption at one of the busiest times of the year. They have also discussed simultaneous assaults on the airport’s security fence to stretch police resources to the limit.”(3) Inside the paper a journalist called Rashid Razaq, who spent a night undercover in the camp, reported that one man was “urging us to ‘get them panicked with different things at the same time like bags left around the airport and people climbing the fence.’ Late that night, I saw two protesters checking out the security fences.”(4) As the organisers of the camp began to probe, the story started to fall apart. They also discovered that this is not the only occasion on which Rashid Razaq has been accused of taking liberties with the truth.

How did Mr Razaq see protesters “checking out the security fences”? The camp was over a kilometre from the airport fence: he could not have seen anyone from there. When challenged by the campers, the Evening Standard claimed that “Mr Razaq had left the camp to go to a nearby petrol station to buy food when he was returning to the camp with a colleague, Sebastian Meyer. Their route back took them close to the perimeter fence of the airport, where he saw two men whom he recognised from the camp. One was trying to climb the fence while another kept watch.”(5) The Standard contends that “It was a sufficiently light night to recognise faces”.(6)

There are several problems with this story. As photos and maps produced by the campers show, neither the petrol station nor any part of the route to the camp is close enough to the fence to recognise faces(7,8). Sebastian Meyer is a professional photographer. If, somehow, they had seen people at the fence, and managed to recognise them as protesters, why did they not take photographs? I put this question to the Evening Standard’s managing editor, Doug Wills. “He didn’t take any photos of it because it was pitch black.”(9) But the Standard had already claimed that “it was a sufficiently light night to recognise faces”. I asked Mr Wills for a map reference for the section of fence. He has not been able to provide one. And why, if one of the protesters was trying to climb the fence – a more serious matter than merely “checking it out” – did Mr Razaq not report this?

What about the claim that the protesters were planning to plant hoax bombs? The Standard explains that the man who raised the plan was “white and in his late 20s”. “He used words to the effect: ‘we need to make people sit up and take notice. Leave some packages around Heathrow. That’ll make them take notice.”(10) This is a completely different statement to the one quoted in Razaq’s article. In the published version someone else – “a woman in her thirties” – says “we have to make people sit up and take notice”(11). None of the alleged statements amounts to a “plan” by the camp.

But the real problems arise when you see Mr Razaq’s notes, which were obtained by the PCC after several requests from the campers. At first Mr Razaq claimed that “I made an accurate note of what was said as soon as the meetings finished.”(12) But when the notes were released, they turned out to be dated “13/8”, the day after the events Mr Razaq describes(13). They contain none of the damning quotes or descriptions the Evening Standard published. The only quoted speech was an intention to make “a big impact and make people around the world sit-up and take notice, to know we mean business”, this time attributed not to a man in his 20s or a woman in her 30s, but to a “group of three campaigners.” Why did Mr Razaq record this and not the far more serious instigation to plant hoax packages, supposedly made by the same man, in the same breath, at the same meeting?

Mr Razaq has also been accused of misreporting by the Freud Museum in London. In January 2007 he claimed it was showing a film containing footage from Al Qaeda recruitment videos, “outlawed in most Western countries”(14). It wasn’t. The curator told me “He made up details. He put in facts that were completely wrong. I think he is one of those journalists who is prepared to just go and make up a story.”(15) Doug Wills, the Standard’s managing editor, told me that the curator himself had informed Razaq that the Qaeda film was in the exhibition. Mr Wills forwarded an email from him, which mentions the film but not its inclusion in the show(16). Ironically, the title of the exhibition was “Paranoia”.

In January 2008, Razaq wrote that he had gone undercover as a cleaner in Barnet Hospital, and found that staff were flouting basic safety rules(17). The hospital tells me that he was in fact employed as a porter, and that he misunderstood or misreported the rules(18). The Standard insists Razaq was a cleaner. When I spoke to Mr Razaq, he referred me to statements by the managing editor.

Is the Evening Standard worried about his reporting? Not a bit of it. Of the Heathrow coverage it says “we are 100 percent satisfied that our published reports were fair and accurate on a matter of public interest.”(19) They were not just Razaq’s work, but the product of “an extensive operation organised by an extremely experienced team of executives and senior reporters”(20). When the Freud Museum sent a letter of complaint, the paper neither published the letter nor replied to it(21). The problem seems to be a systemic one.

I don’t know how the Press Complaints Commission will rule. But the evidence I have seen suggests that if the Evening Standard is not required to publish a correction we need a bolder arbiter.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Nick Davies, 2008. Flat Earth News, p364. Chatto and Windus.

2. http://www.pcc.org.uk/about/whoswho/members.html

3. Robert Mendick, 13th August 2007. Militants Will Hit Heathrow. Evening Standard – West End Final.

4. Rashid Razaq, 13th August 2007. In the shambolic climate camp, protesters plot campaign on panic. Standard – West End Final.

5. Susan Ryan, acting managing editor, the Evening Standard, 8th October 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

6. ibid.

7. Alex Harvey, the Camp for Climate Action. 26th September 2007. Map included in letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

8. Alex Harvey, the Camp for Climate Action. 18th January 2007. Pictures included in letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

9. Doug Wills, by phone, 3rd March 2008.

10. Susan Ryan, acting managing editor, the Evening Standard, 8th October 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

11. Rashid Razaq, 13th August 2007. In the shambolic climate camp, protesters plot campaign on panic. Standard – West End Final.

12. Quoted by Doug Wills, 17th September 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

13. A photocopy of the notes was included with a letter from Doug Wills, 22nd November 2007 to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

14. Rashid Razaq, 10th January 2007. Film of 9/11 terrorists celebrating is displayed at art show. Evening Standard.

15. Predrag Pajdic, by phone, 29th February 2008.

16. Email from Predrag Pajdic to Khaled Ramadan, 9th January 2007.

17. Rashid Razaq, 7th January 2008. Standard reveals hospital workers flouting basic rules on hygiene. Evening Standard.

18. Press Office, Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust, by phone, 29th February 2008.

19. Doug Wills, 11th December 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

20. Doug Wills, 12th February 2008. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

21. Predrag Pajdic, by phone, 29th February 2008

Protest Taking Off

Ellie Keen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:59:35 +0000

In 1971, the United States government proposed testing its nuclear arsenal near the tiny island of Amchitka – a wildlife paradise off the west coast of Alaska. A number of protest groups sprang up. One particular group of people came together with the idea to charter a boat – the Phyllis Cormack – and sail it into the nuclear testing site. Through placing themselves in the area of the bomb blast, they wanted to draw a line in the sand, and to make sure that the whole world would bear witness to what their government was doing. Later, the US government called off its tests. Greenpeace was born.

Today, some 30 years later, Greenpeace activists have today once more drawn a line in the sand. By climbing on top of an A320 aircraft at Heathrow airport to bear witness to the threat to the climate from Brown’s plan for a third runway, they’ve taken the climate campaign to a new level. Climate change is the greatest danger to the world today. The crossroads where we stand now is similar in some ways to the threat from a nuclear winter during the cold war. In years to come, like the early nuclear campaigners, I’m sure people will look back to understand the sense of dread these inspirational activists hold. Runway 3 is a litmus test of the government’s commitment to truly tackling climate change.

It isn’t difficult to understand why. Aviation already accounts for 13% of the UK’s climate impacts and we fly more than any other country in the world. Greenpeace carefully chose to demonstrate on top of a plane that had flown from Manchester to illustrate that so many of these destinations are reachable more quickly and in greater comfort by train – which is over ten times less polluting. But the government’s aviation policy follows no logic. It follows the profit-led whims of BAA.

While Greenpeace is far from alone in opposing Runway 3, today’s action signifies a serious ratcheting-up of the direct action campaign. Even the protesters at last summer’s Climate Camp didn’t cross the perimeter fence at Heathrow, but this was an inevitable next step and is indicative of people’s frustration at the failure of democratic processes.

The proposed runway is hated by Londoners, contested by climate scientists and would destroy the communities our politicians are meant to serve. The fact that these plans have come this far is testament to the government’s undemocratic, cosy relationship with BAA. On Wednesday, the government’s consultation will end but it has been a fix from the start. Freedom of Information documents reveal that BAA actually wrote some of the consultation papers and helped the government draw up a “risk register” of threats to its construction.

In the past fortnight, all of London’s mayoral candidates have come out against the third runway, as have over 100 local west London politicians representing some two million people. Tonight Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, will add his name, when he speaks at a major rally at Westminster Central Hall. Today’s Greenpeace action adds the voice of people committed to taking direct action to stop climate change.

It’s time Gordon Brown got beyond rhetorical support and started believing his own hype. Brown could be the first prime minister to take climate change seriously. Or the last prime minister not to.

Juggle a few of these numbers, and it makes economic sense to kill people

JamieSW — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:51:22 +0000

This is a column about how good intentions can run amok. It tells the story of how an honourable, intelligent man set out to avert environmental disaster and ended up accidentally promoting the economics of the slave trade. It shows how human lives can be priced and exchanged for goods and services.

The story begins in a village a few miles to the west of London. The British government proposes to flatten Sipson in order to build a third runway for Heathrow airport. The public consultation is about to end, but no one doubts that the government has made up its mind.

Its central case is that the economic benefits of building a third runway outweigh the economic costs. The extra capacity, the government says, will deliver a net benefit to the UK economy of £5bn(1). The climate change the runway will cause costs £4.8bn(2), but this is dwarfed by the profits to be made.

There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the government’s numbers are wrong. A new analysis by the environmental consultancy CE Delft shows that the official figures overestimate both the number of jobs the runway will generate and the value brought to the United Kingdom by extra business passengers(3). In an excoriating article in the Guardian last week, Professor Paul Ekins demonstrated that the government has rigged the cost of carbon(4). (Delightfully, the web address for the consultation document ends completecondoc.pdf.) But while the runway’s opponents don’t like the results, most people seem to agree that weighing up economic costs and benefits is a sensible method of making this decision. The problem, they argue, is that the wrong figures have been used.

When Sir Nicholas Stern published his study of the economics of climate change, environmentalists (myself included) lined up to applaud him: he had given us the answer we wanted. He showed that stopping runaway climate change would cost less than failing to prevent it. But because his report was so long, few people bothered to find out how he had achieved this result. It took me a while, but by the time I reached the end I was horrified.

On one side of Stern’s equation are the costs of investing in new technologies (or not investing in old ones) to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from rising above a certain level. These can reasonably be priced in pounds or dollars. On the other side are the costs of climate change. Some of them – such as higher food prices and the expense of building sea walls – are financial, but most take the form of costs which are generally seen as incalculable: the destruction of ecosystems and human communities; the displacement of people from their homes; disease and death. All these costs are thrown together by Sir Nicholas with a formula he calls “equivalent to a reduction in consumption”, to which he then attaches a price.

Stern explains that this “consumption” involves not just the consumption of goods we might buy from the supermarket, but also of “education, health and the environment.”(5) He admits that this formula “raises profound difficulties”, especially the “challenge of expressing health (including mortality) and environmental quality in terms of income”(6). But he uses it anyway, and discovers that the global disaster which would be unleashed by a 5-6° rise in temperature, and which is likely to involve widespread famine, is “equivalent to a reduction in consumption” of 5-20%.

It is true that as people begin to starve they will consume less. When they die they cease to consume altogether. But Stern’s unit (a reduction in consumption) incorporates everything from the price of baked beans to the pain of bereavement. He then translates it into a “social cost of carbon”, measured in dollars. He has, in other words, put a price on human life. Worse still, he has ensured that this price is buried among the other prices: when you read that the “social cost of carbon” is $30 a tonne, you don’t know – unless you unpick the whole report and its methodology and sources – how much of this is made of human lives.

The poorer people are, the cheaper their lives become. “For example,” Stern observes, “a very poor person may not be ‘willing-to-pay’ very much money to insure her life, whereas a rich person may be prepared to pay a very large sum. Can it be right to conclude that a poor person’s life or health is therefore less valuable?”(7) Up to a point, yes: income, he says, should be one of the measures used to determine the social cost of carbon. Sir Nicholas was by no means the first to use such a formula. What was new was the unthinking enthusiasm with which his approach was greeted.

Stern’s methodology has a disastrous consequence, unintended but surely obvious. His report shows that the dollar losses of failing to prevent a high degree of global warming outweigh the dollar savings arising from not taking action. It therefore makes economic sense to try to stop runaway climate change. But what if the result had been different? What if he had discovered that the profits to be made from burning more fossil fuels exceeded the social cost of carbon? We would then find that it makes economic sense to kill people.

This is what the government has done. Its consultation paper boasts that “our approach is entirely consistent with the Stern Review”(8). It has translated his “social cost of carbon” into a “shadow price of carbon”, which is currently valued, human lives and all, at £25 a tonne(9).

Against this is set the economic benefit of a new runway. Part of this benefit takes the form of shorter waiting times for passengers. The government claims that building a third runway will reduce delays, on average, by three minutes(10). This saving is costed at €38-49 per passenger per hour(11). The price is a function of the average net wages of travellers: the more you earn, the more the delays are deemed to cost you, even if you are on holiday.

Consider the implications. On one side of the equation human life is being costed. On the other side, the value of delays to passengers is being priced, and it rises according to their wealth. Convenience is weighed against human life. The richer you are, the more lives your time is worth.

The people most likely to be killed by climate change do not live in this country. Most of them live in Africa and South Asia. Hardly any of the economic benefits of expanding Heathrow accrue to them. Yet the government has calculated the economic benefits to the United Kingdom, weighed them against the global costs of climate change and discovered that sacrificing foreigners – especially poor ones – is a sensible economic decision.

I can accept that a unit of measurement which allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions is a useful tool. What I cannot accept is that it should be scrambled up with the price of eggs and prefixed with a dollar sign. Human life is not a commodity. It cannot be traded against profits or exchanged for convenience. We have no right to decide that others should die to make us richer.

References:

1. The net benefits are estimated at between £4.4bn and £5.2bn: Department for Transport, November 2007. Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport: Consultation Document, p74.

2. Department for Transport, November 2007. Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport: Consultation Document, p125. http://www.dft.gov.uk/162259/165220/302152/completecondoc.pdf

3. Bart Boon et al, February 2008. The economics of Heathrow expansion: Final report. CE Delft. http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/4504.final.report.pdf

4. Paul Ekins, 13th February 2008. Path of least resistance. The Guardian.

5. Sir Nicholas Stern, October 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury, Part 1, page 28. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics…

6. ibid, Part 1, page 30.

7. ibid, Part 1, page 30-31.

8. Department for Transport, ibid, p10.

9. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, December 2007. The Social Cost Of Carbon And The Shadow Price Of Carbon: What They Are, And How To Use Them In Economic Appraisal In The UK. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/carboncost/pd…

10. Department for Transport, November 2007. UK Air Passenger Demand and CO2 Forecasts, p128. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/environmentalissues/ukairdemandandco2…

11. Finding the figures on which the government based its benefit estimates was a struggle. The consultation document led me to the passenger demand forecast (see note 10), which in turn referenced this paper:

European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, 2005. Standard Inputs for EUROCONTROL Cost Benefit Analyses. http://www.eurocontrol.int/eatm/gallery/content/public/library/CBA-stand…