Blair Insists He Will Not Give Up His Long-Haul Flights

By MICHAEL SETTLE

TONY Blair is insisting he will not give up his long-haul holiday flights, claiming that the fight against global warming does not require such “unreasonable” sacrifices.

Green campaigners swiftly denounced him as “deluded” and said he had forfeited any claim to be a world leader on climate change.

The Prime Minister, who recently spent Christmas in Miami, today rejects out of hand the need to set any personal example on combating greenhouse gases by taking breaks closer to home. He has adopted the George W Bush line that science is the key to tackling global warming.

Questioned about cutting back on long-haul flights during an interview with Sky News, he said: “These things are a bit impractical actually to expect people to do that. What we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy-efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less. How, for example, in the new frames for the aircraft, they are far more energy efficient.”

Mr Blair warned against setting “unrealistic targets” or ending cheap air travel. “I’m still waiting for the first politician who’s actually running for office who’s going to come out and say it – and they’re not. It’s like telling people you shouldn’t drive anywhere.”

Last week, Ian Pearson, Environment Minister, denounced low-cost airline Ryanair as the “irresponsible face of capitalism” and attacked British Airways as “only just playing ball” on environmental regulations.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s boss, hit back, denouncing the minister as “silly”, claiming the GBP10bn his company had invested in new planes meant that in the last five years the carrier had cut emissions and fuel consumption by 50per cent.

It is estimated that a flight to New York is the equivalent of heating a home for a year ordriving 10,000 miles in a car. The European Commission recently confirmed that aviation emissions accounted for just 3per cent of EU greenhouse gases but that the level of emissions from aircraft had doubled in the past 10 years and was due to more than double in the next 10.

Emily Armistead of Greenpeace said: “Tony Blair is crossing his fingers and hoping someone will invent aeroplanes that don’t cause climate change, but that’s like holding out for cigarettes that don’t cause cancer.”

(c) 2007 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.