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In the end, Britain's courageous, world-leading and scientifically rational response to climate change lived and died within the space of a few weeks. Born, with great hopes, in late 2008, when a new department was created and the Climate Change Act was passed, forcing aviation emissions to fall along with everything else, it was killed off yesterday when the transport secretary handed the aviation lobby what it wanted, a third runway at Heathrow.

Geoff Hoon's statement was a dismal moment for the government that put climate change targets into law and some of whose members believe in meeting them. At its very first test it has sided with the old, carbon-addicted economy: concrete and calamity, the most unsophisticated of responses to the extraordinary challenge that has been set for the next four decades.

Special pleading

Ministers can insist that the decision in no way diverts from their goal - indeed that yesterday brought a new promise to cap aviation emissions at existing levels. But this is to pretend that the huge cuts in overall emissions required by law can somehow be magicked out of the air from elsewhere, so that Heathrow can grow. The truth is that all reductions, from every source, will always be painful; that each individual measure will have its set of big-business and union opponents; and that every case that comes before the cabinet can, as with Heathrow, be declared a special exception, essential to future national prosperity.

The job of government is to rise above such special pleading and accept the demands of the biggest long-term policy of all, an 80% cut in British greenhouse emissions by 2050 and a 20% cut by 2020. These targets should be the unbending rule against which all policies are measured, and the Heathrow runway does not even come close to acceptability.

Even with the temporary and weak restrictions outlined by Mr Hoon yesterday, in a statement so full of evasive language that it was impossible to take anything he said about constraints on future expansion seriously. The number of flights will increase, and so will pollution. It was a craven submission to the laziest of arguments, that only the perpetual expansion of what is already the world's biggest international airport can prevent Britain's economic decline.

Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, fought a battle against this, with the support of some of his colleagues, but he lost. Some people say he should resign, but there is a strong argument that he should stay and fight from within. Fair enough, but the onus is on him to show urgently that Heathrow is the aberration. The next few months must see the government back spectacular moves on carbon reduction, if belief in its commitment is not to dribble away.

To support his decision to stay, Mr Miliband can point out that he won concessions: the first a promise that aviation emission levels in 2050 will fall to 2005 levels and the second that the new runway will only be used to just over half its capacity, unless the Committee on Climate Change allows full use.

But the 2050 target will mean nothing while aviation is allowed to expand into a far-off fantasy where nonexistent green jets waft their way through the stratosphere emitting nothing more than the gentle scent of fresh-cut flowers.And even the limit on the use of the third runway is questionable, Mr Hoon yesterday giving the game away by describing the restriction as an "initial" one. All past promises on Heathrow expansion, such as the claim that Terminal 5 would end talk of new runways, have been broken. This one will be too. If BAA gets the runway, jets will land on it.

Like bright clean paint slapped on to hide the dirt, yesterday also brought news on high-speed rail. The tenacious transport minister Andrew Adonis is right about the need for this, to add capacity as much as make journeys faster, and right too to consider a Heathrow hub. But new rail is needed regardless of whether a third runway is built; indeed it can replace it.

Protest

The politics of yesterday's announcement were terrible. For the first time in months, the Conservative party looked modern, brave and on the right side of the argument. That does not mean that, in office, the Tories might not change their mind - Boris Johnson, after all, wants a whole new airport, and Tory opposition has been helped along by local outrage in west London. But both main opposition parties accept reality; if carbon reduction is to happen, things cannot go on as they have before.

The prime minister, and certainly the transport secretary, do not appear to think like this; for them business comes first, and they can claim to be taking a tough decision in the face of a do-nothing opposition. They forced the pace to get their runway even before the government's carbon reduction programme has been announced - which means the airport expansion is not even justified by reliable public data.

But their boldness only runs so far; it does not extend, for instance, to allowing a vote in the House of Commons, which they might lose. The government's claim that parliament does not debate big infrastructure projects is nonsense; Crossrail was authorised by law. The third runway could be too.

Trust

So much of the argument about the new runway, as about climate change more generally, comes down to trust. Do we believe that the threat is real, and that action is needed? The answer is yes. Do we believe that the carbon reduction targets will be very hard to meet, and that the route to 2020 and 2050 is very unclear? Also yes. So why on earth has the government just authorised the expansion of the one industry that - even on the most optimistic targets - will make no cuts in emissions at all?

The debate about the proportion of emissions that come from planes is complex; one estimate suggests that by 2050 the industry could, like some grotesque Pac-Man character, munch up the whole of Britain's notional carbon allowance. The reality will be less than that, but even the Department for Transport says aviation could account for 29% of UK emissions, if every other polluter makes the necessary deep cuts.

It is true that the climate does not care where carbon comes from; that a jet can land at Heathrow provided one does not also take off from Charles de Gaulle. In theory EU carbon trading limits and the British 2050 target are what should count. But the third runway makes meeting those targets a whole lot harder. "Unconstrained aviation emissions growth would make required reductions in other sectors impossibly large," the Committee on Climate Change said yesterday. The government says it agrees, but flights continue to grow.

At some point, if Heathrow is a guide, confidence in the possibility of meeting carbon targets altogether will falter. No longer something for the future, awaiting better technology, action will have been needed and found lacking. Perhaps that will lead to popular outrage. Labour, a party founded in the name of progress and common endeavour has looked backwards, to the demands of the City. The opposition parties are right to fight it. And Labour MPs should do everything they can to secure a Commons vote, and make sure this unnecessary runway is never built.

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A Runway for Jobs? It's Time Aviation's Bluff Was Called

16th January 09 - Simon Jenkins, The Guardian (UK)

The boss of BAA, Colin Matthews, said this week that a third runway at Heathrow would "only go ahead if strict environmental limits are met". What does he mean, if? They are not met and he knows it. Nothing on earth is going to stop him wanting his runway.

Meanwhile Whitehall is witnessing a truly bone-crunching fight between the immovable object of public interest and the irresistible force of Big Carbon. I am sceptical of most policies put forward in the cause of global warming but for aviation to plead its green credentials is like big tobacco claiming that smoking is good for your health.

The prime minister has again postponed taking a decision, but that will not stop him meekly championing the carbon lobby by parroting Matthews's nonsense to reluctant Labour MPs. He will waffle about "insisting" that the airport and airlines "take steps" to reduce carbon emissions. He will promise that a third runway will not go ahead if they "breach air pollution and noise levels", or if Heathrow fails a punctuality test.

What will Brown do if these conditions are not met? Will he come from retirement, break up the tarmac with a drill and rebuild Harmondsworth? This is infantile politics, but it will doubtless dupe the ever-spineless Labour backbenchers.

Brown will do what his predecessors have done, which is lie. In the 1960s ministers promised "for all time" that there would be no expansion of Heathrow. It expanded. When T4 opened in 1978 there was another promise of no expansion, and a cap of 275,000 flights. The pledge was broken within a year. At the time of T5 the cap was raised to 480,000, and the prime minister and cabinet agreed that a third runway would be "totally unacceptable".

That promise is now broken. In 2006 the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, promised that a new runway would be a short, domestic one, with flights only over countryside to the west. She also promised carbon and pollution limits. Those promises have been broken. The government wants almost to double the number of Heathrow flights to 700,000, an astonishing increase on the present chaos, and careless of the impact on west London or its infrastructure. This is an orgy of planning abuse. No Heathrow promise is worth a bucket of spit.

Ministers lie because they know they will be out of office, or out of sight, when their pledges are broken. They know that no government can bind its successor and that Big Carbon, like Big Pharma, always gets its way. When we were young we were told that new airports could go anywhere because new planes would be so clean and quiet that nobody would mind. It was all rubbish.

The biggest lie is that a third runway is about something called "the business economy". The BAA lobby has conned the CBI, London First and even the unions into believing this, fobbing them off with a factoid that the runway would "create 50,000 jobs". So would rebuilding Britain's mental health infrastructure, which would thus also be "good for business".

I am unsentimental about much economic growth. I would flatten a rare orchid or a natterjack toad or even Harmondsworth tithe barn if the wealth thus liberated were overwhelming. With Heathrow's third runway nothing is overwhelming except the prospective environmental damage.

Air travel is a discretionary luxury whose tax position and cost externalities have long been indulged by ministers (and transport department officials) because the industry is glamorous and shrewdly gives ministers and business journalists upgrades. No fewer than 87% of UK international passengers are "leisure and tourism", including almost every reasonably prosperous Briton. Even at Heathrow, only a third of users give business as their purpose of travel. I would bet most of that is a perk, a conference or a holiday on expenses.

In an electronic age, flights truly "essential to the British economy" must be minuscule. The lobby's Jo Valentine protests that "hologram videoconferencing still can't beat a good old-fashioned handshake". That is hardly a crushing argument, and how many trips are for a handshake? Commercial London boomed in recent decades despite its appalling air facilities, because in truth they had nothing to do with the case.

The "hub" argument was recently shot to pieces by the former BA boss Bob Ayling. It might help domestic tourists escape the rain, he said, but transfers spend little or nothing in London and yield no external benefits other than to airline profits. The biggest growth in air travel has been in non-hub cheap flights. And as a CAA survey in 2006 showed, no-frills carriers have not brought new social classes into air travel but rather increased the number of holidays taken by the better-off.

The tourist industry is important, but most airline users are outbound leisure travellers. Curbing such travel, through taxation or slot rationing, would benefit domestic tourism. It would help the balance of payments, cut the fastest growing area of carbon emissions and reduce airport congestion, and thus the crowding out of mostly "business" flights. It could be used to favour inbound tourism from origins such as the US and the far east. There is no economic case for a third runway, rather an economic case against one. Air travel is not a cause of wealth but a consequence of it.

Disentangling self-interest from public interest is near impossible, but we can pick the argument clean of cant and greed. Aviation benefits from a similar government indulgence to that visited on cars in the 1960s and 70s, when investment was based on "predict and provide". Car travel is now rationed by taxation, price and congestion, whatever the business outcome. Aviation's bluff must soon be called.

The row at Heathrow is the drawn-out consequence of political cowardice in not building in the Thames estuary in the 70s and not expanding Gatwick or Stansted. Heathrow may be convenient for west London but otherwise it is an awful place for an airport, worse even than New York's La Guardia.

Airports have to be subject to planning. Most of Heathrow's domestic and tourist flights should be moved. It can then have space for predominantly business destinations and thus for the rich, who should pay the full cost of their privileged location.

But don't bet on this happening. Gordon Brown and New Labour have never knowingly stood up to a big commercial interest. They are unlikely to start now.

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