News: Blair jumps on the carbon offset bandwagon

Flights > News > # 1147 (11/01/2007)

Tony Blair has said he has no intention to curb his enthusiasm for long-haul holidays in order to tackle global warming.
The jet-setting Prime Minister will instead do his bit by offsetting the carbon emissions caused by his air travel.
Mr Blair told Sky News it was “impractical” to expect people to holiday closer to home. Environmentalists have accused him of "crossing his fingers" and hoping someone else saves the planet.
Reacting to his comments, Greenpeace campaigner Emily Armistead said: “Tony Blair is crossing his fingers and hoping someone will invent aeroplanes that don't cause climate change.
"But that's like holding out for cigarettes that don't cause cancer. Hoping for the best isn't a policy, it's a delusion."
One of Mr Blair's own advisers, Jonathon Porritt, said the PM had shown a "complete failure to lead" for being "patchy and muddle-headed" on the climate change issue.
Faced with suggestions Mr Blair was telling the public it was futile to change their behaviour, his spokesman said: "The Prime Minister's approach always has been that you can't address the problems of climate change by hurting the domestic or the world economy.
"Are you going to stop tourism to developing countries that will then harm those developing countries?"

Comment:

At least Tony Blair has a slightly more interesting view on this topic than most of his colleagues, even if it does leave him open to being criticised for going against his own government's policy. Regardless of Blair’s attitude towards his personal flying though, aviation’s environmental impacts will be hotly debated for many years to come, so the attitudes of his successors are always going to be far more interesting to us than those of a lame duck prime minister with about as much credibility as Donny Tourette.

The comment from the Greenpeace activist is the one which is most in need of a challenge. She claims that Blair just wants to cross his fingers and hope that a zero emissions aircraft will be invented, and that such a concept is completely pie in the sky. We already know that emissions-free cars and trains are technically possible, providing they are ultimately powered from renewable electricity sources, so should the prospect of a zero emissions, or at least massively reduced emissions, aircraft really be dismissed so lightly?

Many people have raised concerns about the sheer number of holidays that Blair has taken, and his apparent lack of support for the UK domestic tourism industry, but we are much more concerned about his pointless crusade to save the world. One minute he’s in Washington, the next he’s in Beirut, then its back to Washington. He’ll fit in a quick photo-op in Moscow or Mumbai, before finishing with a morale boosting sojourn with the troops in Iraq. When will he get the message – nobody actually listens to what he says! Imagine how much less CO2 emissions would be guffed out if our dear leader did the honorable thing and stayed on terra firma?