UK transport secretary Chris Grayling says a new runway planned at London’s Heathrow Airport will not meaningfully increase carbon emissions, despite upping the number of flights. There’s only one explanation: Grayling’s favourite author must be Douglas Adams.
In sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams creates something called the Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field, which enables people to simply ignore what they don’t want to see. Grayling isn’t alone in deploying one – internationally, the top current user is Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who signed up to the Paris Agreement on reducing carbon emissions with one hand and is backing one of the world’s largest coal mines with the other.
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There are myriad ways to meet a carbon budget, whether those laid down for the UK under the Climate Change Act or global ones determined by climate science. The knee-jerk reaction for a decision maker is to let it be Somebody Else’s Problem: the energy minister holds back on closing coal-fired power stations; the treasury decides not to prioritise energy efficiency; the transport minister green-lights a new runway. Other countries should close their mines, not us. Somebody else can do it.
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In reality, as observed by the UK government’s own advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change, there is no plan for constraining carbon emissions from the new Heathrow runway. The government just hopes it will happen.
We have vague assertions about a new and very modest offsetting scheme agreed under the International Civil Aviation Organization. We have an assumption that by 2030 there will be a “” – a vision that history renders as unrealistic as Adams’s bizarre sci-fi vision.
Where’s the plan?
Grayling deployed the SEP field on air pollution too, arguing that a new runway would reduce emissions because travelling to and from the airport will become cleaner. But this depends on more than half of London drivers using electric cars within a decade, which isn’t going to happen without a whole new raft of policymaking by… er… Chris Grayling. So where is it?
As things stand, greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft could make up half the UK’s carbon budget by 2050 – meaning tougher cuts for all other economic sectors, at a considerable and as yet uncalculated cost to the overall economy.
Carbon budgets have an inexorable logic. There is a finite emissions space. Logically, the government ought to accompany every decision that increases emissions from one sector with a parallel announcement on how it will cut them faster in others. And because the Committee on Climate Change finds the optimum path for reducing emissions across the overall economy, the government ought logically to calculate the overall economic impact of diverging from the committee’s recommended trajectory every time it does so.
Cutting emissions, whether nationally or globally, requires coordinated action. A new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point makes little sense on its own, but nuclear plus electric vehicles plus a smart grid does. The sure way to make a hash of both the economy and the climate system is to let every sector and every minister make carbon cuts Somebody Else’s Problem; but that is exactly what the government has done.
