A Ryanair advert in the Guardian denying the airplanes' responsability in Global warming

international | environment | other press

Thursday March 29, 2007 11:36

by Jacques Dauphin - www.louche.net

jacques.dauphin at gmail dot com

George Monbiot must have been pleased to read the Guardian yesterday!

A very disturbing Ryanair advert published in the Guardian tells us that Gordon Brown's tax on flights is just the state stealing from us. It also says that "aviation accounts for just 2% of CO2 emissions" so the tax has nothing to do with environment.
George Monbiot must have been pleasad to read the Guardian yesterday!

The Ryanair advert pusblished in Wednesday 28th of March 2007 Guardian

I was reading the paper yesterday and I discovered this ad in the pages of the Guardian showing a photograph of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams with bubble text saying they agree against Gordon Brown's APD tax.
The advert was "paid for by Ryanair - fighting for tax free travel". The advert explains this tax is not related to the global warming threat: Gordon Brown "claims this is for environment - this claim is rubbish. Aviation accounts for just 2% of CO2 emissions". For Ryanair, the british state is a thug that steals our money: "This year, Greedy Gordon will nick £1BN from passengers", and they ask us to "send our protest" to the governement treasury email.
Now after tuesday's historical day for Northern Ireland, using the picture of a Paisley and Adams sitting at the same table and agreeing to share power for a Ryanair advert would be bad enough in itself.
But this ad goes far beyond this point: it denies the flight companies' responsability in polluting the planet and contributing to global warming. In a very populist type of way, Ryanair's lobbying emphasizes upon the fact that the state is stealing from us, passengers with the right to consume cheap flights as much as we want. And to make it even more depressing, the ad is published in The Guardian, a newspaper that in the last month signed personalities like George Monbiot and others and made a lot of healines regarding the Global warming threat. So if you're a journalist and you deny gobal warming, you'll be attacked by the Guardian's journalists, but if you pay for your ad, you can just say all the bullshit you want in their pages.
I'm just amazed this ad could actually be published in a serious newspaper like the Guardian.