The Guardian view on expanding Heathrow: just say no | Editorial
Britain finally confronted the point of a decision on a difficult question that it had ducked for far too long. Or, at least, that is how the Airports Commission presented its endorsement of an extra runway at Heathrow. The airwaves reverberated with the voices of the sort of men who never shrug off a boyhood Airfix fixation, arguing with burning intensity about whether the precise spec and coordinates of the Heathrow proposal, and its Gatwick rival, had the makings of a world-beating hub. A few voices were raised about the "environmental" effect, in the sense of the immediate local environment - questions of noise, of birdlife and the extra fumes that could soon be inhaled by the suffering lungs of Middlesex. These are all real issues, but together with the diversionary debate about "where" rather than "whether", they pale besides aviation's contribution to the planet's slow cooking. If there is a difficult question that has been ducked for too long, then that is the one about decarbonising the economy.
To be fair to Sir Howard Davies, his commission did not ignore carbon. The report predicated its projections of passenger growth on two scenarios, both of which it said could respect UK carbon obligations. The first involved a rigid cap on aviation emissions, a little above current levels. The commission stuck a finger in the air and ventured that this might be compatible with a 61% rise in passengers by 2050, a calculation that must rely on engineering advances easing the brute, energy-intensive physics of lifting people and machinery into the air. The emphasis, however, and the basis for arguing that increased capacity was not merely desirable but imperative, was on a second, fairytale future, in which passengers double, under the auspices of comprehensive and globally enforced carbon trading.
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