Fly him to the moon (please)

Another fine week for "joined-up government" in Britain. Last week a junior minister in the transport department teed off on the airlines for their lack of co-operation over measures to combat climate change. He accused BA of "barely playing ball" and called Satanair -- sorry, Ryanair -- "the irresponsible face of capitalism". For his pains he was rounded on not only by the airlines but by his boss, the improbably-monikered Stephen Ladyman. Then Tony Blair came back from his latest schmooze with the rich and past-it -- this time at Robin Gibb's villa in Miami -- and announced that he had no intention of abandoning his long-haul holidays, and neither should anyone else. However, he was paying to plant a tree or two to offset the emissions -- making this possibly the first time that the word "paying" had been used in connection with a Blair family holiday.

As an aside, does anyone else think that this whole "carbon offset" nonsense is almost irrelevant, and maybe even counter-productive? It's a bit like allowing murderers to foster extra children to replace their victims. OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but the notion that removing a tonne of carbon dioxide from the already-pristine air of Costa Rica somehow makes up for belching out an extra tonne of the stuff in Mexico City or LA or Shanghai is patently false. It's dangerous to allow wealthy globetrotters to think that this is all they need to do.

Blair apparently believes that it's up to science to solve global warming. He's not wrong, but maybe he hasn't noticed that the scientific advances of the past two centuries have led to an inexorable rise in energy consumption. Sure, today's aircraft are somewhat less polluting than those of 20 or 30 years ago, but the main impact of technological advances has been to make flying cheaper, with the result that the overall amount of pollution created by the industry is rising sharply. Likewise, technology has made cars much cleaner, but also much cheaper, with the result that there are more and more of them out there. Rising incomes and consumption are swamping the benefits of improving technology, resulting in steadily-increasing overall levels of carbon pollution. And this is not to mention the congestion, noise pollution etc that go along with the seemingly insatiable appetite for cheap travel.

It's sometimes claimed that raising the cost of travel would harm the poor disproportionately.
Even if this were true, it would not be a good reason to keep energy prices low -- much better to find a way to compensate those who need help. But in fact, all the evidence is that cheap flying is the pastime of the wealthy, not the poor. The proportion of passengers from the top three income groups at the cheap flight paradise (or hell) of Stansted is almost exactly the same as at Heathrow. These people are the most likely to campaign against expansion of those airports, so it doesn't exactly help that they are the first in line for the early flight to Istanbul.