I don’t make a habit of swearing, but this morning has been testing, to say the least. Formerly known as the “World’s Favourite Airline” until the world decided that it wasn’t too fond of airlines pushing out carbon dioxide into its upper atmosphere, British Airways have decided, in its eternal wisdom, to kit out a couple of Airbus A318s for its most luxury conscious business travellers. An article in The Guardian (which happens to carry popup adverts on its website for said airline), states:

“The route announced yesterday will see two daily flights between London City airport, next door to the capital’s financial district, and JFK. BA will use two Airbus A318 planes fitted out with flat beds and carrying a maximum of 32 passengers.”

“Willie Walsh, British Airways’ chief executive, said: ‘Given the range of corporate clients that we have based in and around London City, we thought it was a great opportunity. It’s about us being innovative and listening to our customers.’ “

I stared at this article, wondering how ostentaciously polluting it was possible to be, and short of having your own private jet, this is pretty close. The Airbus A318 is normally equipped to carry 107 passengers, but try to get hold of the carbon emissions figures for this aircraft and you find that Airbus have conveniently removed them from their information pages. Airbus’ head office in Toulouse likes to cut callers off when they mention carbon emissions, so I resorted to using the ClimateCare (don’t even think of going there to offset your flights – just don’t fly, for goodness sake!) calculator, which gives a typical return flight from London City to New York JFK as 1.55 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s about the same as the total annual carbon emissions for a person in Uruguay.

Turn a 107 seater plane into a 32 seater plane, like British Airways are doing, and you can then multiply the emissions per person, per flight by 3.31, giving each rich businessman (yes, they are almost all men) a total of 5.18 tonnes of carbon dioxide for their return flight. That’s 35% more than the total annual carbon emissions for a person in China!

This from a company that states:

“We are leading the climate change debate in our industry.”

If they are the leader in the industry then I think it is fair to say that you should never listen to an air executive when they talk about climate change.