Prepared
by members of the Green Party Tranport Working Group, April 2001.
The Green Party of England and
Wales welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Government’s consultation
document on air transport policy (see http://www.aviation.detr.gov.uk/consult/future/index.htm).
We particularly welcome both the objective set out in its first paragraph to
take a truly long-term view by looking 30 years ahead, and also the invitation
in ch1para4 to ‘comment on any aspect of aviation which you consider to be
material to future policy’
The consultation paper poses a
number of open-ended questions, that do a reasonable but far from perfect job
of identifying the key issues. In particular, the absolutely critical issue of
petroleum depletion is ignored - this will become a dominant factor over the
30-year timeframe that is being considered. We address this issue under the
heading of ’Main Questions -(a)’
We have copied the full list of
questions out from most of the sections of the consultation paper for ease of
reference; though we do not comment on all the sections or all the questions in
every section.
To read the paper online, left
click here, to download it (in pdf format), right click here.
After consultation with the working
group, it was agreed that Caroline Lucas MEP would submit a separate response
to the Government's paper, from her different perspective of recently leading
the European Parliament's review of EU Aviation Strategy. To read/download it
left/right click here.
The two papers are intended to be
complementary: