When one 747 from London to New York spews out more CO2 emissions than a motorist does in the course of an entire year, when the 16,000 flights taking off each year generate 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, destroying the planet’s upper atmosphere, when global warming is melting the ice-cap and threatening the poorest nations of the world with starvation or drowning, when mankind, in the memorable words of the climate guru James Lovelock, is “ perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease”, does this not add up to a most grievous offence against nature, to say nothing of God? Is the Bishop wrong, then, to suggest we should all take personal responsibility?

I note that he fell short of a thundering pulpit denunciation by conceding that a cheap flight to Benidorm, or the use of a gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor on the school run might only be a “symptom of sin” rather than the actual burn-in-hell thing itself.

But at least his words were stronger than the milk-and-water follow-up from the Church of Scotland, which bleated that “our souls are not in any imminent danger from large cars or flying”. Why ever not? I should have thought that if God did indeed create the heavens, the earth and all that is therein, he would be mightily displeased to see us collectively disabling it. The Kirk seems to have forgotten its own Westminster Confession of 1646, which teaches that “every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the law of God and contrary thereunto, doth, in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal”.

That’s more like it. Along with the thundering language, it introduces that powerful motivator, guilt. And though the modern world may find it a struggle to define the concept of sin — or even to admit that it exists at all — it knows perfectly well what guilt is. Guilt drives us back on to the straight and narrow, however far we have strayed from it; it jolts us into making that telephone call to Aunt Sadie, whom we promised to invite to lunch last Christmas; it fills the collecting boxes of the nation; it squeezes out the confession that either ends or saves a marriage; it forces the murderer into a police station to confess to a killing; it can make a politician enter a pair of cowboy boots on his register of interests; and it just might persuade us to go by train instead of by air next time.

Guilt may be national as well as personal. It can end slavery, make reparation for the crimes of a previous regime or motivate the world’s aid agencies in their endless attempt to eradicate world poverty. It contributed to the decision of Nato countries to intervene in Kosovo, and shamed the Security Council that failed to do the same in Rwanda. Guilt may eventually force Condoleezza Rice to lean on Israel to stop the bombing of Lebanon, and it just might persuade the world’s governments to restrict rather than encourage air travel.

Guilt, in short, could prompt the first stirring of a popular revolt against the excess of carbon emissions that is destroying our planet. I may as well start the ball rolling myself. This summer I bought a cheap Ryanair ticket to Grenoble in France. It cost me £17. At the last minute I had to change my flight. The price had dropped to £4.99. Did I feel triumph at pulling off a remarkable bargain? I did not. I felt guilty. How could I, who had initially budgeted for a flight costing at least a couple of hundred pounds, justify a ticket that was less than the train fare into town? Alongside me, in a packed aircraft, were other passengers, heading for a destination they had barely heard of, on an airline whose only attraction was its fare, funded not by its ticket price but by the cheap perfume it managed to sell on board, to an airport that would barely have existed before the rise of budget air travel, on a journey as artificial and unnec- essary as it is possible to imagine, which had the effect, however, of shaving yet another centimetre off the ozone layer and depriving yet another polar bear of its rapidly melting ice floe.

All over the world, encouraged by governments that remain wilfully blind to long-term pollution, cities and regions are competing for the right to open new airports, granting easily affordable landing rights to a plethora of airlines with names like Flybe, Wizzair, Jet2 and Excel, which no one had heard of a few years ago, but which all share one thing — the inalienable right to destroy our environment.

Far from trying to rein back on this insane expansion, most countries are subsidising it — to the tune of about £30 billion a year in Europe alone. There is no VAT on aviation fuel, no VAT on new aircraft and no VAT on ticket sales. In Britain, airlines would have to pay £5 billion a year if they were taxed at the same rate as motorists. Since they do not, tickets cost about 42 per cent less than they did ten years ago, and the number of people who fly is expected to double over the next 15 years. We are, in effect, subsidising an industry that is poisoning our planet, in the name of another industry — tourism — that will, of course, be the first to suffer from the poisoning of our planet.

I don’t know how this makes you feel, but it leaves me bathed in sweat at the mere thought of it. That’s either guilt, or the weather, or both. Either way, it’s a sin.

Click here to read previous columns by Magnus Linklater

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