This week the UK’s Supreme Court waved away the last remaining opportunity to halt the expansion of Luton Airport. With all legal options exhausted, it will now go ahead with its plans to double passenger numbers to 32 million a year by the early 2040s.
The court are the latest in a long line of people and organisations to turn a blind eye to the environmental cost of airport growth, a list that starts with Luton’s council and political parties, and ends with the Secretary of State. One exception is the Planning Inspectorate, whose exhaustive investigation concluded that “the public benefits do not outweigh the environmental harm”.
So let’s look at the balance here more specifically. What are the public benefits? And what is the environmental harm?
The press releases all mention the former and are quiet on the latter, so it’s much easier to answer the first question. The benefits of airport expansion are 11,000 new jobs, 4,400 of which will be specifically within Luton. The project is expected to generate an extra £1.5 billion in economic growth every year.
Since the council owns the airport, this will mean significant further funding for local communities and causes – “up to an additional £13 million” by the mid-40s. Don’t get me wrong, that’s useful. I am yet to claim airport funds for any of my own projects, but they already fund the work of many of my friends in the local arts scene or environmental and community sectors. Airport funding keeps the libraries open, refurbishes parks, pays for school gardens, and supports the carnival and the fireworks.
It’s no wonder nobody wants to answer the second question, but I here goes. According to the airport’s latest sustainability report, the total emissions from Luton Airport are 1,310,848 tonnes of greenhouse gases.
To put that into some context, that’s the same amount of fossil fuel pollution as a small country. For comparison, the Seychelles produces 1,240,000 tonnes of CO2, Eswatini 1,390,000. There are 45 countries with fossil emissions smaller than Luton Airport, which is why airport expansion has to be considered in a wider context, and not just a matter of local traffic and noise.
By my own maths, which I’m happy to have corrected should Luton Airport publish an official estimate, the expanded airport will be closer to 2,210,498 tonnes. That’s about the same as Fiji.
But wait – isn’t the airport setting strict limits to carbon emissions? This is a recurring theme in the propaganda in favour of airport expansion: Luton Airport proposes limits to its environmental impact, in a framework it calls Green Controlled Growth.
Under this framework, legally binding limits will be set to noise pollution, air pollution, carbon emissions and traffic. If it breaches these, it has to pause expansion until it gets back on track. This is a groundbreaking idea in theory, and no other airport has anything like this. The devil is in the detail however.
The Green Controlled Growth framework only applies to operational emissions from the airport building and infrastructure. Quoting directly from their own report, “these emissions account for approximately 0.4% of the Airport’s total reported greenhouse gas footprint.”
These vaunted environmental limits don’t include the planes, as those are subject to separate government targets. Even though Luton Airport puts the fuel in those planes and is therefore directly responsible for their burning, this is somebody else’s problem. You need to root around in the online pfds to find this out – the 0.4% figure doesn’t feature in the press releases.
So this the trade-off we’ve made in expanding Luton Airport: we are committing to an expansion in greenhouse gases that’s equivalent to the African nation of Estwatini, population 1.2 million. We’re doing that for 12,000 jobs and £1.5 billion. The announcement was made during a drought in the UK, in a year of record breaking summer heat.
Does that sound reasonable?
The Earthbound Report 