News Updates
January 20 2025
Last week, the West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin refused to withdraw her support for Leeds Bradford Airport expansion, despite currently consulting on ways to make West Yorkshire carbon net zero by 2038.
Nick Hodgkinson, who chairs the Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport (GALBA), asked her to rethink her support for expansion because of the harm that more flights would do to the climate. In response, the Mayor accepted there is “much still to do to decarbonise aviation” but also claimed that LBA expansion would “benefit local communities and the wider Yorkshire region”.
Today, the GALBA activist hit back at the Mayor’s claims, saying: “LBA expansion would mean 1,800,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere, polluting the climate we depend on. We’ve all seen the devastating consequences of climate change in the Los Angeles wildfires.”
“Unfortunately, clean flying is not going to happen at scale for decades. This is why the scientists on the Climate Change Committee have repeatedly said we should not allow airports to expand at this time. Why is the Mayor ignoring expert advice? It’s great that the airport’s bosses want its ground operations to be carbon net zero. But 95% of LBA’s climate pollution comes from planes using the airport, not the terminal building.”
He added: “Of course, the Mayor is right to care about the economy but polluting the climate even more is not going to help. A recent report by the Institute of Actuaries revealed the massive threat that climate change poses to our future prosperity. The report warned that without urgent action to cut greenhouse gases, the world’s economy will be cut in half from 2070. That’s within the lifetime of our children and grandchildren.”
“You can’t dismiss actuaries as ‘treehugging hippies’ – they are hard headed financial experts who literally do the Maths. We ignore them at our peril.”
Sandy Trust, author of the Institute of Actuaries report, has said: “You can’t have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live. Nature is our foundation, providing food, water and air, as well as the raw materials and energy that power our economy. Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity which we must take action to avoid.”
Furthermore, data released last year by the Office for National Statistics, and analysed by the New Economics Foundation, revealed that the link between business flying and economic growth has ‘decoupled’.
Flights for business purposes fell by 29% in 2023, compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019, with 3.9 million fewer trips made. UK businesses spent £2.9 billion less (-22%) on air travel in 2023 compared with 2019, despite real GDP growth of 1.8% over the same period.
Nick Hodgkinson said: “The claims made about aviation being good for the economy are hugely over-inflated. There’s been a big fall in business travel but LBA isn’t even a business airport. It’s a holiday airport, taking far more people – and their spending money – out of our region than into it.”
Leeds Bradford Airport is big enough already