Sir Jonathon, who is due to retire from his post as advisor today, spoke out in an interview with The Independent. He particularly criticised the Prime Minister for backing controversial proposals for a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport, condeming the decision as “ludicrous”.

He told The Independent that the PM has “some incredibly fixed ideas about some of these things. He genuinely feels that a successful competitive economy of the future has to be growing its aviation business in order to make UK PLC  more productive, and so on. And you can put the evidence about minimal economic benefit of a third runway in front of him – it won’t go through the Brown brain”.

Sir Jonathon told the paper that the Prime Minister has started to see the importance of climate change over the past 18 months, but that “environment has never been Gordon Brown’s strong suit”.

Dr. Peter Holden, from the British Medical Association, told The Times that it would be “a total and utter waste of time” for doctors to issue medical notes in such cases.

According to The Guardian, Mr Milliband “hinted that airlines would face less testing targets, with other sectors forced to find even more stringent cuts to make up the difference”.  Mr Milliband told The Guardian that he does not “want to have a situation where only rich people can afford to fly”.

The airport has two runways and one terminal, although a second terminal is currently under construction. Both domestic and international flights operate from Dublin Airport, with the most popular destination being London. Most of the check-in desks are on the first floor of the terminal, although the check-in desks for Aer Lingus flights to the UK and Germany are on a different level.

You’ll find a number of different services within the airport terminal, including ATMs, Bureau de Change outlets, Internet kiosks, a pharmacy, a business lounge and an E-toll kiosk (from which you can buy a tag enabling you to use the electronic tolling lanes on the M50 motorway in Dublin). After you have checked in and passed through the airport security area, you can also explore the airport’s shopping area, “The Street”, where you’ll find more than 25 shops, bars, cafes and restaurants.

There are many bus and coach operators which serve Dublin Airport, and you’ll find a taxi rank outside of the airport as well. However, there is currently no rail link to the airport. There are also a number of car hire firms with rental offices at the airport, and if you book your hire car online before you travel, you can simply pick it up at the airport when you arrive there.

Both domestic and international flights arrive at and depart from Nice Airport, which has two terminals. You can check which terminal you need by looking at the airlines list on the airport’s website. The terminals open at 4 a.m. each day and close half an hour after the final flight has arrived.

Each terminal has an information desk, as well as shops, a restaurant and a service centre. There are several internet areas within the terminals andthe airport has its own business centre. Terminal 1 also has play areas for children.

There are bus services from the airport to a number of destinations, including Cannes, Monte Carlo and Saint Tropez, and the town’s main train station, Nice St. Augustin,  is about 15 minutes’ walk from Terminal 1. There are also taxi ranks outside of both terminals.

One of the easiest methods of getting to and from Nice Airport, however, is by hire car. If you book your rental car online, you can pick it up when you land, and simply drop it off at the Nice Airport car hire office before returning home.

Sometimes flying is the only viable way to get to a destination and, as mentioned in the earlier post, simply avoiding such places could be counter-productive, as some poorer communities rely on money from tourism. So, when we need to travel by air, is carbon offsetting a good solution?

There are a number of websites that you can use in order to offset carbon emissions.  You can use these sites to calculate the carbon emissions that you will be responsible for as a result of a flight (or in respect of driving your car or the electricity that you use in your home each year), and then pay to offset these emissions. The money that you pay is then used to fund projects such as producing renewable energy, or providing people in Asia or Africa with energy-efficient cooking appliances.

The Government accepts that carbon offsetting can be valuable but the Directgov website states that “offsetting should be a final choice if air travel is unavoidable. It can help reduce the impact of your activities in the short term, but it’s not a substitute for producing less emissions in the first place”.

However, some people believe that carbon offsetting is nothing more than a way for people to assuage their guilt and provides us with a “feel-good” factor without us actually having to change our behaviour in any way. In an article published on the BBC’s website last week, Martin Livermore goes even further, describing carbon offsetting as “transferring money to developing countries to fund projects that probably would have been implemented anyway, and with little real impact on emissions”.

For Livermore, the only way to slow down the effects of climate change is to entirely rethink the way in which we use energy: “The answer is to use the best available and most cost effective low carbon technology for base load generation (nuclear power), increase the focus on energy efficiency in all sectors of the economy, and encourage R&D on new transport and power generation technologies”.

So where does this leave the traveller? If we need to fly occasionally, it’s surely better to do something in order to counteract the effects of our travel than to do nothing and wait for the world’s governments to take action. After all, changing the way in which we use fossil fuels is unlikely to be a soution that can be implemented quickly.

Another solution, however, could be to channel the money that we would have donated to a carbon offsetting programme to somewhere where it could have an even greater effect.

Oxfam, one of the world’s best known charities, for example, is running a climate change campaign. Not only does the charity provide aid, particularly in the form of disaster relief, to the people directly affected by the consequences of climate change, it is also campaigning for direct action from governments to support these people and to cut emissions.

You can make donations to Oxfam in order to help the charity to fund its work, but you can also get involved by sending emails to decision-makers and signing online petitions. Taking such a proactive approach to the issue of climate change, as well as working to reduce the emissions for which our individual lifestyles are responsible, could result in major long-term changes in the world.

It’s been another week of bad news for the airline industry. On Monday, The Times reported budget airline Ryanair’s announcement that its profits had fallen by 47% during the first 6 months of the year, blaming the rise in fuel costs, although the company was predicting that it would break even by the end of the year.

On Thursday, the BBC reported that Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific has issued a profits warning. According to The Times Online today, Singapore Airlines has reported a 36% fall in profits in Quarter 3 of the year, and this was followed by the news that British Airways had announced a 92% fall in profits for the first six months of the year.

The airlines are trying to remain positive. Talking to the BBC, British Airways’ Chief Executive, Willie Walsh, stated that whilst he believed that the first six months of the year would “be remembered as one of the bleakest on record”, he predicted that the company would end the year by making “a small profit”.

Michael O’Leary,Chief Executive of Ryanair has also remained upbeat about his company’s future, telling the Times Online that “with one of the strongest balance sheets in the airline industry, €2.1bn in cash and the lowest cost base, Ryanair is strongly positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that will inevitably arise from the financial crisis and economic recession over the coming year” (Times Online, November 3, 2008).

Whilst the airlines are hoping that the drop in the price of oil will help them to improve their finances, they have also been announcing a number of changes designed to help them to regain their positions. Ryanair plans to cut fares for its winter flights by 20% in order to encourage people to fly with them, and Michael O’Leary is still talking about the possibility of the company launching a low-cost transtlantic service in the future.

British Airways, on the other hand, has not mentioned price cuts, instead opting to cut the number of flights that it will be operating in Summer 2009 by 1% in order to increase efficiency by reducing the number of empty seats on scheduled flights.

At the moment, therefore, it’s not clear whether consumers will benefit from reduced prices across the arline industry or whether there will simply be less flights to choose from in future.

In the last few months, both Willie Walsh and Micheal O’Leary have made predictions that more airlines will go bust soon. However, Tom Symonds, Transport Correspondent for BBC News, yesterday published an article discussing the issue, stating that some experts believe that the worst may be over for the airlines.  

At the moment, we will have to wait and see.

Image courtesy of: © Lars Christensen | Dreamstime.com

According to Graham Tibbetts of The Telegraph, rises in household bills and fuel, together with a growing awareness of the environmental impact of air travel, has led to a decline in air travel for the first time in the last two decades.

In another article, the newspaper also reports that, according to a recent survey by travel website Trivago, 65% of British families are planning to holiday in the UK in 2009 rather than travel overseas.

This is likely to come as a major blow to the already struggling travel industry, which has seen a number of airlines and travel agents go into receivership during the last few months.

Image: © Tatjana Krstic | Dreamstime.com