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From The Times
June 21, 2004

Aircraft pollution and policymaking

From Mr Matthew Knowles
Sir, Sir Jonathan Porritt, the Chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission (report, June 17), and other environmentalists constantly predict the future, apparently confident in their own skills of clairvoyance, in order to advance their schemes for the present. However, such predictions of doom are rarely reviewed to see whether they were accurate, and seem never to take into account advances in technology that may render their assumptions, based on today’s human behaviour, inaccurate.

Airport expansion in the UK may well not go ahead on the scale that he fears, because advances in aircraft development such as the new double-decker, 555-seat Airbus A380, mean that more people can fly on fewer aircraft. Further advances in technology may also reduce pollution from aircraft.

Intelligent policymaking that can gently encourage the air travel industry into speeding up the development of such innovation will be much more effective than using taxation and higher fares as the sledgehammer to crack a nut.

We should all be concerned about our effect on the environment, but we should also be worried that constant scare stories that fail to come true may make us immune to those which are based on fact, not conjecture.

Yours faithfully,
MATTHEW KNOWLES,
7 Beech Close,
Loughton, Essex IG10 2PH.
June 17.

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