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ShareLONDON: British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday that he would continue to fly to faraway vacation spots, even though air travel is increasingly being targeted in the fight against global warming.
"I personally think these things are a bit impractical actually to expect people to do that," Blair said in an interview with Sky News television, less than a week after returning from a vacation in the US state of Florida.
"I think that what we need to do is to look at how you make air travel more energy efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less," the prime minister said. "How, for example, in the new frames for the aircraft, they are far more energy efficient," he said.
He doubted other politicians would make what he called an unrealistic sacrifice. "You know, I'm still waiting for the first politician who's actually running for office who's going to come out and say it - and they're not," he said. "It's like telling people you shouldn't drive anywhere."
He warned that people had to make reasonable sacrifices in order not to be completely turned off tackling climate change. "Britain is two percent of the world's emissions," he said. "We shut down all of Britain's emissions tomorrow, the growth in China will make up the difference within two years," he said.
"So we've got to be realistic about how much obligation we've got to put on ourselves. The truth is all the evidence is that if you use science and technology constructively, your economy can grow, people can have a good time but, do so more responsibly," he said.
Emily Armistead, a campaigner for the environmentalist group Greenpeace, said Blair was not only deluded but had undermined any claim he had to leading the fight against global warming. "Tony Blair is crossing his fingers and hoping someone will invent aeroplanes that don't cause climate change. But that's like holding out for cigarettes that don't cause cancer," Armistead said.
"The prime minister should be halting airport expansion and getting people back onto the railways. He's finally forfeited any claim to be a world leader on climate change," she added.
