Two audacious and well executed climate actions have deservedly grabbed headlines this week - Plane Stupid's 'No third runway' banner drop on the House of Commons yesterday perfectly complimenting our own Heathrow Airport plane protest on Monday. Both sets of activists involved spoke eloquently to the media about why they were there: to expose the government's 'public consultation' as a sham, and to remind us all that climate change is the greatest threat that we face, and we have little time to start getting serious about it.
It's a message the world is increasingly ready to hear. At one point yesterday, Plane Stupid's action was the top global story on Google News. But back here, most of the usual media supects were interested in only one narrow aspect of the story: security. How did they get in to two of our most well-guarded public buildings? What if they had been terrorists? How could this have been allowed to happen?
The point is that these actions were taken precisely because our security is threatened; it's not just the security of a few airline passengers or politicians that's at stake, but the long term future of the planet and its inhabitants. Climate change is already killing at least 150,000 people every year, according to World Health Organisation figures, and this is set to double over the next two decades. The 1990s were the hottest decade on record so far, and the naughties are already on track to overtake them.
Catastrophic climate change will undermine everone's security. As sea-levels rise and the amount of land avilable for farming decreases, millions of people will be made homeless, refugees will flood into the remaining habitable areas and chaos will almost certainly ensue. This has to be the greatest threat we face - the challenge is to manage our collective behaviour to minimise the chances of it happening.
So which is the real security threat? The holes uncovered by Greenpeace at Heathrow and Plane Stupid at Parliament, or the great yawning gap those actions exposed in Gordon Brown's climate change policies? The government seems happy to talk a good game on climate change but not when it comes to actually doing anything about it. And they seem much happier deflecting attention away from this failure by changing the subject - talking about security breaches rather than having to answer for their lack of action on the defining issue of the day. Let's remember why the activists felt compelled to do what they did - there is a massive concensus among scientists that climate change is real and that we only have a short time to counteract its effects.
Aviation is the fastest growing sources of UK carbon emissions. If it's allowed to expand as predicted, then that by itself will cause us to miss our emission reduction targets. This can't be allowed to happen - we have to make a start at safeguarding our long-term future by acting now to stop this misguided airport expansion programme.
