Nachdem sich Umweltstaatssekretär Ian Pearson noch vor wenigen Tagen öffentlich Gedanken über die Luftfahrtindustrie gemacht hatte (Zitat: “Ryanair are not just the unacceptable face of capitalism, they are the irresponsible face of capitalism”), hat sich heute nun Mr Pearsons Chef zu Wort gemeldet. Frisch aus dem Winterurlaub in Miami zurückgekehrt, erklärte Tony Blair dem Sender “Sky News”, er würde auch in Zukunft nicht auf Langstreckenflüge in den Urlaub verzichten. Er sagte wörtlich:

I personally think these things are a bit impractical actually to expect people to do that. I think that what we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less.

How - for example - in the new frames for the aircraft, they are far more energy efficient.

You know, I’m still waiting for the first politician who’s actually running for office who’s going to come out and say it (that people should not fly) - and they’re not.

It’s like telling people you shouldn’t drive anywhere.

Britain is 2% of the world’s emissions. We shut down all of Britain’s emissions tomorrow - the growth in China will make up the difference within two years.

So we’ve got to be realistic about how much obligation we’ve got to put on ourselves.

The danger, for example, if you say to people ‘Right, in Britain, you know, you’re not going to have any more cheap air travel’, everybody else is going to be having it.

So you’ve got to do this together and you’ve got to do it in a way that doesn’t end up actually putting people off the green agenda by saying you must not have a good time anymore and can’t consume.

Das klingt eigentlich alles ganz vernünftig. Ob Mr Pearson seinen Chef inzwischen als “the irresponsible face of government” bezeichnet hat, ist nicht bekannt.