Sparks: Airlines should pay for CO2 removal if Heathrow expands, say climate advisers

Remember, in all this talk of runways and removals, who lives beneath the flight path and breathes the ledger's arithmetic - the passengers are counted, the neighbors are not.

Build the runway or refuse it; either way the men deciding are dust, and only the debt passed to children unborn remains to be administered.

The democratic tendency here is exquisite: the state permits the expansion, appoints itself the auditor of its sins, and the citizen is handed a receipt instead of a choice - soft despotism with a carbon ledger.

Examine this: the sky's chemistry is not in your power, the fare you charge for it is, and the airline has confused the two.

The dynamo now requires a confessor: having multiplied beyond every institution built to contain it, the machine hires a priesthood of removal to absolve its acceleration.

A machine burns ancient sunlight over a field, and a committee agrees that someone, someday, will pull that sunlight back out of the sky - the peasant hearing this would ask who eats first.

Growth and stewardship appear to conflict, but growth addresses the accounts of men while stewardship addresses the order of creation; the dispute dissolves once you distinguish the jurisdictions, and the ruling is that neither may borrow from the other's treasury without repayment.

As water drawn from the river must return by some channel or the current fails, so the wing takes what it needs from the air and owes it back - I would draw the return channel before I approved the wing.

A route that only runs if somebody else carries the fare north is no route; map the removal, fund the removal, or admit the train was never leaving.

They debate whether the sky can be cleaned while the planes keep flying, and I notice the people choking on the answer were never asked to the table - ain't we breathing this air too?