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Aviation industry takes five million people to court
Greenpeace
Here’s a doozy for you: on Wednesday, the aviation industry is taking five million people – including a lot of their own staff – to court. If you’re a member or supporter of a group that’s concerned about climate change, the chances are you’re a defendant too.
The industry seems to want to ban five million of us from Heathrow and all routes to the airport, including the Piccadilly line, parts of the rail network, and sections of the M25 and M4.
In three weeks’ time, the Camp for Climate Action is due to gather near Heathrow to peacefully protest against Heathrow’s vast contribution to climate change (the airport’s planes emit more greenhouse gases than many individual countries) and its planned runway expansion.
The owner of Heathrow, the British Airports Authority (BAA), seems to be, frankly, terrified.
It’s seeking an injunction, which names as defendants “all persons acting as members, participants or supporters” of anti-aviation group Plane Stupid, anti-noise group HACAN and AirportWatch. The injunction is to stop people from setting foot on Heathrow and “the arterial infrastructure serving” it.
So far, so good. Just another example of the aviation industry’s corporate bullying, albeit a draconian one.
But the interesting bit is that AirportWatch, named on the injunction, is just an umbrella organisation. Its member organisations include the National Trust, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, Transport 2000, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, among many others.
The combined supporter base of these organisations is well over five million people.
And it includes the Queen, patron of the RSBP and CPRE. Prince Charles, president of the National Trust, would also be banned from Heathrow and its surrounds – as would Imran Khan and Shane Warne, who recently fund-raised for HACAN.
Even more bizarrely, the injunction covers many of BAA’s own staff.
(26 July 2007)
U.S. Airlines Under Pressure To Fly Greener
Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post
Airlines and airplane makers have largely slipped under the radar in the debate over global warming.
But a dispute over a European emissions-trading proposal has caught many carriers and their trade groups by surprise, spurring them to launch a public relations blitz highlighting their green bona fides, even if most of their work has been aimed at boosting their bottom lines.
Long a punching bag for consumer complaints and neighborhood protests over noise and poor air quality, the industry wants to avoid becoming a target on another front.
“People are looking across the Atlantic and seeing what is happening in Europe,” said Nancy N. Young, the new vice president of environmental affairs at the Air Transport Association, U.S. carriers’ main trade group. “We know that it’s coming here. . . . Aviation has lost the public square in this debate. We need to do a better job of letting people know that our environmental interests are directly aligned with our business interests.”
Industry officials are quick to point out that commercial aviation contributes a very small percentage of the greenhouse gas and particle emissions that scientists blame for global warming. But they also acknowledge that aviation’s impact could surge if the industry continues its worldwide growth spurt.
Boeing expects the number of commercial jetliners to nearly double, to 36,420, in the next 20 years. The Federal Aviation Administration expects 1.2 billion passengers a year to travel on U.S. carriers by 2020, up from 741 million last year.
By 2050, the industry is expected to contribute anywhere from 6 to 10 percent of the gases and particles tied to global warming, up from about 3 percent today, said Michael J. Prather, a professor at the University of California at Irvine and lead author of a 1999 report on aviation’s role in global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(28 July 2007)
Global warming debate is stormy
Martin Merzer, Miami Herald
A new report claims global warming is causing a doubling of hurricane activity, but other researchers express deep doubts.
—
Hurricanes are forming twice as often as they did a century ago, largely because of global warming caused by humans, according to a new scientific study.
Other scientists say the report draws improper conclusions from partial data.
The study, conducted by two respected researchers and scheduled to be released today in a peer-reviewed publication, found that four hurricanes and two tropical storms developed during an average year between 1900 and 1930.
Between 1995 and 2005, however, the average shot up to eight hurricanes and seven tropical storms, the report said.
The scientists attributed the sharp increases to warmer ocean temperatures and altered wind patterns linked to human-induced global warming.
”When you look at the numbers and the strong relationship to sea surface temperatures and the reality of global warming, you end up with a causal link that can’t be denied,” said Greg Holland, coauthor of the report and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
But other experts said the study by Holland and Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology is undermined by ”sloppy” research that used overly selective data and fell victim to a problem called “observation error.”
In short, it may not be that many more hurricanes are forming now than a century ago, said the critics, who agree that global warming is occurring but believe it has not significantly affected hurricane development.
(30 July 2007)
Tiny Tuvalu Fights for Its Literal Survival
Stephen Leahy, IPS/IFEJ
The second smallest nation on Earth hopes to turn itself into an example of sustainable development that others can emulate.
But the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and its 10,500 people may only have 50 years or less to set that example before it is swept away by rising sea levels due to climate change.
“Construction of the first ever biogas digestor on a coral island is complete,” said Gilliane Le Gallic, president of Alofa Tuvalu, a Paris-based group that is working with the local Tuvaluan government.
Located on a small islet near Tuvalu’s capital of Funafuti, the biogas digester uses manure from about 60 pigs to produce gas for cooking stoves. More importantly, more than 40 Tuvaluans have been trained at the newly opened Tuvalu National Training Centre on renewable energy.
“We are trying to create simple, workable models of sustainable development that can be reproduced by others elsewhere,” Le Gallic, a documentary filmmaker, told IPS from Paris.
(27 July 2007)
Forest Service worries about bigger fires, climate change
Les Blumenthal, Tacoma News Tribune (Washington)
It was a monster fire – 175,000 acres of tinder-dry timber just south of the Canadian border in north-central Washington.
In places it burned with an intensity rarely seen, crowning through stands of Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and lodgepole pine weakened by a bark beetle infestation.
“It was clearly a firestorm,” said David Peterson, a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab in Seattle.
At the height of the blaze, 2,300 firefighters fought it – including crews from New Zealand and Mexico and soldiers dispatched from Fort Lewis.
Last year’s Tripod Fire, the largest in Washington in more than a century, smoldered through the winter, and several small spot fires have kicked up this summer.
Peterson and other scientists say the Tripod Fire could be a sign of things to come in the Western forests. Rising temperatures brought on by global warming add stress to trees, making them more susceptible to bugs and disease and stimulating the growth of underbrush and other fuels.
Some studies suggest the number of acres scorched by wildfire could increase fivefold by the end of the century.
Even as fires burn across the West this summer, the nation’s forests have become entwined in the larger debate over climate change. They are both a victim of global warming and a potential solution in helping reverse the trend, by sopping up huge amounts of greenhouse gases.
(30 July 2007)
Related: Forest Service worries about bigger fires, climate change (The Missoulian)
