Globalising Green Beans V Globalising People

international | environment | news report Wednesday May 03, 2006 09:00 by Kathy Sinnott

Are EU environmental concerns about aviation genuine?

Listening to the debate on privatising Aer Lingus, sometimes I wonder. Don't worry this is not going to be a column about Aer Lingus. I think there is one issue that is clear whether you like privatisation or not. Having a privately run Irish Aer Lingus connecting Ireland to the rest of the world is not what we will have 5 or 10 years down the line. We will have a formerly Irish airline bought by a newer and much richer airline for its prime airport piers and landing rights, flying wherever will make the most money.

As I say, I wonder when I hear such a cross-section of Irish experts and politicians wax eloquent about a privatised airline, why we love to hate Ryanair our Irish private airline so much.

I have my own gripe with Ryanair around disability and the limits set on numbers and the experience of some travellers with disabilities but I am also aware that the European Federation of Disabled People has files bulging with complaints for every airline. The difference is that people paid a lot more to have their wheelchair broken or left behind or to be left sitting at the wrong boarding gate until their flight had departed elsewhere. I have also travelled Ryanair enough to observe real kindness.

We have now passed legislation that will hopefully make all the airlines take better care of travellers with special needs, but in the meantime I do not understand why all the "privateers" are not lauding Ryanair. And it's not just an Irish thing, however, there is a continuous attack on "'Low fares airlines in Europe...

At the moment two of the EU committees that I sit on, the Transport and Tourism Committee and the Environment and Public Health Committee, are considering proposals by the European Commission on "Reducing the Impact of Aviation on Climate Change," which if the debates on the proposal are anything to go by, are aimed at eliminating low cost air travel.

While introducing measures to discourage travel by plane, it makes perfect sense to make trains faster and more fuel efficient, train networks more widespread and the tickets more affordable so that we ride instead of fly from Cork to Dublin or Paris to Cologne. Of course as an island we would be hit by the measures to discourage flying. Disincentives are inevitably financial so they would make getting on and off our island home to interact with the rest of the world much more expensive. I have warned the committees that I will at every discussion remind them that Ireland is an Island and shouldn't be punished for that.

There was a time when young people left Ireland for good. The difficulty of sea travel and the high cost of air meant few visits home over a lifetime. Within the last ten years, Ryanair and Aer Lingus have made flying to and from Ireland much more affordable. Not only are people able to visit their family abroad and take far-flung jobs but they can now take their holiday in the sun or explore the planet without significant financial burdens. Commuting no longer refers solely to journeys between the city and its suburbs but also to journeys from one country to another.

We are assured that the particulate pollution of airplane exhaust stays in the air for a year causing clouds and that this is a bad thing. If this is true then we must limit the damage from airplanes.

The EU has proposed to implement measures to encourage cleaner modes of transport which discourage flying by imposing the "real cost of flying" on people. The "real cost of flying" is whatever financial cost the Commission deems equal to the amount air travel is costing the environment.
I would take this even more seriously, if it were not proposed by the same Commission, who through its globalisation policies and those of the WTO it follows, are bringing us to the point where little that we eat, wear and use, is produced locally. The food on our table increasingly comes from thousands of miles away while the food grown locally is sent to a table thousands of miles away from us. All this globalisation uses fuel, fuel to power the planes, ships, trucks and vans to move the products we trade and consume.
On the one hand we are knowingly increasing our fuel consumption and our fuel based pollution by stimulating the globalisation of green beans. On the other we want to reduce fuel consumption and pollution from stopping the globalisation of human beings.

So when the only real solution offered by the debate is to get rid of the low-cost airlines, I again wonder, what is really at stake. When it comes to fuel efficiency and economy per person you can't beat the low fares airlines. A low cost airline does not run a money-loosing route for long. So is it really the low fares airlines or the people travelling that are being targeted. And if it is us, do we really think we are making progress to return to the days when plane tickets are the preserve of the well-heeled, business class?

Instead of grounding people with average and low incomes, the Commission should seek to ensure that Brazilian sugar and beef is sold at its real cost. This should encompass the pollution cost generated by its transportation, the social cost of poorly paid plantation workers, as well as the displacement cost of Irish workers and the clean up cost associated with unused Irish factories. Perhaps then sugar from Ireland would seem a good buy.