Heading for the fiery furnace if we go on taking these cheap flights

[Barrett808]

We're all heading for the fiery furnace if we go on taking these cheap flights
Magnus Linklater

JET TRAVEL is a sin, says the Bishop of London, and of course he is right. How can it not be a mortal sin to contribute actively to the end of the world?

When one 747 from London to New York spews out more CO2 emissions than a motorist does in the course of an entire year, when the 16,000 flights taking off each year generate 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, destroying the planet’s upper atmosphere, when global warming is melting the ice-cap and threatening the poorest nations of the world with starvation or drowning, when mankind, in the memorable words of the climate guru James Lovelock, is “ perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease”, does this not add up to a most grievous offence against nature, to say nothing of God? Is the Bishop wrong, then, to suggest we should all take personal responsibility?

...

Guilt, in short, could prompt the first stirring of a popular revolt against the excess of carbon emissions that is destroying our planet. I may as well start the ball rolling myself. This summer I bought a cheap Ryanair ticket to Grenoble in France. It cost me £17. At the last minute I had to change my flight. The price had dropped to £4.99. Did I feel triumph at pulling off a remarkable bargain? I did not. I felt guilty. How could I, who had initially budgeted for a flight costing at least a couple of hundred pounds, justify a ticket that was less than the train fare into town? Alongside me, in a packed aircraft, were other passengers, heading for a destination they had barely heard of, on an airline whose only attraction was its fare, funded not by its ticket price but by the cheap perfume it managed to sell on board, to an airport that would barely have existed before the rise of budget air travel, on a journey as artificial and unnecessary as it is possible to imagine, which had the effect, however, of shaving yet another centimetre off the ozone layer and depriving yet another polar bear of its rapidly melting ice floe.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-2285559,00.html

[1620rock]

1. Time to bring back the trains and ocean liners. eom