IT was interesting to see that Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon opened a £22million factory for Spirit Aerosystems for manufacturing aeroplane parts. She also wants Air Passenger Duty to be halved.
I wonder what her views are about the expansion of Heathrow being blocked by Friends of the Earth (FoE), which successfully claimed that the project fails to take into account the UK’s legal requirement under the Climate Change Acts to reduce greenhouse gases?
The UK Climate Change Act was drawn up in 2018. In 2019, the UK created a legally-binding net-zero target for 2050. Only a handful of countries have legally-binding climate change Acts – the others made only non-binding promises which are regularly being broken.
These include China and India. China aims to construct 216 new airports by 2035 and India plans to build 100 airports by 2024. Even the small Indian Ocean island nation of the Maldives, which 30 years ago was prophesied to sink below the waves like the lost city of Atlantis because of rising sea levels allegedly caused by climate change, is building four new runways this year. Will FoE go to these countries?
The First Minister should propose that the solution to Heathrow is to repeal the UK Climate Change Acts and encourage Boris Johnson to do so.
