Last week Manchester Airport on Trial received an email containing a press release from Manchester City Council announcing that the leader of the council had been invited to a global climate conference.
Let’s get this straight. Sir Richard Leese is the Labour head of Manchester City Council and responsible for aggressively pushing the expansion of Manchester Airport; ignoring planning consultations and threatening to demolish family homes in the process.
He was invited by the C40 group to speak at the conference in Brazil to share the region’s experiences of tackling climate change. This strikes us as a very worrying scenario. Some of the world’s largest and most polluting cities are looking to Manchester, a city which looks likely set to fail to meet its emission targets and drastically expand its most polluting transport sector, for advice on climate change.
Manchester Mule have covered the story in more detail- it’s certainly worth a read.