As someone who loves to see aircraft flying, I find myself in a quandry about the attendees for COP 26 in Glasgow this November. What has prompted this is the recent report on the climate, the warnings in it are pretty clear. There has to be a great deal more done to reduce emissions of CO2 and Methane, it has to be done quickly and it has to be a global effort.
For the most part the western world has had it’s dirty polluting industrial era, the rest of the world is queueing up to have theirs. The world leaders are supposed to be meeting face to face in Glasgow this November to come to some fairly monumental decisions on how to avert what is shaping up to be a global calamity.
As I said in an earlier post, there are currently 46 aircraft rumoured to be arriving between the central scottish airports, but there is still effectively three moths to go so those numbers are likely to increase. There are rumoured to be thousands of people likely to attend from all over the world, so it is also likely that a lot of them will arrive via scheduled flights.
So as the conference has the stated goal of mitigating the effects of climate change and reversing them if possible, how can the meeting be justified. Wouldn’t it be a suitable candidate for people to Video conference, this would certainly mitigate the transportation effects on the climate. Or do our leaders around the world feel that the face to face option is so advantageous that the means will justify the end?
It is not as if we have an other planet, this is the only one that we have. I can remember the day when the population clock passed four billion in 1974, it will probably pass eight billion in 2022. These world citizens have every right to expect that they will be able to consume resources tha same way that our generation did, what they can’t possibly realise is that we’ve already used everything up and are continuing to use it at an increasing rate – what is likely to be left for the next generation, probably not much.
Our legacy isn’t going to be very pretty, I think that the next generation will have every right to be well and truly hacked off!