As part of Friends of the Earth's Day of Action, the Edinburgh local group is staging a publicity stunt at Edinburgh airport. Information on the stunt is available here:

Why?

As climate change becomes a more pressing issue every day, the UK government is still doing little in the way of effective action to reduce our emissions. Through pressure from groups such as Friends of the Earth, the government has now introduced a climate change bill, due to be debated in the House of Commons later this year. Unfortunately, the bill is lacking in a few issues. Most importantly, the current version of the bill does not include international aviation and shipping in its greenhouse gas reductions. We want to get the message that Gordon Brown is ignoring international aviation into the media, with a concerted publicity effort.

Where?

Edinburgh airport. Meet at the bus stop in front of the main terminal.

When?

April 5, 2008. Meet at 10:30, stunt at 11am.

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. And this was exactly the case in a campaign meeting, organised by Friends of the Earth Scotland last Saturday. I'd heard of the Tyndall Centre's report on aviation (which I mentioned before here), but haven't come across this picture before:

This is powerful stuff. The black (blue) line represents where our annual Co2e-emissions have to be under a Contraction and Convergence scenario, in order to achieve the UK's planned (?) cut of 60% (80%) by 2050. The red lines represent the Co2 emissions (with various radiative forcing effects calculated in) under current growth scenarios. As we can see, the government plans to have UK's economy completely zero-carbon by 2050. I'm not sure how they plan on doing this, but I'm sure Richard Branson has a masterplan.

Sometimes you come across something that just seems to be too good to be true. Here's one of those things:

A while ago, Virgin posted a poll on their website, asking their customers (and other visitors of their site), to show their support for an expansion of Heathrow. After all, even if Richard Branson has flowers coming out of all orifices with his great, world-saving biofuel planes, who could oppose something that will increase business, even if it ends up wrecking the environment.

Well, the results didn't quite come out the way they expected:

For some reason (I wonder why), the poll has disappeared from their website, and I have a feeling that Virgin won't stick to their idea to "send the results of this survey to the Department of Transport as part of its consultation"...

From Plane Stupid.