With the privately financed mission, the West Sussex hub is aiming to extend its capability by 100,000 flights a 12 months.

They added:

Gatwick will transfer its emergency runway 12 metres north, enabling it for use for departures of narrow-bodied planes comparable to Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s.

The brand new runway is anticipated so as to add 14,000 jobs and as a lot as £1bn in additional financial exercise.

In a sane world, this is able to not occur.

Each airplane happening the runway at Gatwick brings us nearer to a local weather disaster.

Ninety-two per cent of the flights from the UK are for tourism: this destruction of the planet is all in regards to the relentless promotion of the concept some should have a proper to journey, largely as a type of conspicuous consumption of the type John Christensen mentioned right here final week.

A fast Google search revealed this:

• 10–15% of the inhabitants take essentially the most flights:
  • In 2019, the ten% most frequent flyers in England took greater than half of all worldwide flights.
  • A 2021 research confirmed that within the UK, 15% of the inhabitants took 70% of all flights.
  • In 2014, a Division for Transport survey discovered that 15% of adults in Nice Britain accounted for 71% of flights.
• Smallest group of frequent flyers nonetheless dominates: A June 2025 evaluation famous that “ultra-frequent flyers,” who make up lower than 3% of the UK inhabitants, are chargeable for 30% of all air journeys taken by UK residents.
• About half the inhabitants doesn’t fly in a given 12 months:
  • Within the 12 months earlier than 2019, practically half (48%) of England’s inhabitants didn’t take a single flight overseas.
  • A 2021 research famous that roughly 50% of the UK inhabitants doesn’t take part in air journey yearly.
• Excessive earnings is a significant component: Frequent air journey is strongly correlated with increased family earnings and academic attainment. Which means that taxes on aviation would disproportionately have an effect on wealthier people.
• Larger earners journey extra ceaselessly: Earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic, 42% of the very best earnings households (£75,000+) flew extra typically than a couple of times a 12 months, whereas over half of low-income households (£25,000 and beneath) flew lower than a couple of times a 12 months or by no means. 

In different phrases, the wealthiest in a rich nation are reserving their proper to destroy the planet for everybody else.

And, in the meantime, Gatwick Airport has preferred to type itself as a carbon-neutral airport by ignoring the emissions it permits.

If solely we had sustainable value accounting of the sort I described right here, it will be obviously apparent that this growth is not going to add £1 billion to the economic system, however will in truth make it very a lot worse off, rising the general carbon insolvency of the economic system we dwell in. And that, in fact, is exactly why we want sustainable value accounting.