The Airport Commission changed its arguments sharply between its 2013 interim report and the final document it put out yesterday.

In 2013, the central idea was that Heathrow should be expanded because of a rising need for business air travel.

The UK is missing out, the Commission suggested, because Heathrow did not have sufficient capacity to service desirable locations such as the largest Chinese cities.

But now everything has changed. The core argument is that without Heathrow expansion the UK’s leisure travellers would suffer. The Commission tells us that air travel makes people happy (I am only slightly simplifying the text). Therefore London needs more runways so that we can all fly more.

The purpose of this post is to point to what I think is a serious flaw in the analysis of the impact of air travel on happiness. I apologise for straying into econometrics but since the Commission’s report is likely to result in public policy decisions, I believe it is vital that poor and misleading analytic work is scrutinised.

In summary, I say that the Commission’s econometric work does not show that air travel makes people happy. Rather it demonstrates he wholly unsurprising conclusion that having holidays away from home is associated with a better state of mind and health.

There is no legitimate ground for the Davies Commission to justify Heathrow expansion on the basis of improved happiness as a result of more air travel. Reproduced here (see right) is a crucial chart that the Commission didn’t include in the interim report but does make an appearance in today’s document. It’s worth a close look.

With falling business travel, the business case evaporates

For the first time we see on Airport Commission headed paper an admission that business air travel is falling. It’s lower in terms of millions of passengers than it was in 2000 down from about 31 million trips to around 29 million. Any growth that is coming is from leisure travel, either for holidays or Visiting Friends and Relations (VFR).

This conclusion is as true for Heathrow as it is for other London and large regional airports. Heathrow is a leisure airport, partly for UK residents and partly for non-residents passing  through the airport on the way to another destination. 

Simply put, the notion that business needs more airport runways around London is nonsense. If there is any need for more airport capacity, it arises because of leisure travel.

And it is certainly worth pointing out again that many of the leisure travellers that pass through Heathrow are in transit from one non-UK destination to another. They are of no substantial value to the UK economy. Why the people of Richmond or Hounslow should suffer more noise and traffic disruption to allow more non-UK people to fly on holiday elsewhere is an issue that Howard Davies does not address.

By ceasing to stress the business need for Heathrow expansion, the Davies Commission seems to have finally accepted that the arguments for more runways can only be made by reference to the possibility of rising leisure travel, by UK residents and those from abroad.

So now it’s all about our ‘life satisfaction, health and happiness’

That’s why we see the following surprising statements early in the Commission’s final report (there’s nothing remotely like these comments in the interim version):

“Leisure flights have a high social value. Empirical analysis focused on passengers travelling on holiday or to visit friends and family has shown how the access to leisure travel affects mental health and wellbeing. The findings demonstrate these patterns of travel are associated with higher levels of life satisfactions, general and mental health, and happiness.”

And so it goes on. Heathrow expansion is justified not by the brutal logic of global economics but by an unusual interest in personal happiness. The Commission pulled in consultants PwC to provide the analysis that back up its assertions that air travel makes us feel good.

The consultants trawled through published academic research and analysed three large scale statistical studies of personal happiness. As it happens, the academic research is limited and not particularly helpful. PwC writes:

“Most of this literature is based on analysis of surveys of small groups of people with specific characteristics or small samples designed to be representative of large populations . None of the studies has conducted empirical analysis using datasets similar to those we have used in our empirical analysis.”

So they move on to their three big statistical studies. The first shows reasonably convincingly that having an annual holiday is associated with greater happiness. Nobody will be surprised. If you don’t have a holiday you are likely to have less control over your life and/or be the kind of person who gets little pleasure from leisure. These are clear predictors of unhappiness.

The second PwC study demonstrates, the consultants say,  that air travel is associated with a higher level of happiness. This is the conclusion that the Davies Commission leaps upon because it supports the case for more London runway capacity. (Here comes the only bit of econometrics in this article, sorry).

Holidays are associated with happiness. Who knew?

However, the statistical work that PwC did for the Commission didn’t split up the respondents into those that travelled on holiday by car, train or bus and those that flew. This second study is therefore picking up nothing more or less than the same phenomenon seen in the first study. If you travel abroad you are likely to be doing so because you are going on holiday.

In other words, the second report finds the same conclusion as the first; holidays are associated with happiness, not that people like air travel. There can be no conclusion that air travel causes a higher sense of life satisfaction.

The third statistical study confirms the first. People who are able to take holidays tend to be happier than those that do not. PWC concludes

“Our empirical analysis of the UK using three large datasets consistently finds that taking holidays and flights is associated with improvements in health and wellbeing as measured through various indicators of health and wellbeing.”

No it does not. PWCs’ empirical analysis shows that people who take holidays are happier. Nothing more and nothing less. For their money PWC should have done better econometrics. And the Davies committee shouldn’t have based their revision to the reason why London needs more airport capacity on such a weak piece of work.

More lame arguments, and one huge omission …

There’s one more comment to make. In addition to the new focus on leisure, the Airport Commission uses its final report to make the case for Heathrow based on the amount of freight coming in to the airport. This argument is almost shockingly lame.

The reason Heathrow takes in more freight tonnage than elsewhere is simply that it has far more inbound passenger flights. The freight that arrives in the airport doesn’t come in cargo aircraft but in the holds of long distance passenger flights. And since Heathrow has almost seven times as many long distance passenger flights as Gatwick it is utterly obvious why it brings in more freight.

The truth remains that London doesn’t need more runway capacity and that the pressure for Heathrow expansion is entirely driven by the understandable desire of the owners of the airport to make more money by running more services. Nothing more and nothing less.

If the UK thinks it can meet its carbon budgets for 2050 by expanding the number of airport runways, delusions have set in very deep. Today’s air travel CO₂ emissions of around 40 million tonnes a year will use up almost all the UK’s allowance by mid-century.

We cannot meet our carbon budgets by continued encouragement of aviation.

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change and valued contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary.

This article was originally published on Carbon Commentary.

On 27 February, Indra Pelani, a young farmer and environmental defender from Indonesia was brutally murdered by the security force of a subsidiary of Asia Pulp and Paper, an Indonesian company with a long history of conflict in the region.

Indra is not a lone victim of such corporate abuse. In 2014, more than 116 environmental and land defenders were killed worldwide, according to the international NGO Global Witness.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg; there are thousands of victims of human rights abuses that never get to tell their story, and some of the biggest companies in the world are implicated in these abuses. Yet those responsible are rarely held accountable.

But in July 2015, after decades of struggle by communities across the world, the idea that corporations should be held legally liable and criminally responsible for their crimes, no matter where they may occur, is finally being considered by the United Nations.

From 6-10 July a historic UN meeting will take place, beginning the process of establishing new and binding rules on transnational corporations and other business enterprises, and bringing justice to thousands of victims.

It will be the first session of the new Inter Governmental Working Group, where ambassadors from all UN member countries will decide the scope, content and form of this new Human Rights Treaty.

The Treaty has the support of more than 800 organisations, the UN Human Rights Council, the Vatican and many diverse governments including those of South Africa, Indonesia, India, China and Ecuador.

Justice is needed

Environmental activists and the communities we work with in the global South often face the threat of injury and death just for standing up for their rights. A new case of corporate violence against environmental rights defenders is reported to Friends of the Earth International on average once a week.

The Niger Delta is a prime example of the massive social and environmental impacts arising from corporate impunity. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of Ogoni leader Ken Saro Wiwa in prison, for resisting oil extraction by Shell. French petrol company Total continues to use the damaging practice of gas flaring to this day, even though this practice has been officially illegal in Nigeria since 1984.

Since 2010, Wilmar International has grabbed tens of thousands of hectares of Nigerian land for palm oil plantations, destroying livelihoods and dispossessing local communities.

Currently many of these corporate crimes go unpunished due to the corruption of local legal systems and the fact that many corporations are richer and more powerful than the states that seek to regulate them. Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities (including nation states), 37 are corporations.

Traditionally, international law focuses on the role and responsibilities of states, rather than corporations. Human rights abuses arising from the cross-border activities of corporations is the largest gap in international law. In our globalised world, companies operate between different national jurisdictions and are often able to take advantage of this situation to escape accountability.

The new Human Rights Treaty will seek to address these gaps in international law, in order to bring justice to victims like those in the Niger Delta.

The forces for and against

The strongest opponents of a binding Human Rights Treaty have been big business, the United States administration and European governments, which have threatened to boycott the process altogether.

The US ambassador stated that “we hold deep concern” and that the Treaty would “only be binding on the states that became party to it.” Business lobby groups have argued that a treaty will be too complex and lengthy, and is generally not necessary because, they argue, companies take their Corporate Social Responsibilities very seriously today. The evidence, however, indicates otherwise.

Similar to the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, the process will no doubt take years to finalise and ratify. Yet while setting up a Treaty would take time, it would also have the power to change millions of lives and set new global norms in the longer-term.

The new Human Rights Treaty will build on other processes like the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, but will move beyond their voluntary character and provide an essential enforcement mechanism, amongst other major steps forward.

While some European countries are doing everything in their power to block progress on this treaty, others, who view themselves as the founders of modern human rights, are starting to engage in the process.

In March this year, for example, the French Parliament passed a national law that would hold French corporations with more than 5,000 employees responsible for human rights abuses they commit anywhere in the world.

Special rights for corporations

At the other end of the spectrum, corporate rights are very well protected internationally, through various binding international agreements such as free trade and investment agreements, and especially through the investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in those treaties.

ISDS enables foreign corporations to sue governments for billions of dollars in private and often secret tribunals, whenever they feel that their profits are negatively affected by new laws or changes in policy.

For example, in El Salvador Australian-Canadian gold mining company Pacific Rim, accused of human rights abuses, used ISDS to sue the government for US$301 million because the president decided to stop issuing mining permits after water supplies were polluted. During protests against the mine several environmental activists were murdered and to this day families of the victims are still demanding justice.

While companies have the ‘right’ to defend their profits regardless of the circumstances, no parallel mechanisms currently exist at the international level to deal with their human rights violations or to ensure access to justice for the victims of their activities.

We need rights for people and rules for business, and this first meeting of the Inter Governmental Working Group at the UN will be a key step forward in that process. We will closely observe these talks and will not shy away from exposing the opponents of a binding Human Rights Treaty.

Sam Cossar-Gilbert is Economic Justice / Resisting Neoliberalism Coordinator at Friends of the Earth International. He tweets @samcossar.

June 2015, the Israeli army displaced hundreds of Palestinians from their homes in the Jordan Valley, forcing them for from their homes and lands over seven days in which military exercises were held in the area.

During the military exercises grazing lands essential to the survival of the pastoralist communites have been set on fire and water tanks have been pierced by bullets.

And the Israeli military, in testimony given to the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, has been clear that the exercises are specifically intended to destroy ‘illegal’ buildings and persuade residents to abandon the affected areas.

As Colonel Einav Shalev, operations officer of Central Command, recently told the Judea and Samaria subcommittee of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee convened to discuss “Illegal Palestinian construction in Area C” of the West Bank:

“I think that the movement of armored vehicles, other vehicles and more in this region and the thousands of soldiers marching clears the way. When the battalions march, people move aside. In places where we significantly reduced the amount of training, ‘warts’ have grown.” By ‘warts’, he refers to Palestinian communities and their buildings.