cheap flights

An interesting (if not actually entertaining) article by Mark Lynas over on his blog today (and in the new edition of New Statesman, too). Lynas calls for the government to turn its attention to environmental matters now, and if they've any sense they'll follow his advice.

Lynas writes:

"'The environment' is still seen as a soft-focus poor relation to the real hard-politics issues such as health, the economy, asylum-seekers, and so on. Throughout the election, it was the issue that dared not speak its name. The problem was not that it was too controversial: on the contrary, it wasn't controversial enough. Green issues are still so unimportant electorally that, last November, Labour admitted quite freely that it would not meet its own climate-change targets. Unlike Iraq, the environment is not even worth lying about.

Our political system is gripped from top to bottom by a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance, where politicians openly acknowledge that environmental issues are the most important ever to face humankind, and yet even as they utter these words, business as usual hums on in the background."

Reading the article in full has spoiled my day somewhat. I've been looking at summer holidays and marvelling over the cheap flights. Cheap, yes. Impossibly damaging, er, also yes. One of those situations where I won't even pretend my moral side will win out, but that's a shame.