Hot Air

While hardly the stuff of front-page headlines for Britain's leading liberal newspaper, the airline industry's twenty years of greenwashing may possibly be a cause of concern for a pessimistic nay-sayer here and there. A report by an optimisically-named climate charity assessed the targets which the industry deigns to set itself under the self-regulatory régime so rigorously imposed by the high and frequent fliers in Her Majesty's Government, and found that the industry had missed, massaged or ignored almost all of them, except for those that are "realistic" by the sensible and moderate definition of making little or no difference to the emergency. Fortunately, a spokesbeing for the Ministry of P&O Ferries was on hand to set the record straight: the report is so wilfully inaccurate as to verge upon the woke, since Her Majesty's Government is keeping significant taxes down by throwing taxpayers' money at technology that doesn't exist. Notably, we are spending a hundred and eighty million "to accelerate sustainable aviation fuel," which demonstrates an intriguing revision of those tedious mechanical rules whereby fuel is a means of accelerating something merely solid and tangible.