Dear readers…
I shall be honest and let you in on a little secret. We can find solutions for most of the changes we need to make to usher in a low-carbon world, but the great minds that I read for enlightenment don’t have a solution for air travel.
Brilliant men like Joe Romm and George Monbiot can see no realistic way to make planes sustainable. An electric plane would come crashing to earth once that enormous plug gets pulled from the socket. You couldn’t put enough hamsters in those little round wheels to get airborn. The dilithium reactor isn’t likely to be invented for another two centuries, and who in their right mind would mix matter and anti-matter!
The simple truth is the air travel cannot be made sustainable in the next 10 years, and so it must diminish as a mode of travel because global warming will become the dominant story of our time. It’s the one huge sacrifice that hovers on the horizon.
Of course, I’m secretly hoping that dirigibles — or zeppelins or airships, if you prefer — will make a comeback. That if we want to travel to Europe, we’ll do so in a lighter-than-air craft that runs across the Atlantic like a floating hotel, gracious and elegant and relaxed at 200 mph.* Perhaps I’m an incurable romantic, but it sounds like the perfect way to travel to the continent.
But I’m not holding my breath.
And I sure as hell can’t figure out what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been smoking. The UK has taken a mildly-effective leadership role in the battle to slow global warming, but with a single swipe of his pen, Brown has made it just this side of impossible for Great Britain to meet its international climate commitments.
Brown is spending £9 billion ($13 billion US) to build a third runway at Heathrow. It’s a craven act. It is folly. Monbiot explains at The Guardian.
But this government has always been inventive in devising ways to disappoint, and the Heathrow decision represents the final abandonment both of the sustainable, integrated transport system it promised in 1998 and of any realistic prospect that its promised carbon cuts could be met without cooking the books. As Simon Jenkins argued in his devastating column on Wednesday, its promises to restrict traffic levels and impose carbon constraints on the airline companies are both meaningless and cynical: not only has every other promise governments have made about Heathrow’s expansion been broken, but ministers know that they won’t be around to carry the can when the limits they set today are breached.
And that, dear friends, is why Gordon Brown is the deserved reecipient of this week’s Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award.
__________________
*If you like young adult fiction, might I recommend Airborn by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel which is set aboard a dirigible. It’s won a bevy of awards.