Heathrow Airport, the carbon hellmouth, according to green demonology, is back in the news after reality has savaged Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s and the Government’s agenda for ‘growth’. Reeves is expected to green-light (no pun intended) the airport’s expansion plans, which began in the early 1990s, were formally set out by the Labour Government in 2003, and then bounced between Parliaments under different Governments and the courts ever since. So what to make of the return of the project, and how to square it with the Government’s commitment to Net Zero?
A 2020 judicial review brought by green organisations, Mayor Sadiq Khan and a number of borough councils, found that the plans for the expansion were incompatible with the Paris Agreement and therefore unlawful. Despite the fact that in 2018, MPs had voted in favour of the expansion, the 2020 ruling found that since “The UK ratified the Paris Agreement on November 17th 2016”, the expansion was unlawful because of the Secretary of State for Transport’s Airports National Policy Statement’s “failure to take account of the Paris Agreement”. Later that year, the ruling was overturned by the same Supreme Court, to howls of green rage promising vengeance and a pledge to use the Green Blob’s billions to continue obstructing the project in courts.
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