C02 emissions were not cut as a result of this action! All flights were merely delayed.

Not taking away from a really effective action, but writing reports with misleading titles like this one does the issue and the campaign behind the action no favours at-all.

I wrote the title and agree it may be not 100% accurate as emissions are a lot more complicated than simply whether flights were grounded or generating capacity switched off. However, you are wrong to say it does the campaign no favors to have that title here as that is the exact claim they are making themselves in their press release and media statements. In fact when I spoke to one of them about the feature it was the point they most wanted covered.

Now to your claim that flights were not cancelled but merely delayed - that's just plain wrong. Many many more flights were delayed but others were completely cancelled. You can't just postpone a flight and slot it in somewhere else during the day when the backlog is so great - those flights were cancelled and never flew.

However, the people that wanted to fly, many if not most of them would have got seats on later flights or rescheduled another time, so it's certainly not a simple calculation to say how much CO2 emissions were saved. Those people all travelled to Standsted somehow, wasted energy if it were a wasted trip. And the planes that were due to land at Standsted all had to land somewhere, either being diverted somewhere else where transport would have to have been laid on for the diverted passengers, or circling Stansted waiting for the opportunity to land. So obviously the action would have generated extra CO2 emissions which would offset to some degree those that were saved.

The same may be true of the action at Kingsnorth which shut down one of the four generating turbines for four hours, taking almost 500megawatts or over 1.5% of UK supply at the time. However, taking offline generating capacity doesn't necessarily mean any CO2 emissions were saved.

Dunno whether you guys know, but the action the other night made national news all the way over in New Zealand. So much more effective than a crappy petition or the like. Keep it up.

I stand corrected.

It's about 40 tonnes average per flight according to the Plane Stupid website so assuming that its something like 1,500 tonnes of CO2 not emitted due to cancelled flights (offset by some getting diverted or circling longer) then that one four hour action did the same as getting 1,000 americans to go vegetarian for one year. Not bad!

 http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/12/04/world/04meat.web.html

 http://geosci.uchicago.ed u/~gidon/papers/nutri/nut riEI.pdf

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation. Marks & Spencer, for example, did a study of their supply chain’s CO2e footprint and found that meat production was by far the biggest culprit, way outstripping their air miles.

Meat consumption is rising around the world, especially in developing countries and probably outstrips the predicted increase in air travel. People eat everyday (or try to), even when during recession, so getting people to change their diet would have real long term benefits towards cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Few people fly much at all, but when they do it is one single thing that knocks up their contribution to emission more than any other single avoidable act. Therefore it also seems to make sense to encourage people not to fly.