Just Stop Oil paint the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
{Wow, what an nut Shapps is, that takes some effort} The Secretary of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Grant Shapps, has been ridiculed after his latest political stunt spectacularly backfired.
After campaigners from the climate protest group Just Stop Oil sprayed orange paint onto the department for energy security and net zero’s headquarters in Westminster on Wednesday after its decision to issue more than 100 new oil and gas licences in the UK, Shapps decided to invoice the Labour Party for the damage to the building.
The Tory minister drew on a familiar baseless Tory attack line, posting a ridiculous letter on Twitter and claiming that Just Stop Oil was the ‘political wing of the Labour Party’.
The Tories have repeatedly tried to claim, incorrectly, that Just Stop Oil funds the Labour Party. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak previously made the claim which was fact checked and proven to be false by organisations such as Full Fact which wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to prove his claim.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk boards his private jet before departing from Beijing Capital International Airport on May 31, 2023.
“Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are getting a bargain, paying less in taxes each year to fly private and contribute more pollution than millions of drivers combined on the roads below.”
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey announced legislation on Wednesday that would hike fuel taxes for private jet travel and transfer the revenue to a new federal fund aimed at bolstering clean public transportation and other climate initiatives.
The bill, titled the Fueling Alternative Transportation With a Carbon Aviation Tax (FATCAT) Act, would add a $1.73-per-gallon surcharge to the current fuel tax for private jet travel, which is around $0.22 per gallon. Markey’s new surcharge would amount to the equivalent of roughly $200 per metric ton of a private jet’s carbon emissions, according to the senator’s office.
Private jet flights—a significantly more polluting form of travel than commercial flights or trains—surged during the coronavirus pandemic. One recent study by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Patriotic Millionaires estimated that private jets’ planet-warming emissions jumped by more than 23% during the Covid-19 crisis.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire CEO, is the most frequent private jet flyer in the U.S., helping produce more than 2,100 tons of carbon emissions last year while paying minimal taxes, according to IPS and the Patriotic Millionaires. The groups pointed to research showing that just 1% of the world’s population is responsible for half of all aviation emissions.
“The 1 percent can’t free ride on our environment and our infrastructure at a discount,” Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are getting a bargain, paying less in taxes each year to fly private and contribute more pollution than millions of drivers combined on the roads below. It’s time to ground these fat cats and make them pay their fair share so that we can invest in building public transportation that communities across the country and our economy desperately need.”
Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) introduced companion legislation in the House.
“Working families shouldn’t subsidize the ultra-wealthy to fly private and destroy our environment,” said Velázquez. “If billionaires want to travel on private jets, they should pay similar taxes to those flying commercial. It’s time for the rich to pay for their pollution so we can fund environmental justice initiatives and affordable public transportation across the country.”
Climate campaigners have been targeting private jets with growing frequency in recent years as research has more closely examined their impacts on the planet. The European group Transport & Environment found that private jets are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes and 50 times more polluting than trains.
In May, dozens of climate activists and scientists disrupted Europe’s largest private jet sales fair to demand a total ban on the planes. IPS and the Patriotic Millionaires estimated that the median net worth of a full private jet owner is $190 million.
“Sales of private jets are skyrocketing, and with them the one percent’s hugely unfair contribution to the climate crisis—while the most vulnerable people deal with the damage,” Klara Maria Schenk of Greenpeace’s Mobility for All campaign said during the May protest. “It is high time for politicians to put a stop to this unjust and excessive pollution and ban private jets.”
This story has been updated with additional details about the bill.
David Williams left blind in one eye and suffering trauma and anxiety after a vicious 2021 attack in his home. Contemptible Labour is trying to pin its disastrous loss in Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election on him
Labour’s appalling conduct under the authoritarian and blame-shifting Keir Starmer regime has continued with a series of apparently-briefed attempts to pin the blame for its woeful defeat in Thursday’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election on former constituency party chair David Williams.
Williams resigned from his position and the party last week in disgust at the way Labour had behaved during the election campaign – and he responded to the subsequent attempts to scapegoat him with a link to an article, posted on Twitter:
Some people have been criticising me for not going on the doorsteps in the byelection campaign. I met with Danny Beales at the beginning of the campaign to explain why.https://t.co/NhWHrD0OJW
The article revealed that Williams was the victim of a horrific attack in 2021 by his mentally ill former son-in-law – an attack that left him permanently blind in one eye after the attacker tried to gouge out his eyes and then strangle him with a skipping rope. In his victim impact statement to the court, Williams explained that the attack ad the ‘life-changing’ injuries had left him suffering anxiety and nightmares – and that despite being ‘politically active’,
My days of door knocking and meeting people on the doorsteps are now behind me.
Now Labour is trying to deflect blame from the abysmal and spineless Keir Starmer and the lacklustre right-wing candidate Starmer’s party rigged into the selection by claiming a man disabled in a vicious attack did not do enough door-knocking. Only one word springs to mind for the people who would do such a thing, but Skwawkbox will allow readers to fill in the blank for themselves.
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
Despite floods and fires, both left and right in the US act like environmental disaster isn’t happening
There’s a lot of hot air from the American right around education at the moment, with hate groups inciting moral panics that have resulted in the banning of books related to race, sex and gender. But there seems to be surprisingly little emphasis on another right-wing bugbear: environmentalism.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that US conservatives don’t consider bashing Greta Thunberg on the internet a national pastime. It’s just that Greta and the cause she represents don’t seem to come up when right-wing activists go to school-board meetings to scream about ‘transgenderism’ or ‘critical race theory’.
On one level, it is, of course, good that they’re not calling for literature addressing our environmental crises to be banned in schools. Growing up, I learned a lot from Ranger Rick magazine, a product of the National Wildlife Federation that teaches children about nature and supports conservation. But on another level, the lack of interest on this issue from the right may actually signal a problem for the US and therefore – because my country is such an outsized contributor to global climate change – the entire planet.
Authoritarians are bullies who paint themselves as victims. If you want to see what I mean, just type ‘Donald Trump’ and the phrase ‘treated very unfairly’ into Google. They whine and scream the loudest when they feel their privilege and power to be most immediately threatened. And if Republicans do not feel especially threatened on behalf of their precious fossil fuels industry, that’s probably because the US is highly unlikely to pass any serious environmental regulations any time soon.
Cheap airline tickets, made possible by favorable government tax treatment, “come at a high cost to the planet and its inhabitants,” the environmental group warned.
A study released Thursday by Greenpeace found that the policy decisions of European governments have made flying a significantly cheaper option than traveling by train, even though the former is far worse for the climate than the latter.
For its analysis, Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe compared air and rail fares for nine different days on 112 European travel routes.
“In the majority (79 out of 112) of routes analyzed, flights are less expensive than rail,” the group noted in its new study. “Rail trips are on average twice as expensive as flights, despite the fact that the overall climate impact of flying can be over 80 times worse than taking a train.”
“Why would anyone take the train from London to Barcelona and pay up to €384 when air tickets are available for the ridiculously low price of €12.99?” the group asked. (That’s roughly $427 for a rail trip versus $14 to fly.)
Greenpeace attributed the often substantial differences in price to “unfair tax” policies that “favor air travel over rail.” The group pointed out that “while airlines pay neither kerosene tax nor [a value-added tax] on international flights and benefit from subsidies paid with taxpayers’ money, railways have to pay energy taxes, VAT, and high rail tolls in most countries.”
“For the planet and people’s sake, politicians must act to turn this situation around.”
Lorelei Limousin, a senior climate campaigner with Greenpeace E.U., said Thursday that “airlines benefit from outrageous fiscal advantages.”
“Planes pollute far more than trains, so why are people being encouraged to fly?” Limousin continued. “Low-cost airlines, in particular, have exploited every loophole and trick in the book. €10 [$11] airline tickets are only possible because others, like workers and taxpayers, pay the true cost. For the planet and people’s sake, politicians must act to turn this situation around and make taking the train the more affordable option, or else we’re only going to see more and more heatwaves like the one currently wreaking total havoc in Spain, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere.”
Flying has been the fastest-growing source of transport emissions in the E.U. in recent years, and Greenpeace argued that European governments and institutions are effectively subsidizing the aviation industry’s planet-warming emissions “through giveaways to airlines and airports” while simultaneously “closing down railway stations and lines.”
Low-cost airlines in particular have benefited from government subsidies and less regulation. Greenpeace’s analysis shows that “incentives for new routes from an airport are mainly designed for low-cost carriers, which are typically flying to small airports near large airports, which are considered new destinations (Paris-Beauvais, Frankfurt-Hahn…).”
“Thanks to the outrageous subsidies that airlines benefit from, they can offer unreasonably low prices—low-cost airlines are at the forefront with their aggressive pricing strategies,” Greenpeace said. “But these cheap tickets come at a high cost to the planet and its inhabitants, including their employees, airport neighbors, customers, people affected by extreme weather events.”
To promote less polluting travel, Greenpeace urged European national governments to “introduce climate tickets, affordable and simple long-term tickets valid on all means of public transport in a country or a defined region.”
“Together with the E.U. institutions, they should also cooperate for the implementation of a cross-border climate ticket,” the group said in a statement. “Windfall profit taxes, the phaseout of airline subsidies, and a fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions would make revenues available for funding climate tickets while improving public transport networks.”
