Carla Denyer
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Carla Denyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
a good idea to be ambitious. We still need policies that are in line with 1.5 and we need it in legislation if we possibly can. Why do MPs always reach for legislation when it could just be regulation? You may have noticed that ministers don't tend to go, oh, yes, co-leader of the Green Party told me to do it, so I'll get on with it.
So so trying to get cross party support through a bit of legislation that is hopefully non-controversial to a very large number of people is just one of the stronger levers that we have available. Private members bills often don't make it onto the statute book, but occasionally they do. This could. And I think now's the time.
I think it probably would, because one of the important clauses in the Climate and Nature Bill is that the UK government would have a responsibility to reduce emissions associated with aviation and shipping. So one of the big problems with current climate legislation is that aviation shipping are dealt with separately through international agreements, but ones that are pretty ineffective.
And so every country is able to go, yeah, yeah, we've got loads of airports with loads of planes setting off from them, but that's not a problem because aviation shipping is excluded. It's like, well, it's still your citizens taking off in planes owned by British companies from British airports emitting carbon dioxide in British airspace. I think it might be your problem a little bit.
And the Climate and Nature Bill doesn't have a line saying thou shalt not expand airports, but it would make it very, very difficult to meet the legal requirements while doing so.
Worth noting as well that the Climate Change Committee, which is the government's official independent advisor on climate, has said there should be no net airport expansion and that the government won't be able to meet its targets if it does that. And of course, people need to travel.
But the thing to have at the top of your mind when thinking about airport expansion is airport expansion benefits the super rich. The wealthiest 1% are responsible for 50% of global aviation emissions. And so airport expansion overwhelmingly benefits those people.
Meanwhile, the people living under the flight path dealing with the noise pollution and the air pollution locally, as well as those at the sharp end of climate change, are overwhelmingly rich. those at the other end of the spectrum.
What do you say? The benefits for the economy are probably overstated. The New Economics Foundation did a really helpful analysis of this years ago when... my local airport at home and in my constituency, Bristol, was proposing to expand. And it may do that again, it looks like, or try to. They found that the majority of the new jobs that would be created were low quality jobs.
Yes, of course, if you've got an increased number of passengers going through an airport, you do need more people to serve you sandwiches and coffee. But if instead the government invested in expanding rail in the UK and better international rail connections and so on, then guess what? More people would need to buy sandwiches and coffee in the rail stations. So it doesn't generate very...
good quality jobs, and those jobs aren't inherently attached to aviation, they could go to wherever else you invested that money.
Which is why this has to be about government changing policy and changing legislation to make the greener thing the most convenient and the most affordable thing. Yeah. rather than having a go at individuals for choices that sometimes they don't have complete freedom to make. Thank goodness rail is going to be brought back into public hands now.
That's been a Green Party policy since forever, as long as the investment comes with it. Yeah. But there's no tax on aviation fuel. There's no VAT on plane tickets. There's additional direct subsidies connected to domestic aviation on top of that. The tax regime for private jets is a bit too generous. There are lots of political choices that successive governments have made to
that have created this unfair situation we're in now. And it's so important for us to remember that the economy is not this naturally occurring phenomenon that we just have to live in. The economy is created by humans. And if it's not working for us, we can change it.
Greater Manchester, you'd have thought. Greater Manchester.
Surely the penny is dropping.
I've seen the conspiracy theories about what caused the... Oh my God. No, I haven't.
What is it?
Yeah, the thing that I and the Greens and wider environmental movement has been saying for decades is that, you know, those on the lowest incomes, those in the global south who've done the least to contribute to climate change will be at the sharp end of it, but no one can escape it. And we are getting to the point where... That is happening now.
Yeah, I have. So there are two Conservative co-proposers to the Climate and Nature Bill. And actually, they've been some of the more proactive, I would say, in terms of lobbying their peers and making the case.
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