Look at what they do, not what they say: Cornwall Council and the climate emergency

Cornwall Council planning for more fossil fuelled growth

Yesterday Rishi Sunak delivered an obvious snub to Boris Johnson’s aim of forging a global deal on the climate crisis at the forthcoming COP26 meeting.  He did this by halving the tax on domestic flights while only increasing the duty on long-haul flights of over 5,550 miles by a paltry 4.3%, probably less than next year’s rate of inflation. Whether deliberate or not, this further undermined any tatters of moral credibility left clinging precariously to the UK Government.

However, this news was no doubt met with wild celebrations in certain quarters of Cornwall Council. By an amazing coincidence the Council yesterday responded to a Freedom of Information request I had made asking for an update on the number of flights taken by officers on council business. The original piece from 2019 can be found here, while the updated figures are as follows.

Year	Domestic flights	Overseas flights
2017-18	655	6
2018-19	1056	22
2019-20	633	23
2020-21	23	1

The key thing to remember is that Cornwall Council declared a ‘climate emergency’ in January 2019. Nonetheless, every single working day in the financial year from March 2019 to March 2020 saw an average of 2.4 council officers still hopping onto a plane to somewhere else in the UK. Meanwhile, the number of overseas flights actually increased in that year. Even in 2020-21, when it was difficult to fly anywhere, council officers managed some domestic flights.

This raises three questions.

First, why did councillors allow their frequent flyers to make their declaration of a climate emergency look foolish? Why didn’t they act to stop all internal flights where a rail journey was an alternative? As very few of those domestic flights were presumably to Belfast, that would be the vast majority. What is it about the word ‘emergency’ that Cornwall’s councillors and officers don’t grasp?

Second, how can the Council call on residents to reduce our carbon footprint when it allows its officers to act with such mind-boggling hypocrisy?

Third, why does it take an FOI request to obtain this information?

Fact: an air trip from Newquay to Heathrow creates per capita seven times the carbon emissions of a train journey and that doesn’t include the CO2 costs of getting to and from the airport.