On the Ground: Planes, Bristol and the teachers from Canada

When Stephen Clarke, a prominent local councillor and leading climate activist in Bristol, called the expansion of Bristol Airport the biggest carbon decision for a generation, he knew the environmental stakes were high. Then he found out who actually owned it.

In this episode of On the Ground, host Laura Cole reveals a story of a massive national oversight. It’s the story of a local planning battle over an airport that escalated into a national problem we are still struggling to resolve – who is counting aviation emissions? And who is watching a wave of airport expansion across the country? 

She's joined by Clarke and members of the Bristol Airport Action Network (BAAN). 

Read more about the UK's push for airport expansion and 

Follow host Laura Cole on LinkedIn.

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Transcript

Laura Cole 0:01

This is the story of a national oversight. It's the story of a local planning battle over an airport that escalated into a countrywide problem we're still struggling to resolve. Who is counting aviation emissions? And who's keeping track of a wave of expansions of the UK's airports?

Stephen Clark 0:18

The decision on Bristol Airport was made without the carbon emissions ever being considered. Nobody was allowed to take them into account. And that's ridiculous.

Laura Cole 0:29

It's also the story of a plucky group of individuals who took their local climate into their own hands. A group of Somerset locals who wanted to take on international corporate heavyweights and hold the powers of the state to account. Literally.

Stephen Clark 0:41

Many of those problems didn't actually become apparent until the Bristol Inquiry.

Laura Cole 0:46

Along the way, it showed the peculiar quirks of modern global investment and the unlikeliest alliance between investment benefactors and the little guys. I would say that it is a very unusual thing to see. But more on that soon. This is On the Ground by Geographical, where we tell rooted stories with outsized impact. And this month's issue is Bristol Airport and a simple expansion plan that was proposed in 2018. It's a tale that starts in rural town halls, battles a 10-week inquiry, and winds up in the highest courts of state power, all to ask who's flying the plane on airport expansion. This episode is going to feature lots of recordings from that inquiry, which I'll flag as we go along. Now to Bristol, or more precisely, the northern slopes of the Mendip Hills. It's a single runway, so planes coordinate takeoffs and landings within three to four minutes of each other. It's a fairly rural area in the county of North Somerset. From Bristol City, you have to get here by road, 30 minutes by private car or public bus. Standing on the edge of Felton Common, which ends suddenly in this ragged hedgerow 50 metres from the runway, it's pretty impressive to have these enormous crafts come into land. The airport itself has that kind of necessary liminal zone feeling. It's the sandwich bread on either side of a holiday abroad, and possibly the closest thing most of us will ever experience to space travel. For those living the Mendip Hills, Bristol City, or Western Supermare, it's a constant presence. In numbers, the expansion plan would mean an extra 23,600 flights and an additional 2 million passengers a year. Bristol Airport Limited, the company that run the airport, have often said that people don't fly because there are airports.

Michael Humphreys 2:30

Rather, there are airports because people want to fly.

Laura Cole 2:34

That's the voice of Michael Humphreys. He's the lawyer for Bristol Airport Limited, speaking at the inquiry.

Michael Humphreys 2:40

Is seeking to expand Bristol Airport to accommodate the demand to fly from quite literally millions of people.

Stephen Clark 2:47

It was a mega carbon project that was going to make a real difference.

Laura Cole 2:51

The last voice is Stephen Clark, corporate nuisance or climate hero, depending on who you ask. He is the key actor in the planning inquiry. And his main concern was that the flights represent an additional one million tonnes of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, which he said would overwhelm the emissions budget of the region. I went to speak with him in the city of Bristol because I wanted to know what was his end goal here.

Stephen Clark 3:11

Yeah, I'm Steve Clark, Bristol Airport Action Network, which is an organisation looking from a resident's point of view at the expansions, the various expansions of Bristol Airport. We've always said really, really clearly we're not against people taking one or two flights a year for their summer holidays or whatever. That's not what we're about.

Laura Cole 3:30

Stephen said this is the biggest decision for infrastructure and carbon that Bristol would make in a generation. Just to give you an example.

Stephen Clark 3:36

In Bristol, all of the road transport that's all of it, the buses, cars, lorries, everything, emits half a million tons of carbon a year. The airport expansion, so just that expansion, emits a million tons a year. So that gives you an idea of the sense of scale.

Laura Cole 3:54

His concerns about the airport's expansion started while he was finishing off work as a Green Councillor for Bristol South. Once he started digging, he was really surprised to find out who the owners were.

Stephen Clark 4:04

And we were pretty surprised to see that Ontario Teachers' um pension plan were the controlling influence at the time. I thought that was weird.

Laura Cole 4:16

The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. Yeah. A pension plan for teachers in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Jenny Denny 4:22

Why would uh they also own four other airports in Europe? And why? You know, why would a pension plan have a portfolio of airports in Europe? It didn't make sense really.

Laura Cole 4:40

That's Jenny Denny, a school teacher. I went to interview her in Chumagna, a village right under the flight park.

Jenny Denny 4:45

But I felt that there was a lack of moral moral guidance there.

Laura Cole 4:54

Okay, so you might be wondering, how on earth did Canadian teachers end up owning Bristol Airport? Me too. Unlike UK state pensions, teachers has a special model which gives it the ability to invest in all kinds of holdings all over the world. The model has its roots in the philosophies of a man called Peter Drucker. Born in 1909, he's considered as a sort of godfather of management. He wrote a book called The Unseen Revolution, which he described as, and I quote, my least read and most prescient. I really like that quote. I read it as the cleanest humble brag. He predicted the large boomer generation would eventually become an outsized retiree generation that we see today, and that employees through their pension funds could become legal owners, suppliers of capital, and the controlling force in the capital market. It was in this image that the Canadian pension model was made. OTPP's overseas investing appetite dovetailed so neatly with the UK's privatization wave in the 1980s under Thatcher. In 86, the UK was the first country that privatised its airports, and the move allowed many of them to become commercial companies. It took a few years, but in 2001, OTPP bought their first stakes in Bristol and Birmingham airports. Maybe a bit ironically, Canada's own airports are owned by the state, though run by not-for-profit companies. So teachers doesn't have shares in any of them. They have had other stuff in the UK. They had shares in Northumbrian Water Company at one point. Burton's, the company that manufactures Jamie Dodgers, a small stake in SportsDirect, and also a sizeable stake in Camelot, which runs the National Lottery. Anyway, all of this to say that it's now possible for Canadian teachers to own airports that don't fly to Canada. And Bristol was a chunk of that. That the airport's owners were teachers like herself really stumped Jenny.

Jenny Denny 6:31

As a teacher, you inevitably you would say, no, this isn't right, you know, this isn't what we should be doing. We're facing massive climate change and we're now part of it. I think it it was the hypocrisy that got to me. But when I go and teach, but I'm teaching geography lessons, I'm teaching PSHG lessons, all of which are banging on about climate change. Children are constantly being told that climate change is their problem, and then when they have the opportunity to address that problem, say, oh well, actually, no, we're not going to now because we've got people with large amounts of money who are really just a little bit more influential than you.

Laura Cole 7:15

Some of the campaigners thought of trying to contact Canadian teachers themselves.

Stephen Clark 7:19

When we started to get in touch with Ontario MPs, which we did, there's about 120 MPs in Ontario. They basically ignored us. We were pretty careful not to play the um these people from abroad owning our stuff. That's not good. Yeah, we didn't get into it in that way. So we stuck to the you're a bunch of teachers and you're screwing up the carbon budget in the southwest. Do you know about this? If so, try and stop it. I'm sure you've all got LED lights and electric cars. Have a look where your pension fund comes from.

Laura Cole 7:56

They figured that the pension plan had headquarters in London, so they staged a protest outside the building.

Stephen Clark 8:01

Went in, rang the doorbell, got into the reception, left a letter for the MD, asked for the MD to come down and speak to us, which he refused. Everybody kicked us out of the building and pulled down the shutters.

Laura Cole 8:12

Meanwhile, important decisions needed to be made in the Southwest. In February 2020, North Somerset Council were getting ready for an important vote on the future of the airport. Over 11,000 comments were submitted by the public to the planning website. The vast majority, around 84%, were against the plans. But ultimately the decision of whether to reject or accept the application was down to the 25 North Somerset councillors.

Stephen Clark 8:35

We were hopeful, but we, you know, you never know going into something.

Laura Cole 8:38

Stephen was worried the arguments for jobs and tourism to the region would trump any argument about the emissions toll. More generally, he feared that people wouldn't see the wave of expansion projects on the horizon. The fact is, and I was a bit taken aback to understand this myself, the government has no comprehensive plan on how all of these airport expansions will work together from a climate point of view. If they even can work together from a climate point of view.

Stephen Clark 9:08

If you imagine a bucket with the here's our carbon budget, the airports are coming along and pouring in, they're saying, Well, our little bit doesn't make any difference to the bucket, or hardly any difference to the bucket, even he's throwing Gatwick. We'll pour a bit more in, of course, eventually you're gonna get to the top of the bucket, and it's gonna flow over.

Laura Cole 9:29

At the town hall in Western Supermare, the seat of the council, it was tense. In one of the pubs down the road, Priyanka Raval, a journalist at Bristol Cable, described the atmosphere as more like a football match than a local vote.

unknown 9:42

Councillor Treadway and Councillor Westwood. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, it was it was it was brilliant.

Laura Cole 9:54

The council rejects the airport claim. They cite that the airport expansion would not contribute to the transition to a low carbon future and would exacerbate climate change. This was against the country's Climate Change Act, and that the Council had declared itself a climate emergency in 2019. It seemed to be a decisive victory, and Bristol Airport expressed its regret not long after they appealed the decision. Success, right? Regents could vote out planning permissions that didn't stick to their climate plans. Unfortunately for Bann, no. This was the complaint that set off the enormous inquiry process against the decision of North Somerset Council. The results would set the stage for decisions like this all over the country. In July 2021, the inquiry descends on Western Supermare Town Hall. Protests reel on the steps outside, while indoors the party's legal representations shuffle papers ready to make their case to three planning inspectors appointed by the state. The scene is a first for Jenny, the teacher from True Magnet. She was really nervous.

Jenny Denny 10:50

It was quite a daunting environment. You were sat in the council chamber room, or a council chamber room, with about four or five people sat quite high up, and then all the councillors down the side. You know, it wasn't a sort of a friendly chat, that was for sure.

unknown 11:06

Next we have delightfully named Jenny Denny.

Laura Cole 11:10

I asked her about being sidelined as a NIMBY and if that affected her at all.

Jenny Denny 11:13

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean that that was what I lived with, because that came up on social media. Yes, absolutely. You put a huge amount of of yourself into trying to persuade somebody that what you see is valid. I'm addressing you today as a resident of Tumagna, as a teacher.

Laura Cole 11:35

In a past life, Stephen Clark was a lawyer. The thought of ten weeks arguing his case didn't phase him so much as the worry no one would recognise their appropriateness to be there, that they didn't really have any right or role to call out national oversights.

Stephen Clark 11:48

As you know, no VAT on kerosene. Why? When I fill up my car, I pay a third of it or whatever is VAT. Why? Where's the logic to that? And people don't know that, you see. MPs don't know it. I tell MPs that kind of stuff all the time. They say, really? Sorry, I'm getting emotional now.

Laura Cole 12:09

On the emissions front, he was concerned that they'd be told aviation emissions are a national responsibility.

Stephen Clark 12:15

I can see the logic for that. You can you can understand the logic for that. The trouble is that nobody at the national level ever did consider them.

Laura Cole 12:23

Aviation emissions are unusual in the decarbonising economy. While most sectors project to decrease their overall emissions, demand for flights is actually increasing. That increase, mixed with the technological difficulty to substitute fossil fuels with scalable alternatives, means flight emissions are actually projected to increase. The Climate Change Committee projects that the aviation sector will already be the largest polluter in the UK by 2040. At the time of the inquiry, international emissions, which make up 90% of flights, had only just been formally added to the carbon budget. The UK's allowance for emissions it works out in five-year chunks, 12 years in advance. That means they won't be included until the sixth carbon budget, which doesn't start until 2033. What's more is that there was no plan for how different expansions could work together, or if they could work together at all, without breaking those legal climate obligations.

Stephen Clark 13:13

I mean if Michael Gove had called it in and said, well, I've looked at all the airports expanding, I think it's quite reasonable for Bristol to expand. I wouldn't have liked it, but I could have understood the argument. But nobody got involved.

Laura Cole 13:27

Let's take a look at the legislation for a second. The UK's blueprint for expanding airports is the policy call to making best use of existing runways, the MBU for short, and the airport national policy statement, the ANPS, which is for bigger airports generally. Both were published in 2018, and this is a problem because a major update to the Climate Change Act came in 2019, which set in stone our higher ambition to be net zero emissions by mid-century compared to 1990. So the difference was initially it was a cut in 80% of emissions based on 1990 levels. Now with net zero it's 100%. Reuben Taylor, representing North Somerset Council, felt this meant the airport was being pushed forward with outdated and less ambitious goals. Here's him at the inquiry.

Reuben Taylor 14:15

Both of these policy documents were promulgated before the adoption by government of the sixth carbon budget, the net zero twenty fifty target, and before the decision to include international aviation within domestic targets.

Laura Cole 14:45

To this, Bristol Airport vehemently argued that the projected emissions increase would be a tiny fraction.

Reuben Taylor 14:51

Our contribution to that is a fraction um a fraction of a percent.

Laura Cole 14:59

The airport was keen to stress, and this is important, that this doesn't mean the aircraft emissions of carbon don't count at all. They weren't saying these emissions aren't there. They were just saying they're a really small amount compared to everything else going on in the country.

Reuben Taylor 15:13

BAOL's uh reliance on MBU is twofold. First, it provides in principle policy support for Bristol Airport making best use of its runway, subject to the resolution of environmental issues. And second, it identifies a distinction between issues that are within the remit of local policy and issues that are addressed by national policy.

Laura Cole 15:36

His key argument was this, and it'll be important later. He said it multiple times. Here's Estelle De Hahn's response at the inquiry. She's a lawyer for Client Earth who was representing Stephen Clark's campaign.

Estelle De Hahn 15:53

Such an approach transparently disregards the reality that the likelihood of attaining net zero by twenty fifty is directly influenced by local planning decision making. Any single development is always going to represent only a small fraction of national sectoral emissions.

Laura Cole 16:10

Her argument was essentially that all the individual developments would be straws to eventually break the camel's back. The camel being the legal obligation to be net zero by twenty fifty.

Estelle De Hahn 16:19

And if every emitter were permitted to rely on this argument, the significance of cumulative effects of carbon emissions would be entirely erased from planning decision making.

Laura Cole 16:27

She pointed to the several airports vying for expansion. There are plans in place for Heathrow and Gatwick, as well as regional airports Luton, Stansted, Leeds, Bradford, and Southampton. Here's Reuben Taylor, the representative for North Somerset Council again. He believed it possible the emissions question would eventually warrant an entire overview of all the airports to make sure they could do this without mucking up climate.

Reuben Taylor 16:47

The possibility that there will be insufficient carbon capacity to enable all these schemes to come forward cannot be ruled out. That means the need for a choice to be made by central government as to which schemes can come forward and which cannot.

Laura Cole 17:02

So the airport's lawyers fought really hard on this concept. Michael Humphreys called it a fallacy and one which would act as an effective moratorium on airport development. Here's his response at the inquiry.

Michael Humphreys 17:13

If the government considered it necessary to carry out an assessment of all airport development projects before any particular project could come forward, it would have said so. This reasoning would be applicable to all forms of development and result in a blanket ban on granting permission for any development that could have a positive carbon impact, however small, until central government has identified the trajectory to net zero for the whole economy. This is nonsense.

Laura Cole 17:44

Are you sensing the puzzle here? Planning decisions of these kinds of regional airport development falls to local planning authorities. That's why North Somerset had a say in the first place. However, under the Climate Change Act, the obligation is on the Secretary of State, and not local decision makers, to ensure that the carbon budget is met. Bristol Airport said many times that the merits of government policy are plainly not up for debate at this local planning inquiry. So effective limbo. Aviation emissions are growing, airports might be this glaring issue, and local decision makers don't have the authority to do anything about it. The argument kept circling back to that first question: whose job is it to account for aviation emissions and the toll of expansion plans elsewhere? And eventually to what happens if the answer to that question is no one?

Michael Humphreys 18:27

There have been some pretty direct attempts to attack the merits of government policy through the back door by challenging weight. Parties have sought to debate the UK's strategy for achieving its carbon budget and net zero target in 2050. The duty to ensure that the carbon budgets and targets are met lies with the Secretary of State. The claim that was made by Benn CC and others that somehow there's this policy vacuum, you know, but all these things are absolutely wrong. The government has set out uh very clearly what it um proposes to do.

Laura Cole 19:04

In all the chaos, something unusual happened. You please tell me if you can't hear me very well. It is a long way. That's the voice of Terry Burgess.

Terry Burgess 19:12

I'm actually a teacher in northwestern Ontario and Canada, and I'm halfway between Winnipeg and Toronto. And I actually own the airport. Perhaps you're surprised by that, but I own the airport completely. Uh, me and 331,000 other members of my pension plan. We know that the airport expansion is morally wrong. Local people don't want it from the news. Um, it seems from here that many of your neighbors over on the continent are at risk of flooding. Um Canada, we are at risk of burning. So um, unfortunately, a couple weeks ago, one of the towns in Canada set um a record for the highest temperature we've ever had in all of Canada. People think it's cold here. It was 49 decimal six degrees Celsius. And three days later, the whole town burned to the ground. The number of fires in Ontario right now is double the 10-year average. Her next task would be to pack a bag for a wildfire threat not far from her house. Back in the 70s, when I was first learning about climate change, we thought that this was a long way off. Uh, but it is here now. It's not something that's gonna happen in the future. It's not something that's happening to other people. It's happening to real people right now. As this is my pension money, it doesn't make this a good investment even for the owners of this airport. Um, so as extreme heat and floods and fires continue, governments are going to be forced to adopt new policies that are gonna curtail fossil fuel use. They're just going to have to, their citizens are going to demand it. So I'm just here today from Canada to let you know that the North Somerset Council and people of Southwest England that you're not alone in asking the managers of my pension fund to abandon this project that would expand the use of fossil fuels. It's certainly morally egregious and it's financially risky.

Laura Cole 21:04

Dr. Lewis Pennington, you're a research associate at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. You specialize in aviation and aviation policy. And have you seen a beneficiary of an airport call out an airport on its own expansion like this before? I feel like this is pretty unusual.

Lois Pennington 21:20

No, I would say that it uh is a very unusual thing to see that you would see the the beneficiary of a pension plan, so essentially an owner of the airport, campaigning themselves against its own growth. And I think what's really interesting is why this happened. So the opponents of the expansion, including the local council and climate groups, feeling like the planning system had failed them.

Laura Cole 21:43

For Stephen Clark, it was a funny experience to have a voice at the other end, especially after all of the effort for contact.

Stephen Clark 21:48

It was fantastic to have her at the inquiry, and it was a very emotional moment. Yeah, it was it was it was brilliant hearing her.

Laura Cole 21:54

Ultimately, the planning inspectors found Bristol Airport's argument persuasive that national emissions were an inappropriate. Matter for local authorities, and they ruled in favour of Bristol Airport's expansion. Bristol Airport Ltd were pleased. In a statement, the company said, the decision is excellent news for our region's economy. They didn't respond to our request for comment. In November 2022, the campaign took their challenge to the High Court. They appealed to the then Secretary of State for Leveling Using and Communities, Michael Gove, to claim that his planning inspectors did not take the government's own climate change net zero policies into consideration enough.

Stephen Clark 22:27

The decision on Bristol Airport was made without the carbon emissions ever being considered. Nobody was allowed to take them into account. And that's ridiculous.

Laura Cole 22:38

The outcome? I'll quote directly from the judge's ruling here. He said, it had to be assumed that the Secretary of State will comply with his legal duty under the Climate Change Act. Hopes dashed. It was going to be assumed that the Secretary of State will handle it. I should add here, at the time of the hearing, the UK was already not on track to meet its fourth and fifth carbon budgets. Stephen described this as invisible carbon slipping through fingers. I feel like it's watching us fail the Climate Change Act in real time and being told, don't worry, someone's coming. I asked if he could trust that someone would come along and take care of it.

Stephen Clark 23:10

How could I think that when in the case of Bristol, which is sort of proof of the pudding, central government completely ignored it? Literally refused to get involved in any way.

Laura Cole 23:21

Here's where it gets interesting. The judge, Justice Lane, bookended his ruling with an unusual message, one that wouldn't have gone unnoticed by airport owners. He said, climate change, with its consequences for human and other life on this planet, is generally regarded as a matter of very great importance. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021 was widely reported as being a code red for humanity, such as the present level of concern. So clearly the planning judges are seeing the disconnect here. This is unusual. It's like all they can do while ruling in favour of the development is say this is where the law goes. We agree that that's not covered here, that it should be covered. I wanted to speak to Dr. Lois Pennington again about how worried we should be about the airport expansions going through. Do you think we're in a busy moment for that expansion right now?

Lois Pennington 24:12

Yeah, you could definitely say we were in a busy moment. Across the UK, there are multiple expansion plans. So around five airports are currently looking to expand their capacity. And the government has broadly signalled its support. Just to put that in context, if we fully utilize all of these expansions, then by 2050 we would see an increase in passenger numbers of over 70% compared to what we had in 2018. And I think the reason why this is happening now in this moment is that the political context has slightly shifted. So a smaller, um a small but more vocal minority that generally opposes climate action has been gaining traction. And it's also really important to consider that we're in a cost of living crisis which consistently ranks high upon people's concerns and worries. And the argument that airport expansion can bring with it economic benefit has created political space for you know seeing as a solution, being seen as a solution to that problem. So yeah, it's definitely a busy moment, but it's not without its uh it's being contested as well.

Laura Cole 25:25

In October 2025, we saw a report come out by the Environmental Audit Committee. I wondered if you could just explain what that audit committee is within the Parliament.

Lois Pennington 25:36

So the Environmental Audit Committee is a select committee in government which is made up of um members from uh all the major parties, typically. And what they were trying to do with that report was to gather evidence on if airport expansion can be done within the UK's climate and nature target.

Laura Cole 25:57

I'm going to cut in here again to explain that this report is really the most significant development in the airport expansion dilemma. It's a big deal because it aimed to check whether the government can allow all of this expansion and still meet the environmental goals that it signed up for. The parliament even ran with the strapline airport expansion could put net zero in serious jeopardy. It even calls out specific expansion projects that are the large ones like Gatwick, Heathrow, and Luton. It says that they're being advanced with outdated policies, those MBU and ANPS policies we talked about earlier. And goes so far as to ask, I'm quoting here, where the decisions are being taken without proper scrutiny. Dr. Lois Pennington was part of the team of scientists that submitted to the report. Now that you've read what the MPs have come back with, what's your key takeaway?

Lois Pennington 26:43

Broadly, one of the major findings that they found was that they they could not see from the government a plan to fit any expansion into our climate targets, but they also could not find evidence that these economic benefits that have been talked about would definitely materialize with an expansion, which was a really important finding to flag, I think.

Laura Cole 27:07

To Stephen, I asked if the report felt like some kind of indication. Finally, MPs are seeing these legal oversights.

Stephen Clark 27:14

I put it down to us. Many of those problems didn't actually become apparent until the Bristol Inquiry.

Laura Cole 27:21

What the Bristol Inquiry also really put on the table was this idea that national aviation emissions are not being taken care of. I wanted to ask, where are we really with aviation emissions?

Lois Pennington 27:31

So aviation emissions are quite complicated. Domestic emissions are included in our carbon budget. So for flights that take off and land within the UK, that is included, but that's a very, very small percentage of our total emissions. International aviation and international flights are not yet included, but they will be from the sixth carbon budget period, which starts in 2033 and ends in 2037. And including international aviation will give a much more honest picture of the UK's carbon footprint because the UK is a major aviation market relative to its size. We're the third biggest aviation market in the world. And I saw a statistic yesterday that said that one in eight passengers on a flight in 2025 was British. So considering the size of the country that's significant, playing significantly outside of our size. But including them within our carbon budgets also is going to put serious pressure on our ability to meet them. So the technologies that we're relying on to decarbonize aviation, like alternative fuels or hydrogen, or even directly removing the carbon that is emitted from the air, are not scaling fast enough. We've seen that the UK is likely to miss its first ever target in terms of the target for the uptake of sustainable fuel, which matters because it shows that we're already not delivering on the early and like relatively modest targets that we had. And the government has made it very clear that demand management, so flying less, is just not politically on the table.

Laura Cole 29:08

There was another argument that the inquiry kept returning to about how it would be legally unprecedented to constrain an airport's development based on national decisions around carbon or economic growth. I wanted to know if you think that's going to be a thorny issue as we continue to see these airport expansion projects developing.

Lois Pennington 29:24

So I think it would be legally, well, it may be legally unprecedented to constrain airport development, but just because it is unprecedented does not mean that it is illegitimate. When you look at planning in general, there are already many aspects of the planning process that limit harmful development. So things that would be harmful to air quality, to noise, to safety. And so climate harm should really be treated in the same way. And I think that this argument also assumes that expansion of airports or expansion of whatever the infrastructure is in this case is framed as the default. Like the airport will grow and it is a choice to limit it, but in reality, it is a choice to expand high-carbon infrastructure as well. And different choices can be made.

Laura Cole 30:13

In the summer, OTPP sold Bristol Airport, along with its stakes in all five of its European airports. It was a really curious move. And Geographical contacted OTPP for a comment. I mainly wanted to know if this was part of their kind of environmental vision that they've talked about before. Or was it simply because of markets? They acknowledged my question. They declined, unfortunately.

Stephen Clark 30:36

They've divested of their airports. We say, in part because of our work. Who knows? The real reason.

Laura Cole 30:47

A company called Macquarie look to be the new owners of Bristol Airport. They're a multinational financial investment group, and you've probably heard of them before. They've previously attracted some public criticism for their management of Thames Water.

Stephen Clark 30:59

It's a bit from the frying pan into the fire with Macquarie. I'm not sure Macquarie even pretend to be green, actually.

Laura Cole 31:07

So expansion continues. Last year, Bristol Airport put in another bid for another expansion phase for 15 million passengers per annum by 2036. Given they still haven't met the capacity for their previous expansion, it's hard to not see this as a bit of a bid to outrace what might be some new policy on the horizon. This brings me to where are we now? Well, some new policy is on the way. There is an update of the airport national policy statement expected in the summer, which the government is working on right now. In January, the government did have a response to that EAC report to say it's committed to engaging the Climate Change Committee on how aviation expansion can be made consistent with our net zero framework as part of this review. I asked Dr. Pennington what she thought of the response and the direction in general.

Lois Pennington 31:51

Yeah, the government's response doesn't isn't it's not it's not surprising and it doesn't address any of the issues that have been raised. And the thing that happened in Bristol that I think has had a really important knock-on effect is the idea that local councils should not or cannot enforce climate limits within their planning. So it's taking power away from the local decision makers and and push the responsibility to a national level, but also without giving a clear forum for where we can discuss how we will keep our aviation emissions within our carbon budget.

Laura Cole 32:25

I mean, clearly the legal dilemma is not going to disappear anytime soon. If the efforts of ban are anything to go by, we might also expect that climate litigation cases are also going to be on the rise. In other words, more people like Stephen Clark taking decisions to the High Court and pointing out all of these holes in policy. I asked Stephen, if not for anything else, was maybe this whole process important or useful even for showing where there are these policy gaps or lacunas as he called them. He answered with his usual pretty cutting realism.

Stephen Clark 32:53

I mean that's a good question, really. I I you know It's a very expensive way to come up with a lacunae. It'd be much simpler if somebody sat down and put their put a cold flannel round their head and tried to work out the the interrelationship between them. So we were very frustrated by the inquiry because we there was an awful lot of effort in, there was a lot of evidence that showed that I say showed that we were right, and Bristol Airport shouldn't have been allowed to expand, but on every single point we put in, we were ignored. You've been listening to On the Ground by Geographical Magazine, written by me, Laura Cole, edited by Brian Cottum and Graham Cawley. If you'd like to get in touch with your comments, be it about airport expansion or the podcast in general, we'd love to hear from you.