The World in 2030

126 The World in 2030
a greater detrimental impact on the atmosphere than other
forms of carbon emission.
In ‘Heat’, George Monbiot has a great deal to say about
jet travel:
Aviation has been growing faster than any other
source of greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2004,
the number of people using airports in the United
Kingdom rose by 120 per cent, and the energy the
planes consumed increased by 79 per cent. 248 Their
carbon dioxide emissions almost doubled in that period
– from 20.1 to 39.5 million tones, or 5.5 per
cent of all the emission this country produces.
Unless something is done to stop this growth, aviation
will overwhelm all the cuts we manage to make
elsewhere. The government predicts that, ‘if sufficient
capacity were provided’, the number of passengers
passing through airports in the United Kingdom will
rise from roughly 200 million today to ‘between 400
million and 600 million’ in 2030. It intends to ensure
that this prophecy comes to pass. The new runways
it is planning ‘would permit around 470 million passengers
by 2030’. 249
In 2006 Friends of the Earth 250 and the Co-operative Bank
commissioned the Tyndall Centre For Climate Change
Research 251 in Manchester, UK to produce a report called
‘Living Within A Carbon Budget’, which made an excellent
attempt to lay out a road map for how Britain could achieve
sufficient cuts in carbon emissions to meet the targets