Digging yourself into a hole

Well, the third runway at Heathrow has been stalled, not for the normal NIMBY reasons, but because our glorious tax conniving, EU lovin, environmental lunacising (is that a word? Well it is now and it's mine) got caught by the protesters breaching its own dogma on global warming climate change policy.

Guardian.

A high court judge today upheld the argument of a coalition of climate change activists that the government's support for a third runway at Heathrow needs to re-examined, particularly in respect to climate change policy.
Protesters and the Department of Transport emerged from the Royal Courts of Justice this morning claiming victory in the complex legal battle.
A coalition of local councils, green groups and residents had argued that the expansion decision was at odds with the UK's overall climate change targets in an alliance including six local authorities, Greenpeace and the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).
In a joint statement, the group said the government's Heathrow policy was now "in tatters" after Lord Justice Carnwath ruled the decision to give the third runway the green light was "untenable".
The statement added: "If the government wants to pursue its plans for Heathrow expansion it must now go back to square one and reconsider the entire case for the runway."

Now you can argue the merits of whether or not such an expansion makes economic sense (it does, though that's not necessarily a reason to do it) and you can point to other areas instead of Heathrow that could be expanded instead (Stanstead, Gatwick) or even build a brand new one (Kent estuary) You can make a case for all those sites to be expanded or built, though non of the option will be popular with the locals. However it did amuse me that the locals (and associated ecoloons) were able to hoist the government on its environmental petard because they hadn't thought through to the eventual consequences of their sham green tax raising policies. Now if the government had taken a sensible attitude towards climate change this wouldn't have happened, but because they were determined to ride its coat tails into tax raising heaven they had to devise certain policies to prevent carbon emissions so that they could charge us more to have costly unworkable replacements plus tax more for those methods that did produce excessive amounts (excessive from their point of view) It also meant that any attempt to build more runways would fall foul of such legislation and it did.

This for all it's amusing is where Labour have again saddled the UK with laws and ordinances that are not in our interests nor helpful in boosting the economy. Yes the climate changes, yes we should reduce pollution, no we are not to blame for the climate changing, the big yellow ball in the sky is responsible for that.