ENVIRONMENT-CANADA: Experts Probe Impacts of Air Travel

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 28 2002 (IPS) - While the world is beginning to recognise the role that air travel plays in producing the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming, the health effects of those emissions are being widely debated.

That discussion has landed in Toronto, where authorities are spending 4.4 billion dollars (2.8 billion U.S. dollars) to expand the country’s largest airport. At the same time, they have hired a team of specialists to study air quality around Pearson Airport.

Marc Brien, a member of the group Community Air, which is fighting a proposed move to expand Toronto’s smaller Island Airport, questions these ”bought” studies.

”Pearson is only interested in results which are not going to disrupt their operations. So having the airport itself fund any of these studies is not meaningful,” he says.

David Chadder, one of the principals at Rowan William Davies & Irwin, says airport authorities have hired his and other similar firms across North America in response to environmentalists’ concerns.

But he says that an oft-cited study of pollution generated by flights in and out of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport produced ”extreme” results. It linked emissions from jet aircraft in the vicinity of the airport to the presence of cancer-based pollutants well above safe levels.

A prominent U.S. scientist disagrees with Chadder.

”There is no question at all that the totality of our environment is being contaminated with a wide range of avoidable carcinogens and other toxic agents. And airports are a major source of such contamination. That is quite apart from other issues of global warming,” says Samuel Epstein.

Epstein is the author of Politics of Cancer, an emeritus professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health in Chicago and chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition.

He takes seriously a number of U.S. environmental studies, including the one at O’Hare, and laments ”the total failure of the aircraft and airport industry to recognise the very significant environmental and public health hazards and attempt to develop some abatements”.

Up against these critics of airport expansion are a powerful group of politicians and business leaders who view aviation as a key component in increased global trade, says Jack Saporito, past president of U.S.-Citizens Aviation Watch.

He points out that the business of carrying of freight generates more revenue for the aviation industry than does passenger travel.

After the federal government’s Transport Canada relinquished control of airports in the early 1990s in favour of a form of privatisation, a building boom sounded at airport facilities, including Pearson.

It ignored a small but vocal lobby that has argued for decades that a high-speed train link in the Toronto-Montreal corridor would be a far better investment than expanding airports.

This vast country is thousands of miles long and air remains the only option for time pressed long-distance travellers.

But at least a third of Pearson’s air passengers are headed for short-haul destinations within the Ottawa/Toronto/Montreal urban corridor and could easily be accommodated by high-speed rail if it were available, says Harry Gow, past president of Transport 2000.

Gow is concerned that a renewed investment by the current federal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien into the national rail service will not survive the coming to power of the prime minister’s expected successor, Paul Martin, a year from now.

Still, even Transport 2000 concedes that pushing rail transportation as the environmentally friendlier alternative to flying has not succeeded.

But an expert says the environmental argument against air travel is stronger than the evidence that airports are bad for health.

”There is no question that when you have more airplanes, you have more pollution, there is no question. And you also have more carbon dioxide, you have more greenhouse gases,” says Judith Patterson, a geology professor at Montreal’s Concordia University..

”As to whether or not the hazardous air pollutants are actually causing increased cancer rates, that is still subject to studies, that is still being hotly debated,” she says.

But diesel, which powers trains across North America, is not necessarily clean either, says Epstein. Ultra fine particulates released by the fuel lead to lung cancer and are ”as bad as cigarettes”, he said. ”I think that fuel cells (a non-polluting technology for rail) are the way to go.”

ENVIRONMENT-CANADA: Experts Probe Impacts of Air Travel

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 28 2002 (IPS) - While the world is beginning to recognise the role that air travel plays in producing the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming, the health effects of those emissions are being widely debated.
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