Heathrow: judges blocking the runway
“It’s not often that climate activists get to punch the air,” said The Guardian. But campaigners were understandably jubilant last Thursday when the Court of Appeal ruled that the Government’s plans to build a third runway at Heathrow were illegal. The judgment was greeted with delight by many who live under the airport’s flight paths; the third runway would have added at least 260,000 flights per year to the existing 475,000. But the judges also set an “extraordinary precedent” by ruling that the runway proposal didn’t take account of the Government’s commitments made under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. It established an important principle. It’s the law, now, that we have to keep our emissions down.
In general, Boris Johnson isn’t keen on uppity judges, said The Economist. But in this case, the Court of Appeal “may have done him a favour”. The PM has long opposed the third runway, famously promising that he would “lie down in front of the bulldozers” to stop it. That won’t be necessary now. The decision doesn’t put an end to all airport expansion: ministers can go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan. But there’s a good chance that it won’t happen at Heathrow: the airport has said it will appeal to the Supreme Court, but the
Government will not. It wouldn’t take much to get round this obstacle, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. It’s simply a matter of putting the relevant environmental “verbiage” into the document – which the previous transport secretary, Chris Grayling, somehow failed to do. And the case for expanding Heathrow is still a “slam-dunk” for “a cashstrapped country desperate to expand access to foreign markets”. Ministers have it in their power “to unleash the largest private investment project in Europe” – to open up new business and cargo routes reaching all over the world. So if the plan for a third runway dies, it will be very much Johnson’s fault.
Fifty years ago, a seven-strong commission sat down to solve what seemed like a straightforward problem, said Graeme Paton in The Times: where to put a new runway for the southeast. “Half a century on it seems we are no closer to an answer.” And now, many other “carbon-heavy” infrastructure projects may have to be rethought, said John Rentoul in The Independent: plans to expand Gatwick, Birmingham and Leeds Bradford airports, for instance, and to build new gas-fired power stations. If the UK is “serious about becoming carbon neutral”, radical change will be needed.