So what bit of “no new airport capacity” did airports not understand? The Climate Change Committee (CCC) spelled it out again on Wednesday: flying accounted for 7% of UK carbon emissions last year, the trend is upwards, and more airport capacity is “incompatible” with national net zero targets.
Of course, they’ve said it before: but as the committee noted in its 2023 progress report, airports have since have been racing to expand. This time, hammering it home, the CCC says that no expansion at all should go ahead until the government sorts out a proper way to manage it.
Until then, airports are dashing for a share of the growth that the industry’s own roadmap deems “sustainable”, thanks to the magic beans of future technologies and offsetting.
This week, Gatwick airport will be expected to formally submit its planning application for a second runway: described as a “low impact” plan, it would bring another 30 million passengers a year to rural Sussex.
Most airports, however, aren’t planning on more runways to expand. Redeveloped terminals at Manchester and Birmingham will shepherd more people through. Others, including London City, want permission for more flights and longer operating hours. Stansted’s licensed capacity has been raised due to bigger planes.
Luton is looking to double in size; Edinburgh and Bristol are growing. And the granddaddy of them all is, of course, Heathrow: ostensibly conducting an “internal review” of third runway plans, but expected to relaunch them soon.
It’s quite a turnaround on many fronts, not least for a subsector that claimed to be whacked harder than the rest of aviation during Covid – as airports needed to keep the lights on when most planes were mothballed in 2020. Now investors still appear to see plenty of brass in that tarmac.
And Gatwick will savour the moment, after losing out to Heathrow in the Airports Commission process for the right to another runway. The planning submission means chief executive Stewart Wingate has somehow sneaked ahead in the decade-long race, just as rival boss John Holland-Kaye departs Heathrow to be replaced at Heathrow in October by the boss of Copenhagen’s airport, Thomas Woldbye.
But the broader transformation might be the way the industry appears to be addressing – or circumventing – the environmental objections in the intervening years.
Just as Covid started to lock down Europe in 2020, aviation executives processed penitentially in a room in central London to scribble their names on a “roadmap” committing to net zero aviation by 2050.
But like, say, the infamous tree planted by activists for David Cameron to stop Heathrow’s runway, this latest totem’s power may be in convincing the public that action is being taken, rather than in real-world outcomes. As the promise of guilt-free flying spreads, the percentage of UK adults saying they would avoid flying for environmental reasons has, the CCC found, fallen for the first time – a reverse clearly uncorrelated to rising temperatures or extreme weather events.
Airports themselves, not least Heathrow, have pledged to reach net zero sooner, chucking money into peat bogs, renewable energy, electric vehicles. Those targets could be achievable – if only those pesky planes wouldn’t land on them.
On the plane side, with more passengers squeezed into more fuel-efficient aircraft, there is progress – per capita. But the environmental benefit only comes, as it shouldn’t need eminent scientists to point out, if the growing numbers of passengers don’t outstrip the savings.
Now, though, there is fresh magic: SAFs, or sustainable aviation fuels. High on the promise of SAFs, aviation’s “green” advocates are now openly rejecting the CCC’s advice on capacity in favour of their own questionable roadmaps.
The industry-funded body Sustainable Aviation said it was “more confident than ever that we can decarbonise without the need to artificially limit demand … and grow by more than the 25% modelled by the CCC without limiting airport expansion”. Heathrow says it has “always been clear that expansion will only ever be delivered within strict environmental limits”, but claims that “demand management would be a blunt, ineffective attempt to curb emissions”.
And Gatwick? “We fully acknowledge the … urgent need for the aviation industry to take action to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.”
That’s the kind of blind reassurance the UK needs as we build and fly. Even if the action is not the actual action science recommends, who can doubt that aviation’s net zero dream will be reality in three decades, if we make it that far?