By Paul Homewood
Heathrow Airport
A bit more information about the Appeal Court’s decision to block the Heathrow expansion.
Below is the finding of the Appeal Court’s judgement, which seems to be the crucial factor behind their decision:
[ANPS is the Airports National Policy Statement]
Leaving aside the legal question of whether the ANPS should have specifically considered the Paris Agreement, (the ANPS does go into great detail as to how the Heathrow expansion is compatible with the Climate Change Act), just what is the SEA Directive?
The Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Directive is an EU Directive, which has been in force for several years now. In essence, it sits on top of the system of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA’s), which are aimed at specific projects.
The SEA Directive is designed to set an overarching procedure for individual projects which stem from it. There is a useful short video here, which explains it.
Wikipedia explain:
The European SEA Directive 2001/42/EC is a European Union Directive in the field of environmental protection, evaluating all those plans and programmes which can produce environmental effects. The environmental assessment procedure will be finalised to indicate, to describe and to evaluate all those effects which can happen on the environment when plans and programmes are implemented and as a consequence all the alternative solutions which can be realised on the basis of objectives and the environmental plans and programmes areas.
The European Commission tells us just how wide the coverage of SEA actually is:
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/eia/sea-legalcontext.htm
There does not seem to be much infrastructure not covered!
And it is not only national projects that must comply, as even local ones also have to follow procedure and prepare plans:
The precedent now set by the Appeal Court will mean that every single project which falls under the SEA Directive must in future take into account the Paris Agreement. And presumably projects already approved can be challenged.
This decision will surely open up a whole new Pandora’s box and allow the likes of Greenpeace to legally challenge any and every project they don’t like in future.
FOOTNOTE
It is worth bearing mind who brought the Heathrow case against the government in the first place.
Apart from five London councils and the Mayor of London, there were four other litigants:
Plan B Earth
Friends of the Earth
WWF-UK
Greenpeace
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 1, 2020 at 06:03AM
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