The Unsuitablog

Here’s a quick question: what is the most unsustainable thing you can do?

Stock car racing, maybe; or perhaps pouring a gallon of cyanide into a river. What about things that lots of people do on a regular basis? Yes, it’s obvious really, but flying is the answer — only a complete numbnuts would claim that you can zip around the world in a heavier that air machine, kept off the ground by the combustion of oil, and consider what you are doing as “sustainable”.

Yes, that world “sustainable”: it’s been horribly misused recently, to the extent that it seems that you can even have “sustainable economic growth”, which is one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard. If you want an economy to grow, you have to get the source of that wealth from somewhere, and if it isn’t nicking it from another country (which is one way, I suppose) then it’s going to come from using resources even more intensively.

Sustainability means leaving something in the same or a better condition than it started. That’s really simple to understand; so simple that, as I said, even a complete numbnuts could fail to understand it: or lots and lots of numbnuts in lots of self-interested groups that don’t give a flying (pun intended) f*** about the state of the planet for future generations.

Which makes the phrase “Future Heathrow” (Heathrow being the biggest airport in the UK) so ironic.

Here they write about Climate Change:

It has been suggested that the environmental costs of Heathrow outweigh its economic benefits but if capacity at Heathrow continues to be constrained, foreign hubs such as Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris will grow instead. This will not provide any climate change benefits but would severely damage the UK’s global competitiveness and UK jobs.

Well, I hate to criticise, but if you don’t have lots of airport capacity then not as many people can fly and — worse for all the tour operators, fuel companies and airport operators — you cannot achieve the economies of scale necessary to lower the cost of flying, meaning that even fewer people will be able to fly.

People, in this spoon-fed consumer culture have learnt to follow the path of least resistance: they won’t go to Frankfurt or Amsterdam, they just won’t bother flying.

What, in fact, Future Heathrow mean when they say “Supporting sustainable growth” is ensuring that the aforementioned vested interests keep on making money out of the air industry, until the oil runs out and (perhaps) people start to understand that by being rampant consumers of products, services and energy is actually a very bad thing indeed.

(And just in case there are a few typing errors, or short memories, you might want to try out www.heathrowfuture.com, www.heathrowfuture.org and www.futureheathrow.org.uk :-D )