Thursday, July 19, 2007

We're all going to get sent to Climate Camp...

...if we don't sign up to big new taxes on hard-up manufacturing industry and good old family holidays.

I saw this flyer at the Prince Charles cinema off London's Leicester Square; at first I thought it was a macabre joke:

Climate_camp_1

Looking at the reverse it appears it is a protest against Heathrow expansion:

Climate_camp_2

All these moralistic attacks on flying can't be justified even under the analysis of a 'green' like Stern. As Fraser Nelson noted on the Spectator's CoffeeHouse blog yesterday:

"If anyone is thinking of cancelling a trip to a developing country where livelihoods depend on tourism, can I put into perspective the impact of air travel with some other polluters identified on page 199 of the Stern Review.

World Greenhouse Gas Emissions (from World Resources Institute)

Road transport 9.9%.
Agriculture soils 6.0%
Livestock (ie, bovine flatulence or farting and burping cows) & manure 5.1%
Cement 3.8%
Rail and ship and “other” transport 2.3%
Landfills 2.0%
Air transport 1.6%
Rice cultivation 1.5%
Food & tobacco 1.0%"

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

3 comments:

Gracchi said...

But as far as I understand it its the rate of growth in that proportion whihc is due to air traffic and ehnce in the total number that people are worried about. Whereas other numbers eg cement are likely to remain fairly constant.

Matthew Sinclair said...

Worrying about trends in something that small is questionable. Seems an obvious candidate for diminishing marginal returns. I.e. air travel's increase will rapidly slow as it gets bigger.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.