Home Page
Back to Media archives

Real Cost of Expansion
Letter to Irish Independent February 12th 2007

DUBLIN Airport's planned expansion to 60 million passengers per annum will do at least €8.4bn worth of damage in global warming terms. This can de deduced using DAA and Ryanair data and new analysis contained in the Stern Report: "The Economics of Climate Change."

Ryanair has a rather new and relatively environmentally clean fleet that
generates about 93 kg of carbon dioxide per passenger carried. According to Professor Stern this means each Ryanair passenger does about €17 worth of damage in global warming terms. If we assume this rate of damage for all Dublin Airport passengers we are understating things because the Aer Lingus fleet is much older and their passengers travel, on average, 50% more kilometres. This means that Dublin Airport's 21 million passengers in 2006 did at least €357 million damage. When Dublin Airport expands to 60 million passengers a year around 2035 they will be doing over €1bn global warming damage per year, every year.

The expansion alone will add some 40 million passengers doing €680 million damage every year. When we add up all the damage done between now and 2050, using discounting factors provided by Prof Stern, we get a total damage bill in today's terms of at least €8.4bn.

This minimum total climate change cost of €8.4bn is additional to the €4.5bn net economic cost UPROAR has estimated for the proposed expansion plan of Dublin Airport.

See: www.norunway.com/t2a/appt2.htm.

That waste is due to a misuse of very valuable land, the economic cost of resulting road congestion and an estimate of the loss of welfare to communities surrounding Dublin Airport. It can therefore be concluded that the expansion plans of Dublin Airport will incur, at a conservative estimate, a colossal net loss of €13bn.