Travel Weekly Blog

Someone in the industry remarked to me recently that talk of the environmental impact of air travel and tourism was just a fad.

Never mind the Stern Review, let’s hope to God they are right. It would be wonderful to find the threat of climate change had been exaggerated.

Tony Blair says the science is not in doubt, but after the Iraq war who can believe him? Unfortunately, the 2,000 leading climate scientists in the world, convened in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the same thing.

A handful of lobbyists, politicians and PR executives, many of them funded by oil giant ExxonMobil, oppose the idea and seek equal media air time. Don’t be misled next time you see the likes of former chancellor Nigel Lawson on TV arguing against the science of climate change. Your children and grandchildren will live with the consequences.

I recommend those not convinced read The Last Generation, the latest book by New Scientist writer Fred Pearce. If you can get find a copy of his 1989 book Turning up the Heat, so much the better. Its prediction of how climate change would unfold through the past decade has proved frighteningly accurate.

Either Pearce is a regular Nostradamus or the science was pretty well understood in the late 1980s. Since then, scientists have developed their understanding and fleshed out the detail, and the predictions of how far and fast temperatures will rise have pushed higher.

Those who deny climate change would have you believe the phenomenon is still the subject of dispute. It is not. The debate is about the rate of temperature rise, and the consequences, during the lifetimes of those now living.

But like those in the tobacco industry who spent five decades denying the link between cigarettes and cancer, these people will not go away – they even employ some of the same tobacco lobbyists. The rest of us just have to get past them.

Where does that leave travel? God knows we all need our world to be sustainable. But tourism needs sustainability too. No one in the industry would suggest it despoil a destination and then move on, like strip mining.

There is a circle to be squared in reconciling constant growth with sustainability, but sooner or later the costs of maintaining what we have – or dealing with the consequences – will have to be factored into profit and loss figures, as former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern has concluded.

No company is going to commit commercial hara-kiri by cutting back a money-making business, so the industry will require regulation to ensure necessary adjustments impact equally on all.

But that would fly in the face of the deregulation that now dominates and require a global political U-turn of the kind that followed the Wall Street Crash or accompanied the build up and outbreak of World War Two.

Maybe deregulation will turn out to be the fad in the long term. What do you think?

Ian Taylor, aviation reporter