The title was from a comment in the London Times on this story about Carbon Taxes on air travel to/from Britain. h/t to Leif Svalgaard.
Passengers face new tax to halt rise in air travel
Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change.
Ticket prices should rise steadily over time to deter air travel and ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels, the Committee on Climate Change says. It believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain’s commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050.
The Times has learnt that it may challenge the Government’s decision to approve a third runway at Heathrow, suggesting that this would be inconsistent with that commitment.
The committee was established under last year’s Climate Change Act. It has a strong influence on government policy and proposed the 80 per cent target accepted by ministers.
…
Industry estimates suggest that the average passenger would pay less than £10 extra per return ticket when aviation joins the EU emissions trading scheme in 2012. This would depend on the price of allowances to emit CO2, which is expected to rise over time.
Read the complete story here at the Times
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BBC are pushing this story hard this morning. No balance in their treatment of the piece. Although I thought it funny that one of their interviewers asked whether people reducing their carbon footprint on a day-to-day basis could mean we could still fly.
Every day they have more and more propaganda. I complain often but get the repeated mantra that the consensus of scientists say the science is settled.
Oh, no, rowing a boat would cause a great deal of heavy breathing, and you know what that creates. . .
Therefore, if Heathrow receives MORE visits from the rest of the world than any other airport – Britain should be compensated by all its visitors for damaging poor Britain’s environment??
“to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment,” – not only barking mad, but pure insanity. Just for a start, their attitude of using other people’s money for their wishes gets right up my nostrils. For a second, they have no concept of the economic and transport disaster that they wish to impose.
From the Blog Istapundit, is a relevant quote, ” … lower living standards for you are a small price to pay in exchange for more power for the political class — whose living standards won’t be going down at all . . . .”
UK Climate Policy is a disaster.
On the one hand we have the Secretary of State claiming that Global Warming is the greatest danger to face humanity ever. We have the Guardian and New Scientist claiming that one study and conference after another are providing irrefutable evidence of coming floods, plagues, volcanoes, famines.
We have the Government in response leading the world in the adoption of aggressive targets in CO2 emission reduction, proposing to build 8,000+ windmills all around the coast and engage in large scale industrial development for windpower all over the previously protected wilder areas of the country.
On the other hand, we have the same Government proposing to build a third runway at Heathrow, while taxing air travel with the aim of reducing the air traffic that will supposedly make it necessary. We have the Government subsidizing the purchase of new cars with a view to rescuing the auto industry in the UK. It also cuts back on Government funding for home insulation. And it proposes to build new coal generating plants.
Some of us in the UK stare at this with total bemusement. What on earth do they think they are doing? If we really do want to cut carbon emissions, we could. Not that it would make any material difference to the level of global carbon emissions, we are too small a country for that, but we could do it. We would have to return to being a country in which car ownership was rare, heating bills for homes and offices lowered (either by insulation or just high fuel costs), the bicycle was a major means of personal transportation, as it was in the thirties forties and fifties. In which air travel was a hugely expensive luxury, and farming labor intensive and non-chemical, and the train, often crowded but always well filled, was the only means of long distance in country travel.
We could do it. It might not be necessary or wise, but it would lower carbon emissions.
However, the mishmash of policies we are currently being subjected to will neither lower carbon emissions, nor give us enough electricity to meet demand, nor will it address the problem of 3,000 deaths and 20,000+ serious injuries on the roads, the impossibility of living in much of the country without a car, the impossibility of cycling safely almost anywhere. It will wreck the UK environment for no gain at all. It will deliver neither sustainable economic growth nor lower carbon nor a protected environment nor less winter deaths from the cold among the poor and elderly.
Whatever you think about Global Warming, this is a total nonsense. Its the politics of the well meaning but totally ineffective gesture. But, its being done on a massive scale, and with increasingly scarce resources. Idiocy.
What about the Chunnel? Is there a Chunnel tax? Would that be a Chax or a Chunnax? Arf, arf.
The sickening thing about this is that they are convincing a younger generation that their “carbon footprint” is something to be worried about. They parrot this stuff as if it is truth. In the meantime, in the US, every single attempt to restart nuclear capacity building save one has failed due to “environmentalist lawfare”.
We have the technology to eliminate most of our CO2 production. We can recycle the fuel. The reprocessing facility can be co-located with the power plant complex. There is no need to ship stuff around. Fuel goes in and never leaves for 100 years.
It is purely asinine. How well will solar generation work in the wake of a c. 535 volcanic eruption? Solar will be dead for YEARS. Nuclear will keep on working. These “environmentalists” are absolute idiots. And China today announced they are going to destroy 25 square miles of Mongolian habitat in order to build a solar plant. And that is GREEN?
Idiots, every swinging one of them.
Lucky for me and my family that we left the UK for Australia many years ago else we would be unable to leave now. We came here to this fabulous land by ship, but they will be next as they are dirty, filthy, oil using devices.
PS to my last post. Where will the British government scuttle the Queen Mary 2 and the Queen Victoria? They will make excellent wrecks for divers to explore.
It’s a cliche, but could the last person to leave the UK, please turn off the lights – we’re trying to cut our emissions
PS I’m building an Ark, just in case we’re not allowed to fly out of the UK
Wouldn’t it be simpler to shut down the airports, and have done with it?
Absurdism at its most absurd…
Political left worldwide behaves as self-harm inflicting psychiatric patient.
What blows me away is that a lot of the AGWers will claim that policy shifts to reduce carbon emissions will have minor economic impact. Perhaps they did not notice the impact of the minor policy shift in the US to generate more biofuels, and what it did to grain prices. The flow on effect from that policy to neighbouring Mexico where corn is a staple was remarkable.
As for the ole homeland, I think the Brits should start blowing CO2 down the Chunnel (Channel Tunnel) and blaming the French /nod.
As an aside… if they are going to tax air travel, then lets be rational about it. The tax should be based on weight, because larger passengers and those with more baggae will require more CO2 to move from point A to point B.
Sadly I think there is a very real possibility of an ETS-GFC should Copenhagen send us down the permit path. Then again, I am far from being the first person to suggest this possibility. The financial types must be rubbing their hands in glee and dreaming up all kinds of weird and woinderful derivatives markets.
Since my butt is too big to fit in the modern coach aircraft seat, I hardly fly at all anymore. I love teasing my Green friends about how much CO2 they produce when they vacation overseas. “What you are vacationing in Japan, this year? Do you know that flying coach to Tokyo roundtrip produces 2.5 metric tons of CO2?”
Try it. It’s fun!
http://www.chooseclimate.org/flying/mf.html
The UK government are as much use as a one legged man at an arse kicking party.
How can you expect political sanity from a country where as BS legal precedent has elevated warmism to a status equal with religion?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/06/employment-tribunal-dismissal-climate-change
“F Rasmin (23:55:13) :
Lucky for me and my family that we left the UK for Australia many years ago else we would be unable to leave now. We came here to this fabulous land by ship, but they will be next as they are dirty, filthy, oil using devices.”
There is a growing level of this AGW lunacy happening here in Australia too. KRudd747 (As he spends most of his time “working for the county” on a plane) is keen to “show the world” how to do it.
Hah !
No historical knowledge bites the political class again.
Gordon Brown, the Milibands and all the rest of the hacks spent their youth knifing their way to the top of the New Labour tree and missed seminal historic waysigns like the “Yes Minister” series !!
Fools – you never set up a committee without knowing what answer it will deliver in advance. Almost the entire English Parliament outsourced their decision-making on climate policy to the Committee on Climate Change and, surprise, surprise – the philosopher kings of the CCC are now wielding the policy whip hand !!!
Let’s see them all sell this one at the next election to the teeming hordes of Brits who have learned to love holidaying overseas.
Oh please Britain – fillet your economy in a pointless plunge into irrelevance before we Aussies do it first ?
Well, we had the same system until last July for over a year over here in Holland. Problem was that Holland is about 4 time Rhode Island State, so a lot of people went to airports in Germany and Belgium to avoid taxes. (LOL) The result was a declining turnover on Dutch airports.
The real problem in the UK is not the environment but the Government needing funds.
Can we all get it into our heads that CO2 is the source of our life. We do not need to reduce it, bury it, compress it, pot it, pipe it, sequester it, store it or otherwise call it into question – a completely farcical, dead-brain idea.
It seems to me that a great deal more publicity and education is required for the benefits of CO2; it should not even come into any question regarding pollution – which it is not.
Who cares what policy or other will effect CO2 when it is so beneficial – as long as more of it it produced.
I can’t believe this generalised hard-on against CO2 when it is the sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and other particulates which should be highlighted.
It seems the populace and many commentators are following the fraudulent line of CO2 as a pollutant, or at least accepting it has some merit; they have been bought and sold after taking the bait completely hook, line and sinker.
We know the UK goverment has an agenda to sell – I’m not buying.
The planet needs more CO2 not less.
I run a small restaurant in the Philippines and have posted on the walls tribute to CO2. You would be amazed how many ill-informed people there are; every bit of information we can get out is to the good, either on walls or by comments.
Only by NOT accepting CO2 reductions and infantile storage solutions to a non-problem and sending rejection comment to the compliant MSM over its Climate madness reportage will the message get throughto biased editors.
No CO2 – No life. To think otherwise is gross ignorance.
The fact that massive geoengineering schemes are being contemplated to try and effect global temperature is very frightening. The mad cabals in the WhiteHouse and Westminster could threaten the future of our very species and biosphere with their insan sun-reduction ideas. It’s doubly frightening because they actually BELIEVE the garbage!
The world of the ruling class has gone mad.
The most important point is, that the politicians and climate scientists can fly several times a year to their useless conferences. Because the poiticians have their own planes and the tickets of the scientists are paid by the tax payer.
I demand total ban on flights of politicians and climate scientists!
Hey Britain, why don’t you green blokes just build a bloody wall around Britain? You could name it the Green Concentration camp inside the Brown Wall.
Well, I’ve been invited to talk on “An Alternative View of Climate Change” on 13 October, and if it goes well, and if I’ve done a presentation by then that others can use (especially the UK wing of the Resistance), I’ll publish it for all to use. It’s only a tiny local talk, but it’s a start. If you don’t know my views, click on my name and enjoy.
REPLY: Lucy, I’ve reposted your Circling the Arctic here, Nice Job. Props to Paul Vaughn too. – Anthony
Human sacrifice anyone?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/richard-alleyne/6146656/Maybe-religion-is-the-answer-claims-atheist-scientist.html