'Plane Stupid' Protests at Stansted Airport in the UK

Members of the environmental organization “Plane Stupid,” which focuses its efforts primarily on reducing the amounts of pollution that commercial flights emit in the atmosphere, invaded one of the runways of England's Stansted airport in Essex on Monday morning and chained themselves to the tarmac. They argued that each passenger flight was responsible for approximately 41.58 tons of carbon dioxide being released in the air, and that the recently government-approved expansion plan for the airport totally disregarded the environment.

 

“We are genuinely grateful for the level of support from people who have agreed with us that desperate times call for desperate measures. We have used this action to ask for everyone to 'please, do something'. We hope that all those that have expressed support for today's action will now think about what they are going to do to ensure the survival of our planet and people on it,” says an entry on the organization's blog.

 

Plane Stupid representatives say that they chose this particular airport because the UK government recently approved an expansion plan for it, which would increase the number of people its terminals could handle yearly from 25 million to 35 million, meaning that an extra 23,000 commercial flights would have to be added to cope with the new numbers.

 

“We’re here because our parents’ generation has failed us and it’s now down to young people to stop climate change by whatever peaceful means we have left. We’re afraid of what the police might do to us, we’re afraid of going to jail but nothing scares us as much as the threat of runaway climate change,” one of the protesters told BBC.

 

Passengers who were due to embark on their flights early Monday morning formed long queues, and many of them were angry that the airport officials hadn't notified them about the protest and the delay it caused. In the end, 57 people were arrested and later released, most of them charged with “aggravated trespassing.”