Protests and Consequences

I was caught in a traffic jam on my way to the office yesterday morning. My route to work skirts Heathrow Airport and it seems that protesters against the putative new runway had blocked the tunnel that leads to the central area. I was inconvenienced a bit. It probably added twenty minutes to my journey time, meaning that I had to park in the far reaches of the car park along with the other late arrivals. People with flights to catch were inconvenienced quite a bit more. Still, twenty minutes extra in the car gave me time to ponder and I came around to thinking about actions and consequences.

The protesters at Heathrow have two distinct issues. They believe that aviation is a uniquely harmful kind of greenhouse gas generator that is contributing a large part of the climate change we are undergoing. They also believe that it is immoral to demolish houses to make way for a new runway. Both viewpoints are worthy of consideration.

Thinking about the airport expansion first. I have lived in the general area of Heathrow for over 25 years. This is not a coincidence. With the amount of travelling I do it is really quite convenient to live just 15 minutes from terminal five – that’s on a good day of course. When my wife and I bought our house we were completely aware that the world’s biggest international airport was just up the road. In fact it was part of the attraction.

Just as an aside, when we had been in the house just a few months a friend came round. This friend was a keen aircraft spotter and had a radio scanner to listen to the chat between the pilots and air traffic control After a couple of hours of this his face was lit up with exhilaration and he asked us how much extra we had had to pay to get a house so close to the glide path. But I digress.

The air transport industry is growing fast. In my professional life it is my business to track that growth and when I started to do this in 1999 there were about one and a half billion passengers carried on commercial flights per year. The equivalent number for 2014 was very nearly 3.5 billion and all projections say it will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. London has long been one of the main international hubs for air transport. If it is to retain that position it needs more airport capacity. That much is clear. The position of the protesters is that London should take a principled stance and decide not to participate in the expansion of air transport.

The obvious challenge is that there is a pretty strong correlation between the availability of effective air transport and economic success. There is at least a plausible risk that if London’s position as an air transport hub declines then so too will the economic prosperity of the city and indeed the country. Among those most concerned with the problems of climate change this may be thought a price worth paying. It’s true that in the short term all that will happen is that traffic will shift to Frankfurt, Amsterdam or Paris but eventually the citizens of those countries will also demand a reduction in air traffic and perhaps this will lead to a global reduction.

Well, it might. But in the meantime Boeing and Airbus have order books for over 12,000 new commercial jet airliners. Barring the sort of political change that is vanishingly unlikely the vast majority of these aircraft will be delivered and put into service. If they don’t operate into Heathrow they will operate into Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta, Almaty, Mumbai and other points East. I've been to some of these places and I'm pretty sure that they will welcome growth in aviation for quite a time to come.This will add to the momentum that already exists for the eastwards shift of the economic centre of gravity of the world. Asia will become more prosperous and Europe relatively less so.

And if that were to happen, perhaps those houses that don’t get demolished to make way for a new runway will be worth a lot less than they are today. The area around Heathrow is rather prosperous, mainly because of the presence of the world’s leading international airport. If Heathrow became a backwater on the aviation map maybe some of that prosperity would go away. We have all seen pictures of the villages where the pit closed and houses lost all their value. Heathrow is the coal pit of west London. It drives the prosperity of the region. Most of the people who live nearby depend on it for their livelihood directly or indirectly.

So the protest yesterday morning inconvenienced a lot of people whose livelihood would be threatened if the protesters got their way. This doesn’t seem to me like a strategy for winning friends and influencing people. The argument that people will lose their homes to support airport expansion and this is a very bad thing seems to me to be a weak one. Unless we are prepared to live in an environment that is frozen at some arbitrary stage of development then there will always be such dilemmas. Charles Dickens wrote about the suffering of Euston and Camden Town where homes and communities were cleared to make way for the coming of the railway in the 19^th century. Those people really were sacrificed to the developments that made the modern world and they were very badly treated. In the modern world we do a bit better. Those displaced by the new runway will be compensated for financial losses and assisted with relocation. And if that doesn’t work as it should we have political processes to address the problem. In any case I am not sure that yesterday’s protesters were all that invested in this side of the argument. When they gave their names and addresses to the beak this morning it turned out that none of them lives within a hundred miles of Heathrow.

But what about the other problem, that aviation is such a big part of the climate change problem and if we don’t fix that the disruption of a few outer London villages will seem like a vicarage tea party? It’s a serious question and it deserves serious consideration. I’ll come back to it in another post. All I’ll say for the moment is that last time I looked the whole of world aviation was emitting about 15% of the greenhouse gasses currently produced by cow farts.