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Third runway a risk to families, say TV mothers
Jack Lefley, Evening Standard21.05.08
Three celebrity mothers has taken their protest over the expansion of Heathrow to Parliament.
Cold Feet star Fay Ripley, novelist and film-maker Rebecca Frayn and actress Rula Lenska joined more than 100 people to urge the Government to tackle climate change.
Children delivered a letter to Gordon Brown in Downing Street as part of yesterday's Climate Action Now protest which objects to a third Heathrow.
Mother-of-three Ms Frayn, daughter of playwright Michael Frayn, said: "We came here because climate change is happening faster than anyone predicted.
"We are a group of mothers and children who have come this evening to ask the Government to form a cross-party coalition to take climate action now. We are here because we are gravely concerned that our children's futures are in jeopardy and we think it's a matter of urgency and the clock is ticking."
Ms Lenska, 60, who has appeared in One Foot in the Grave and Footballers' Wives, added: "The Government can afford to go to war - why aren't they doing something positive against climate change."
But Matthew Knowles, of the Society of British Aerospace Companies, said the protest was misguided: "Campaigns such as this ignore the economic importance of flying, and the engineering progress being made by the aviation industry that has seen a 70 per cent cut in CO2 emissions over the past 50 years."
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Time for some facts in relation to Heathrow's third runway, I think. Fact One - the most recent NASA data shows that the earth has been cooling since 1998 - current climate change models struggle to account for this cooling - as a result climate change is still very much a theory. Fact two - China's 5 year airport plan ending 2010, will see 71 airport expansion projects, relocating 11 airports and the building of 49 new airports - according to Zhang Haidong, from General Administration of Civil Aviation of China. Conclusion - the construction of Heathrow's third runway will have no appreciable impact on climate change at all - but it will create thousands of new jobs and maintain London's business position in Europe. So, forget about the climate change red-herring and just get on and build the thing.
- Jeff Bronstein, Hobart, Australia
Epimethean, You are so very right! And as for the three celebrity women, they obviously don't have enough real work to do.
- Ukusa, Athens, Georgia, USA
As, 98% of the worlds CO2 is produced by volcanoes, the oceans and animals farting; us poor humans only produce 2%, so why pick on us? And as humans in the UK only produces 2% of the 2% (i.e. 0.04% of all CO2), what difference will it really make anyway?
- Epimethean, Surey
