Climate Delay Is The Greatest Act Of Economic Self Harm, Not The Airport Cap

RTÉ sacrifice Climate Change at the altar of aviation.

Last night on RTÉ’s Upfront with Katie Hannon, a large section of the programme was dedicated to discussing the Dublin Airport passenger cap. Airline executive Conor McCarthy and travel journalist Eoghan Corry argued with fellow panellists Senator Róisín Garvey of the Green Party, and Mayor of Limerick John Moran.

The stage was set with Conor McCarthy commenting that the cap is;

The greatest act of economic self harm since the foundation of the state.

In other news, fox denounces hen house fence.

For the bones of half an hour, we heard about cancer patients in Donegal who use McCarthy’s Emerald Airlines to fly for treatment in Dublin that are now at risk of service disruption, how Christmas fares to Frankfurt have more than doubled, how a 5% decrease in flights will ruin the economy, how Eamon Ryan has a “cooling” relationship with the aviation industry, how the Attorney General should weigh in (which these days seems to be overtaking the refrain to call in the Army), and how Shannon and Cork airports are ready and willing to take the almost 40% of passengers that fly into Dublin and immediately head straight out West on the motorways anyway.

Conspicuous in their absence from the panel were the DAA who, it could be argued, have caused this latest kerfuffle by not having their planning exemptions filed in time, and Michael O’Leary, whose name and opinions continue to be invoked like a Padre Pio of neoliberal hyper-capitalism, not only by his aviation and corporate acolytes, but by RTÉ as well, despite him rarely being asked into Montrose to actually contribute.

Once the vested interests had used their allotted shouting time, Katie asked for a contribution from an unfortunate audience member who lives under the new north runway flight path, itself an issue at the centre of a different planning dispute. We heard about how difficult it is to raise a family, or sleep, with 82dB aircraft turning less than 3,000ft over your head between 7am and 11pm, and how planning was supposed to ensure that it never would have come to pass. This awful situation was met with the cold comment from McCarthy that the airport has been there for 84 years, and that plane noise has halved, itself a sly depiction of the exponential decibel scale that was quickly rebuked by the audience member as only being a reduction of 3dB.

It took 31 minutes into the programme before Ireland’s climate targets were brought up, and how the aviation industry contributes to a large part of the country’s failure in meeting those targets. In fact, RTÉ’s own Philip Boucher-Hayes has reported that we are not even calculating all the flight emissions properly.

In the audience, Louise from Children’s Rights Over Flights spoke eloquently, passionately, and concisely about how the whole framing of the debate was wrong. She highlighted that the aviation industry is predicated on increasing the burning of fossil fuels, and the emissions from that growth is putting all children and young people at risk. She levelled to the aviation industry, and their proxies on the panel, that;

“You do not have a right to develop and grow at the cost of children.
Children have an actual right to develop and grow, and please think of them, and appreciate them, and bring them into the conversation.”

Following Louise’s excellent contribution, Katie Hannon attributed proven Climate Science as being;

“…obviously a view, and it’s a growing view in terms of where we should be in terms of aviation.”

The aviation industry’s emissions impact and climate science is not a view to be attributed to an interest group or a particular political party. It is an existential threat to our society, one which RTÉ continually seems to demote into a discussion topic where balance must be provided.

While RTÉ is getting better in their Climate reporting, largely through Philip Boucher-Hayes and George Lee, it is failing us all by framing Climate Change as just another topic when addressing it in the context of current affairs.

In response to Louise, Conor McCarthy trotted out the tired neoliberal arguments about the economy, and Ireland being an island. In fairness to him, he summarised the hyper-capitalist, climate-delaying viewpoint extremely well by saying;

“There’s always going to be a counterargument for this, we live on an island, we are in an open-competitive economy, and the first job of all of us is to produce a sustainable environment and a sustainable economy. Without a sustainable economy, you don’t get jobs, you don’t get prosperity, and we have no hope.”

In case you need it to be clarified, his use of the word sustainable is in the context of sustaining profit, not sustaining a liveable society on a burning planet.

In other news, aviation executive forgets that trains and ferries exist.

As for no hope, come back to me after you’ve read any one of the number of great books about Climate Change.

Ordinarily, I would agree with a lot of the economic points made, about Ireland needing to think and plan strategically, avoid complacency as John Collison put it, rebalance investment and infrastructure to the regions, and streamline the planning system for a number of reasons. These are all important issues in the normal running of a country, but we are rapidly exiting the time when a country can be run normally.

The IPCC report states that we have a decade to reduce our emissions to keep below 2 degrees of warming. We are nowhere near meeting it. There are extraordinary times.

Ireland will get an average of 17% more rain due to our failure to decrease emissions. This rain will not be spread out, it will come in intense storms causing flooding that will wash out our homes, businesses, and perhaps most frighteningly, our crops. Due to erratic increased rain and longer drought periods, food production yields are projected to decrease from between 5% and 22%.

There will not be enough food to eat at certain times of the year. Very few seem to be openly saying this, but we are all seeing it, from the garlic crops lost in the Midleton floods to the potatoe crops lost in the Carlingford floods last year. And that’s not to mention the exponential increase in climate immigration that the northern hemisphere will be faced with, or the increasing societal instability, because large parts of the world, including southern Europe, will be uninhabitable.

Last night’s episode of Upfront put the foxes and the farmers on the panel, and consigned the chickens to the audience. It should be the reverse. Climate needs to take priority over the economy in every facet of society, especially in decision-making and media reporting, if we are to have any chance of meeting our emissions targets.

RTÉ needs to quickly recognise that Climate Action is a matter of strategic national importance and start prioritising and promoting it over the aviation industry, industrial agriculture, and anyone else who aims to delay the reduction in our emissions in the pursuit of profit. RTÉ is the state broadcaster, and it’s time they put the state ahead of corporate interests.

To me, ignoring and/or delaying Climate Action is the greatest economic self harm in the history of the state.

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Dublin Airport

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