Leo's blog

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Following last week's hi-jinx at the architecture awards, the bored-and-ill-informed climate change deniers at Building Design magazine decided to find out if we'd targeted the right people when we tried to give Pascal & Watson their 'We Don't Give a Shit' award for going for the Heathrow contract.

Pascal & Watson have done plenty of airport expansion in the past so we're confident that they deserve the award, but they lost out on the Heathrow contract to Grimshaw. Grimshaw, who never tire of telling everyone that they designed the Eden Project, are a founder member of the UK Green Building Council. The UK's most controversial high-carbon development is a curious direction for them to start moving in.

Intimate relations with BAA are never a wise PR move for any brand, but Grimshaw seems particularly ill equipped to enter the third runway warzone. Sir Nicholas Grimshaw - inventor of EVA ("Environmentally Viable Architecture") goes around saying things like: "We've been trying to define our ideals in our practice recently, and one of things that came out was that we would very strongly rather work with people we liked! Empathy with the people we were designing for was a critical issue, and although you could make a lot of money working for bastards, there's no real joy in it."

The UK Green Building Council has defended Grimshaw, saying, "...we need to direct our anger at the policymakers involved. Where does this stop? Should we be protesting against the people that pour the concrete for coal-fired power stations?". Hmm. If you expect us to applaud architects for doing sustainable architecture then why can't we attack them for doing unsustainable architecture? Swings and bloody roundabouts.

In Memoriam Grimshaw Sustainable Architects
So. Farewell then Grimshaw sustainable architects.
Your bedfellow has violated you.
Now, infected, simply:
Grimshaw, architects.

As we know, since the triumph of modern liberal capitalist democracy, neither governments nor corporations have any real power whatsoever. They are no more than the slaves, nay puppets and playthings, of the all-powerful informed voter/consumer/viewer. This is why the government and BAA, who know full well what a catastrophic mistake a third runway at Heathrow would be, have been forced into all sorts of dodgy and disreputable behaviour in order to build one.

As they so often tell us: the consumer demands it, and what the consumer demands, the consumer gets. We know this to be true, as all the statements made by the government and the aviation industry are quite clear on the subject. They have to build new runways to keep up with burgeoning consumer demand. No way round it. Any other response would be, at the very least, undemocratic.

Well, Plane Stupid may have discovered a way to help the government out of this fix. We've been doing some research, and we've discovered that there might, just might, be a way of controlling that demand. This would be truly game-changing, as it would allow us to limit aviation without enraging the all-powerful consumers. Rather than taking the clearly unacceptable step of denying demand, we continue to satisfy it, whilst reducing it. Consumers get all the flights they want, the planet gets a limit to aviation, and the government and BAA no longer have to debase themselves by doing things they know to be wrong. It's a win-win-win scenario.

In order to achieve this, we need your help. The next time you see a poster, billboard, or other static advertising encouraging demand for flights, put on a fluoro vest and hard hat, approach the offending installation, and simply destroy it. It really is that easy.

But what of free speech? I'm glad you asked. Not only might this strategy have a significant role in saving the planet, it also positively encourages free speech. If you're a creative sort, you could go beyond merely ripping the thing down or painting it black, and use that space to provide the public with a bit of light entertainment, or perhaps some useful information. For example, it may be the case that there are still a few people in your local area who are unaware of the enormous threat climate change poses and the enormous contribution to this threat made by aviation. Why not use the space vacated by the flight promotional material to remedy this?

Instead of encouraging mass murder, the billboard would be rehabilitated as a socially and environmentally responsible contributor to the health and well-being of the community. It could even rescue the rather tarnished reputation of the advertising industry. If you come up with a particularly ambitious idea, it might be worth asking the owners of the billboard to contribute to the costs of the materials, as they will be the main beneficiaries.

How did we formulate this brilliant strategy? Good question. We were inspired by the ground-breaking work of the late Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, who banned all tobacco advertising in the UK in 2002. Whilst this was probably the greatest achievement in a generally rather disappointing career, we felt that banning the promotion of suicide without restricting the advertising of genocide clearly indicates that his work was left unfinished. We feel sure that, were he alive today, Tony would be up a ladder spraying obscenities all over the latest EasyJet atrocity, and that the best way to remember him, and cement his legacy, is to carry on his important work.

It finally seems like we might just be getting through to people - maybe even the hard-working British families the aviation industry likes to blame for their plans to turn Britain into Airstrip One. According to the 25th British Social Attitudes Report, 70% of Brits now agree "that air travel has a serious effect on climate change." This may not strike readers of our website as an especially mind-blowing revelation - but it's worth remembering that only 83% of Brits currently agree that bears shit in the woods.

Of perhaps greater significance is the news that "The proportion who agree that people should be able to travel by plane 'as much as they like' is 63%, down from 78% in 2003. When asked the same question but with the extra words 'even if it harms the environment', agreement falls from 63% to 19%."

Last night Plane Stupid had the opportunity to witness the failure of democracy first hand, as Newham councillors voted 5-1 in favour of a 50% increase in the number of flights using London City Airport (LCA), accepting the airport's generous promise of a one million pound sweetener to spend on noise abatement in the area.

This was in the face of a flash-mob gathered outside the town hall and in the teeth of the large number of very pissed off residents who had come to register their objections, telling tales of noise intrusion and asthma mortality for the communities living around the airport. A local teacher told how his students had carried out a project monitoring aircraft noise around their neighbourhood over a number of months, and consistently read average levels of 85 – 90db. This is well in excess of what the airport admits to – anything over 57db is judged to be a nuisance.

The EU has finally agreed to include aviation emissions in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). This might look like good news - after all, it is the first and only international emissions agreement to include air transport, and indeed the only policy measure the British government has on the table to address aviation's role in causing climate change. But don't get too excited just yet - because this measure is not actually intended to reduce aviation emissions.

Instead, it is expressly intended to allow them to continue to rise, by enabling airlines to purchase credits under the scheme from other sectors who have successfully reduced their own emissions, or worse, from 'accredited' offsetting schemes in far-off lands such as China. But the extra warming impact of aviation emissions over ground-based CO2 emissions is unaccounted for in the plan. Which means that permits to pollute that are sold to airlines by, for instance, power companies, will actually lead to 2 to 5 times more global warming than if the power companies had never reduced their emissions in the first place. MEPs had proposed a way to factor this in to the scheme, but, somewhat unsurprisingly, the aviation lobby successfully got that thrown out by the Commission.

Scientists measuring the impact emissions have on the climate often talk about 'radiative forcing', and say that aviation's emissions have a radiative forcing impact of around 2.7. But what is radiative forcing, and do all scientists agree on aviation's impact?

The warming impact of aviation emissions is notoriously difficult to quantify. Because aircraft exhaust contains other greenhouse gases whose impact is less well understood than carbon dioxide (such as nitrogen oxide [NOx] and the water vapour that makes up condensation trails), and because this whole bundle of gases is deposited right where we don't want it – into the upper atmosphere – trying to ascertain exactly how much warming will result from a given journey is riven with uncertainty.

The Planning Bill currently making its way through Parliament is yet another kick in the teeth for British democracy. The Bill has been cooked up to allow central command to force roads, runways and nuclear power stations onto unwilling communities without having to listen to any of their bleating about it in the process.

Brown's lot like to point to wind farms when asked about the reasoning behind this obviously anti-democratic piece of legislation. But this week they demonstrated quite clearly the true motivation behind it – by voting against an amendment that would have meant Ministers had to demonstrate every major infrastructure project's role in the mitigation of climate change before granting it permission.

Since that would have been, hmm - a bit hard for the new generation of coal fired power stations and airport expansions they've got their little hearts set on, they quite sensibly threw out the amendment. In doing so, they have nailed their true colours to the mast – and none of those colours is green. It's time to dust off the D-locks and start gearing up to fight a carbon hungry development near you. Once this Bill has been passed there'll be no other way to stop it.

We all want the best for our kids, right? But 'the best' is not what we're giving them. If business-as-usual goes on for much longer, we'll be handing them down a climate-changed world of hardships and horrors, with few of the opportunities for happiness and prosperity that we ourselves have enjoyed.

One group of high-powered mums has woken up to the true nature of what responsible parenting actually means in this time of climate crisis: whatever tender hopes and dreams we may have for our children's lives will become distant, hollow fantasies if we fail to prevent runaway global warming, and so part of the role of every responsible parent alive today must be to radically intervene to stop this from happening. These clear-eyed mums have also recognised that our political 'leaders' are still leading us in exactly the wrong direction, and if we continue to follow them we will soon find they have led us over the edge of a cliff.