Travelling Light

While roads melt, farms dry up and blow away, and the little people receive patronising little lectures on fighting the climate crisis by putting a pond in the back garden, Britain's airlines have been doing their bit by ensuring that only a few thousand among their annual millions of carbon-spewing passenger flights take place without any passengers. Five thousand empty flights, half within the UK, have occurred in the past three years; and a further thirty-five thousand commercial flights occurred with less than a tenth of the places filled, and fifty thousand with less than half. The practice of transporting non-existent passengers, even in numbers barely large enough to elect a British prime minister, is environmentally damaging to such an extent that even the Government has described it as such; and plans are allegedly in hand, if nobody has yet torn them up, to listen to excuses more efficiently and to monitor the process, though inevitably not to curtail it.