Why would a climate assembly endorse an airport?

A guest blog by Sam Wakeling

Citizens’ Assemblies offer a hopeful, better way of doing politics as Ci Davis recently described in this blog. They can give a vital rebalancing of power, giving control back to citizens. Ours showed where South Yorkshire citizens are ahead of our politicians. For example, we don’t need to be “brought along” to want changes to our streets to make them safe for walking, wheeling and cycling – these were some of the most popular recommendations. 

But those who hold power don’t share it easily. Assemblies are only as powerful as the information people have and the questions they get to answer. As the conclusions of our climate assembly are shortly to be launched, I believe there are questions to face particularly over how support for reopening our local airport was achieved.

Mayor Coppard wanted to “restore faith” and “inspire trust” and wrote passionately about the need to overcome our fears. But what if it is less ‘our’ fears that are the problem, or our trust, but the fears politicians have and their lack of trust in us, the people?

If assembly members were trusted to decide about the airport wouldn’t they have been given the full picture? They could have heard the outsized role aviation has in damaging our climate and pragmatic options for the way forward. They may have heard how “Sustainable” Aviation Fuel (SAF) relies on spectacular amounts of land, energy or imported waste cooking oil – all of which are needed for uses other than aviation. Even if SAF met optimistic targets it is only hoped to cut 22% of emissions by 2040, with even these savings wiped out by continued growth in flights. They may also have been shown policies which could manage the amount of flying while keeping it available where needed. For example, targeting the bulk of flying done by the wealthiest with a Frequent Flyer Levy. This would charge those polluting most without costing more for the majority who take one trip or less a year. A Frequent Flyer Levy was overwhelmingly supported at a UK-wide Citizens’ Assembly in 2019. The South Yorkshire Climate Assembly needed more time to do this question justice – a whole assembly could be devoted just to exploring the airport and local alternatives for a thriving economy.

But none of that was available to the people asked to decide our direction. All the assembly members were told about aviation was promoting the airport and a speech from the Mayor himself singing its praises for the sake of “growth”. Was he afraid that the people would make the “wrong” choices? 

How similar does this seem to the aim Thatcher had of shutting industry in South Yorkshire? Chasing a kind of theoretical progress which appeared to her to be without cost, and when her scorched-earth free market economic agenda was challenged, she would say: “There Is No Alternative”.

Yet there are real costs to pursuing an airport. Costs which deserve the frankness of the language Oliver Coppard used when describing the need for this assembly – of sacrifice, violence and communities ripped apart. More aviation unavoidably means climate-harming emissions causing more damage to our lives, our livelihoods and our homes. More floods as we have seen causing destruction in Europe and submerging parts of the Midlands last week. It means communities ripped apart by increasingly violent storms, drought and heat waves, with the ecosystems we rely on for our work and food unravelling. 

It means lives being sacrificed on an altar of economic ideals. Sacrificed to grow corporate wealth we are never to share in. Who is being sacrificed? It’s all of us one way or another, but soonest and hardest it’s people most exposed to climate shocks. With heat of around 50C for weeks on end India has been “like a furnace” during this record-breaking summer. The “relentless heat was immense, wearing everyone down,” and “thousands of cases of heatstroke were reported, overwhelming hospitals” writes The Independent’s Asia Climate Correspondent Stuti Mishra. 

We know we need real change, and this needs real shifts in power. We need assemblies where we can decide what we value more: our lives, our children and our human family around the world, or giving public subsidies to enable the profits of aviation companies like Boeing? Which makes billions selling the jets and bombs Israel is using to turn Gaza’s hospitals and schools into rubble and despair.

We must be allowed to choose real alternatives, to care for and respect each other by investing in the daily needs of our communities. To create the jobs we need doing the valuable work of upgrading homes to keep us warm, transforming our streets so we can get around easily and safely, and valuing the labour of healing and caring for each other from young to old. This would be for our own good, as well as standing in solidarity with people feeling the violence of climate damage across the world.

I believe our best hope is in holding sacred that everyone is essential and no one is sacrificed. This needs more and deeper democracy. Assemblies have a powerful part to play, and it’s up to us to see that they can do it with the integrity we need.