The environment will be seen as the great failure of this generation
Jackie Ashley Thursday April 15, 2004 The Guardian
A confession: I have discovered cheap flights. A few weeks ago I flew to Salzburg for £30 and enjoyed a weekend break. Now I'm just back from an Easter trip to Scotland, having paid just £70 for the return journey. Compared with the £200-odd I had to spend on a train ticket to Manchester a few weeks ago, it's a bargain too good to pass up. Why does anyone travel any other way?
For my generation, the ability to jump on a plane and find oneself transported, in every sense, has become second nature. The skies are grey-brown with the trails of low-cost air travellers. What was once a luxury limited to the rich, or once-a-lifetime holidaymakers has become a right for the masses. Tampering with our demand for easily accessible and affordable air travel has become as politically dangerous as watering the workers' beer.
Heathrow and Stansted are huge employers, with tens of thousands dependent on them, just as British Leyland and Swan Hunter once were; and they have similar lobbying clout. Every newspaper is crammed with overseas holiday and flight advertising. The middle classes have bought second homes on the assumption that cheap flights are here to stay, and the short break to Italy, North Africa or New York has become a mundane consolation, as common as chocolate.
Noting this, the government has avoided doing anything much to interfere. More runways, more terminals, more roads to connect them and the continuation of cheap aviation fuel ... yes, there are ferocious local campaigns against individual airport expansions, but ministers have assumed that the country wants more air travel, not less. They predict this boom is only beginning. And they are no doubt right.
But as with the growth in car use, we know that what we want for ourselves is - when multiplied by 50 million - wrong for the country. So when I read that the Commission on Sustainable Development believes the growth in air travel would wipe out improvements in greenhouse gas emissions, I winced. This is my hypocrisy - in all probability yours, too.
For we all know that climate change is real, and most of us assume that it is man-made and dangerous, and even that "something must be done". The same Scotland I was enjoying is losing its skiing industry to climate change. The Alpine glaciers are shrinking fast. There are reports of threatened fauna and landscapes, of melting icecaps and rising sea levels, of storms and droughts. We know something is wrong. But we shrug it off and live for the moment.
The government makes a big deal of the fact that Britain is on course to meet its Kyoto obligations and that, perhaps, helps salve our consciences. But as this commission points out, that is largely because of the one-off "dash for gas" and adecline in manufacturing - we really have swapped British Leyland for Heathrow. And more important still, the Kyoto cut, ignored by the US, is nothing like enough. Ministers' own figures say that a further 60% cut is needed over the next 40 years to avert a "catastrophic" climate change. In the commission's bland understatement, "there is no clear pathway" to that.
Generations to come will blame us for this. More than Iraq or terrorism, the deterioration of the environment under pressure from a fast-growing consumerist human population, will come to be seen as the great issue that the democracies of the early 2000s never faced up to.
For what has happened, at least in Britain, is that the argument has become so dangerously polarised that further progress is difficult. The minority who take environmental issues seriously often turn their backs on mainstream politics in disgust, while Labour in power has been able to relegate the environment to a few glib boasts, while letting the great car and plane economies roar on unhindered. And they have done it because they understand their electorate.
In terms of practical politics, the first thing is to accept that unless there is an environmental catastrophe that has the same level of political impact that September 11 did, we will see no sudden lurch in policy. But the second thing is not to despair. For there is evidence that political leadership can mesh with our own wiser selves to produce more environmentally friendly policies.
It has been done before. When the environmental issues seem manageable and near-at-hand, voters want progress, and politicians have delivered it. Think back to the clean air acts of the 1950s, or look at the (too modest) growth in recycling, or read the commission's own findings about beaches, river quality and reviving populations of birdlife. Or consider the congestion charge gamble in London, and the increase in cycleways; and the drive to build a higher proportion of new homes on brown sites. And remember the evidence that pro-environmental policies can produce real economic growth, as firms get into new technologies to deliver cleaner energy or more efficient housing.
The breakthrough would be to find some way to harness a high level of understanding about the environmental threats, to a coherent political programme. It would not, in theory, be difficult. It would mean giving honest warnings about the course we are set on today - banging on about how we are living our lives with just a little of the flaming rhetoric of good and evil reserved at the moment for impoverished Shias in Iraq. It would then mean setting out a medium-term plan for investment in public transport and rail. It would mean more congestion charging and road pricing.
And yes, it would mean, as the commission suggests, charging the real environmental cost of cheap air travel, either levied on airports or aviation fuel, or both. We should recognise that this reduces human happiness for the millions who benefit from it. As with the congestion charge, we should accept that this would hit some poorer people's mobility, stealing a recent freedom away from them. But we should remember that the boom in air travel is mainly fuelled by middle-class people flying more frequently.
The point is that real political leadership is always about persuading people to forgo things for the general good. Income tax limits individual freedom; so do speed limits, drug laws, police computer records and much of what governments do. The questions are whether global warming is such a threat that political leadership is needed; and whether there are practical things the government can do.
New Labour keeps being attacked for lack of courage, for going with the flow, for not confronting the biggest issues. Perhaps the government is too old, too out of touch, to look at its own warnings about the planet and take them seriously. If not, then here is the great issue for the third term - the hole in the middle of the manifesto yet to be filled.
jackie.ashley at guardian.co.uk
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = The eagle's dancing wings create as weather spins out of hand [Jon Anderson]