21.01.2008
Over twen­ty envi­ron­men­tal pro­test­ers have this morn­ing breached secu­ri­ty at Edin­burgh Air­port and block­ad­ed the entrance to the pri­vate jet com­pa­ny, Greer Avi­a­tion.

The activists, from rad­i­cal direct action group Plane Stu­pid Scot­land, pledged that today’s actions come as part of a nation­wide cam­paign to reverse the cur­rent plans for a tripling of air trav­el in Scot­land which they say flies in the face of the gov­ern­men­t’s own cli­mate tar­gets.

The pro­tes­tors, with ban­ners read­ing ‘This plan­et has no emer­gency exits,’ and dressed in busi­ness atire with indi­vid­ual pri­vate jet wings strapped to their backs high­light­ed that unreg­u­lat­ed busi­ness jet use must be brought into the avi­a­tion debate.

Plane Stu­pid Scot­land spokesper­son Oli said:

Expo­nen­tial eco­nom­ic growth is not com­pat­i­ble with cli­mate change mit­i­ga­tion. The major­i­ty of avi­a­tion growth stems from the demand of the wealth­i­est 10%, and this is why we tar­get pri­vate jet use today. We will nev­er suc­ceed in sav­ing this plan­et and main­tain­ing our exis­tence on it unless we com­mit to fight­ing for the right to exis­tence for all through dis­man­tling cap­i­tal­ism. If we don’t use our ener­gy to join with oth­ers to make real glob­al change, to cre­ate new ways of liv­ing togeth­er, and to find gen­uine­ly sus­tain­able alter­na­tive job oppor­tu­ni­ties for those employed in high emis­sion indus­tries, then we live in a sys­tem in which the plan­et suf­fers along­side us, the peo­ple.

Today’s action aims to high­light the fact that in the UK, pri­vate jet use is the fastest grow­ing sec­tor of the fastest grow­ing source of green­house gas emis­sions – aviation[1]. Yet pri­vate jet jour­neys typ­i­cal­ly have a glob­al warm­ing impact that can be an incred­i­ble 50–70 times that of the same jour­ney made by train.[2]

Plane Stu­pid spokesper­son Lucy said:

“Whilst the British Gov­ern­ment is eager to flout their green cre­den­tials in the upcom­ing Cli­mate Change Bill, they are still sup­port­ing expan­sion at 24 air­ports across the UK – includ­ing every sin­gle Scot­tish air­port. But the sci­ence clear­ly shows that it will be impos­si­ble for Britain to meet the CO2 reduc­tion tar­gets set out in the bill if these plans go ahead – which is the real rea­son why emis­sions from avi­a­tion are specif­i­cal­ly exclud­ed from the bill.”

The Depart­ment for Transport’s own fig­ures show that around half of the fore­cast expan­sion in Scot­tish air trans­port, from 14 mil­lion to 50 mil­lion pas­sen­ger move­ments by 2030, will take place at Edin­burgh air­port — more than dou­bling its emis­sions. Yet incred­i­bly the scale of car­bon emis­sions has been exclud­ed from the gov­ern­ment con­sul­ta­tion on the expan­sion plans (3).

Spokesper­son Jo added.

“A stag­ger­ing 98% of flights from Edin­burgh are to des­ti­na­tions reach­able by bus or train – both over ten times less pol­lut­ing. We see no attempt by BAA Edin­burgh to make its own con­tri­bu­tion to cut­ting car­bon emis­sions. Instead they push ahead with their pro­mo­tion of binge-fly­ing dis­re­gard­ing all the sci­en­tif­ic warn­ings.”

Despite unprece­dent­ed aware­ness about the impact of air trav­el on glob­al warm­ing, air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ers fore­cast world­wide deliv­er­ies of new pas­sen­ger jets will come close to 10,000 over the next decade — almost dou­ble the pro­duc­tion rate for the pre­vi­ous 10 years. If UK expan­sion plans are allowed to go ahead, around 3000 planes will be added to British fleets alone (4).

Plane Stu­pid Scot­land argues that the links must be made between the avi­a­tion indus­try prof­i­teer­ing off the plan­et, local res­i­dents and work­ers alike. Plane Stu­pid Scot­land is fed up with wait­ing for gov­ern­ment to act in the face of an unprece­dent­ed cli­mate threat. Today is the first action of Plane Stu­pid Scot­land who in turn are just one part of the grow­ing move­ment of cli­mate activists who have decid­ed that they must act them­selves to stop cli­mate change.

Plane Stu­pid Scot­land are Call­ing for

1) The Gov­ern­ment to end all sub­si­dies giv­en to the Scot­tish avi­a­tion indus­try
2) An urgent, tar­get­ed and pub­lic invest­ment strat­e­gy in the alter­na­tives to short-haul avi­a­tion
3) No more run­ways- and a strat­e­gy to dis­man­tle exist­ing ones.
4) Mobi­liza­tion of affect­ed com­mu­ni­ties to deter­mine their own lives against avi­a­tion expan­sion and run­away cli­mate change.

Sources:

[1] Air trav­el as a whole already accounts for over 13% of the UK ’s total con­tri­bu­tion to cli­mate change. The lat­est fig­ures avail­able show 6.9% of Euro­pean flights record­ed by air traf­fic con­trol author­i­ties were “busi­ness avi­a­tion” in 2005, with an esti­mat­ed 40% fly­ing emp­ty on “posi­tion­ing flights” to pick up pas­sen­gers. The num­ber of busi­ness jet flights was grow­ing at 8.9% two years ago — twice as fast as the rest of air traf­fic — and is believed to have accel­er­at­ed since.

[2] http://www.aef.org.uk

[3] Tyn­dall Cen­tre for Cli­mate Change Research. Ander­son , Bows (2006) ‘Pol­i­cy Clash’, Trans­port Pol­i­cy. http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/

[4] http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/environmentalissues/ukairdemandandco2forecasts/airpassdemandfullreport.pdf — note: DfT pre­dic­tions fac­tor in a wild­ly opti­mistic increase in fuel effi­cien­cy of almost 30% by 2030.

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Ten peo­ple from Plane Stu­pid Scot­land were arrest­ed. Four peo­ple in steel lock-on tubes who were block­ing the vehi­cle gate onto the taxi-way were cut out by the Faslane cut­ting team after suc­cess­ful­ly blockad­ing for four hours. One of the four was tak­en to hos­pi­tal for treat­ment of hypother­mia. There had ear­li­er been a long dis­pute between mem­bers of action sup­port and the police. The police were pre­vent­ing access to the block­aders who were clear­ly shiv­er­ing and soaked by the por­ing rain. after twen­ty min­utes it was nego­ti­at­ed that a coat could be placed over one man who was par­tic­u­lar­ly suf­fer­ing but it was left too late to stop him from get­ting hypother­mia. We’re still wait­ing to hear from the hos­pi­tal about his con­di­tion.

Two pairs of peo­ple were d‑locked over the two main entrances to the build­ing and were also cut out and nicked at the same time. Two women who had climbed on the roof of the Greer build­ing waltzed around the roof and had a tea par­ty to the sound of live clar­inet play­ing. The cops even­tu­al­ly put a lad­der up and they too were arrest­ed. They had remained on the roof for four hours. All sup­port were able to leave. Agro from the cut­ting team was min­i­mal but the arrival of rein­force­ments in riot gear was some­what over the top.