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Tory wants domestic flights to be taxed out of existence
Joe Churcher, The Independent
Flights within the UK should be taxed almost out of existence, a leading Tory MP said today.
Tim Yeo, who chairs the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, said he wanted to see “virtually no” domestic flights taking off within a decade.
Amid growing clamour over the emissions caused by politicians’ long-haul holiday flights, Mr Yeo said radical action was needed closer to home first.
He said he now always travelled to Scotland by train “as a matter of conscience” and insisted there was “no reason at all why people should fly around the UK”.
“Those flights should be knocked out,” the former environment minister told GMTV in an interview to be broadcast by The Sunday Programme this weekend.
“What we should do is tax domestic flights so heavily and use the money to improve the railways so that in five years’ time everyone is choosing to go by train within the UK.
“That would make a big step in right direction. The long-haul flights are harder to tackle, but the domestic flights we can be taking action on right now and we should be.
“I honestly do believe that within 10 years there should be virtually no domestic flights.”
He attacked the Government for being “pretty timid” over aviation taxation.
“There is an opportunity here to show that Britain is really serious about climate change, about carbon emissions, about reducing the amount of flying, and if we did that I think the world would sit up and pay attention and we’d be setting an example that other countries could follow.
(13 Jan 2007)
Also posted at Climate Ark.
Tony’s carbon footprints: Follow these simple steps, Prime Minister, and you too can save the planet
Geoffrey Lean and Marie Woolf, The Independent
Flights, holidays, they all pump out CO2. Here we reveal the damage Blair is doing – and how he could make amends
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Tony Blair personally emits more than 700 times as much of the pollution that causes global warming as the average Briton, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. His air travel alone contributes as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as a medium-sized business.
He also breaks his Government’s new official guide to greener living, published last week, which says people should try to reduce flights, take fewer holidays and travel by rail or sea.
The revelations come at a particularly embarrassing time for the Prime Minister, as he is planning to launch a campaign this spring to encourage Britons to change their behaviour to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Yesterday he was attacked by both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat environment spokesmen for failing to set a proper example.
…The vast majority of the emissions, according to Best Foot Forward’s detailed report, arise from Mr Blair’s practice of chartering planes to take him and his entourage on official trips overseas. It examined Cabinet Office records for the financial year ending last March – the latest publicly available – and found that only one of his 59 flights was by a scheduled service.
The firm calculated that emissions from the chartered flights amounted to the equivalent of “a staggering 7,991 tonnes of carbon dioxide”. Craig Simmons, its technical director, says: “This is the level of emissions you would expect from a medium-sized business employing some 2,000 people.”
The firm says that if Mr Blair he had travelled on scheduled flights, his emissions would have dropped to 38 tons.
… Environmentalists and ministers have long struggled with the paradox that people want to know what they can do, but are discouraged because any personal action has only a minuscule impact on the problem.
Yet decisions taken by individuals over their use of transport and of energy used in the home account for 44 per cent of Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions. Though each action has a tiny effect, there is no hope of tackling climate change unless many millions of them are taken.
…Yesterday, a Downing Street source said that, following the IoS investigation, it would need to work out Mr Blair’s carbon footprint officially.
(14 Jan 2007)
New book: Hell and High Water
Gar Lipow, Gristmill
Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water may be the most depressing book on global warming I’ve ever read.
He writes of a “Planetary Purgatory,” where sea level rises 20 feet, many coastal cities are subject to such frequent hurricanes they are abandoned, and most of the Greenland ice mass melts. What are today considered heat waves become normal summers, with more and more forest and agricultural land lost to fire and drought.
Here’s the really bad news: this is not what Romm is trying to avoid, but what he hopes to settle for.
Hell and High WaterRomm fears worse “purgatory” scenarios than this, but even more, he fears “hell and high water,” where we end up with sea level rises of 40 to 80 feet. This, along with mega-hurricanes, would require us to triage coastal cities, abandoning most of them. Inland agricultural areas would end up in a permanent state of drought; fire would be ubiquitous.
He spends little time considering how to reduce losses below the “purgatory” level. Deniers and Delayers, who he compares to Neville Chamberlain and Herbert Hoover, are likely to prevent the U.S. from doing anything about the problem in the near future. Even if politics shifts slightly left in 2009, they are likely to have enough influence to prevent real (as opposed to symbolic) action from taking place. China already uses U.S. inaction as an excuse for greatly increasing its emissions, planning a new a coal plant every week for decades. The U.S., in turn, will use this as further excuse for inaction.
In essence, the U.S. and China have a mutual suicide pact, and look likely to take the rest of world along with them.
To reverse this fully, to produce actual emission cuts, would require a massive program whereby the U.S. and China deployed new infrastructure on a scale comparable to war mobilization — instituting massive efficiency improvements and shutting down existing power plants to replace them low-carbon electricity generators.
…[Book author Romm] was acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy in the mid-90s, served as special assistant for international security to Peter Goldmark, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and consulted extensively with some of the nation’s largest corporations on emissions reductions. He is a physicist, and businessman, and political insider. He is resigned to what he thinks is inevitable and simply hopes to avoid worse. My hope is that a lifetime spent in insider elite politics causes him to underestimate what a bottom-up grassroots movement can accomplish.
(14 Jan 2007)
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