Greenpeace targets UK airports in heated CO2 debate

By Pete Harrison

LONDON (Reuters) - The war of words over aviation's impact on the climate heated up this week, as Greenpeace campaigners handed out free train tickets to UK air travelers while pilots urged them to stop feeling guilty.

Environmentalists are targeting domestic plane journeys in particular, which they say could easily be switched to trains which emit less climate-warming CO2.

Greenpeace set up booths at London City, Manchester, Newcastle and Edinburgh airports on Tuesday where travelers on British Airways domestic flights could swap the return section of their plane ticket for a train ticket.

"By aggressively promoting domestic routes, British Airways is fuelling the binge-flying culture," said Greenpeace director John Sauven at London City airport.

"Planes are ten times more damaging to the climate than trains, so if we don't do something about the growth in aviation, Britain will find it very hard to meet its global warming targets," he added.

British Airways countered that it had led the industry over the last eight years in promoting carbon trading to limit aviation's impact on the environment.

"There will be significant cost, so nobody can pretend this is an easy way out," said a BA spokesman, adding that the European Union planned to include aviation in its Emissions Trading Scheme from 2011.

SCAPEGOAT

Greenpeace's action comes the day after the British Air Line Pilots Association published a report saying air travel had become a scapegoat for global warming and air passengers should stop feeling guilty.

The report angered environmentalists by saying shipping and some forms of rail travel were more polluting than aviation.

"The authors assume everyone drives a top of the range 4x4 across continents, before taking the QE2 then jumping on a Maglev bullet train," said Sauven.

Aviation's impact on the environment also made headlines last week when European plane maker Airbus proposed a top-level gathering of aerospace groups, including U.S. rival Boeing, to try harder to cut air travel pollution.

British low-cost airline easyJet also unveiled its vision of a shorthaul aircraft that it hoped would generate 50 percent less CO2 than its current planes and could be delivered by 2015.

EasyJet Chief Executive Andy Harrison said the new design would largely offset the impact of its plans to double its fleet size by then.

And he told Reuters that travelers would continue to make domestic flights in Britain for as long as the country lacked an efficient high-speed rail network.

"If we ever had a true high speed rail service to Scotland, it would affect the airlines," he added.

In a review of the economics of climate change last year, Nicholas Stern put aviation's share at 1.6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, its contribution to global warming was two to four times that because of altitude effects.

Surging use of cars and planes will push up greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades, said a recent draft U.N. report making the transport sector a black spot in a fight against global warming.