The government is bungling the Omicron disaster – just like the climate crisis

How the government has mismanaged the Omicron disaster has chilling parallels to how it is mismanaging the far more dangerous climate catastrophe. Earlier this year, as the lifesaving Covid vaccine programme was rolled out, the government knew two crucial facts that would ensure that its continued protection of our economy and population.

The first was that unless the entire global population was immunised as fast as possible, vaccine-immune variants could emerge and threaten Britain again. And the second was that if such a vaccine-immune variant emerged, it would infect Britain’s vaccinated bubble via international flights if they were not suspended.

Boris Johnson, as chair of the G7, was in a position to coordinate an international task force to help vaccinate poorer countries as fast as possible. But our prime clown failed to do so.

The current trajectory is that the vaccination of poorer countries will not be completed until 2024. This means even more dangerous and infectious variants may continue to emerge.

Having failed to shut the airports to protect us from the first wave of the virus, the government belatedly introduced a traffic light system for aviation corridors. But in a disastrous move weeks ago, transport secretary Grant Shapps removed South Africa from the red list which required travellers from the country to quarantine for ten days.

Just weeks later, after fully reopening the skies to South Africa, Omicron was flown into the UK via one or more passengers, devastating our economy yet again.

Shapps is an avowed aviation enthusiast. He has his own private £100,000 Saratoga Piper plane, which he flies as a hobby. A single 460l tank emits an eye-watering 1.16 tonnes of carbon, which is the equivalent of all the electricity carbon emissions of an average UK home for 1.5 years.

Even as the UK hosted the failed Cop26 climate summit, Shapps was wittering about how we should not feel guilty for flying. But the facts contradict him.

A family of four flying to Disney World from the UK would emit 10 tonnes of carbon or 12.5 years of household electricity emissions. Their flights to New Zealand would emit an unconscionable 34-year equivalent of household electricity emissions.

Shapps dismissed the Climate Assembly’s call for a frequent flyer tax. Instead, the government cut aviation duty on short-haul flights and poured billions into bailing out the airline industry during lockdown. The government repeatedly refuses to take the necessary climate actions to protect us.

Instead, the government says it will act by promoting technologies that do not yet exist and are not predicted to be commercialised until the mid-2030s at the earliest. This is far too late to contribute to the necessary 100 per cent cuts needed by 2030 at the latest. Shapps’s press release last week proclaiming a “net zero, guilt-free long-haul hydrogen plane” was a classic example of this tactic.

When you drill down into the detail, you realise it is just another dead cat thrown onto the table to distract us from the refusal to act on aviation emissions. Let us be clear, there was no such emission-free plane being launched. Rather, Shapps was announcing that a firm the government had subsidised had identified the technological challenges to be overcome to build such a plane.

If these technological challenges are successfully overcome, it would likely be the mid-2030s before we would be able to fly in such hydrogen planes. And it would still not be the zero-emission plane they claim because potentially less than 50 per cent of aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions come from CO2. Water vapour emissions and the cirrus cloud contrails they help create are another significant part of global warming caused by aviation. The problem with hydrogen planes is that they emit 2.6 times more water vapour than kerosene.

When we asked the department what would the impact of such a large increase in water vapour emissions be on aviation greenhouse gases, they were unable to answer. They were likewise unable to answer how many times the transport secretary had flown in his hobby plane over the last year, citing that this was private information.

Devoid of shame over the devastating disruption caused by removing the red list status from South Africa in October, Shapps chillingly boasted on Wednesday about another group of Insulate Britain climate protectors that were jailed without a jury trial from the injunction barring all protests on main roads.

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Heartwarmingly, his tweet was deluged with criticism of his authoritarian crackdown on peaceful protestors, calling for a reversal of his government’s decision to decimate the home insulation programme, which was tackling the thousands of pensioners dying every year in cold, uninsulated British homes.

It is not the climate protectors who should be in front of the High Court, but ministers like Shapps, Priti Patel and Johnson who insist on protecting the “freedom” to infect and pollute the rest of us by the tiny 4 per cent of the global population who fly abroad each year.

The government is failing to stop climate genocide and instead are enacting authoritarian laws undermining democracy snd peaceful protest. No wonder they want to escape accountability, not only from the UK Supreme Court but now the European Court of Human Rights. They must be stopped.