Hello, it's Wednesday the 3rd of November and thanks for joining me Simon Calder for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List.

Currently aboard a train going from London Charing Cross to London Bridge just right across the Thames and what a beautiful site it is to see

the London skyline from the river. And today I want to talk about climate and COP 26 and what is

going to happen in particular not so much much to trains, but more to planes,

because we have seen some very strident pronouncements about aviation.

Just at lunchtime today, the Prime Minister was talking about getting to Net Zero Aviation,

and he was also talking about not expanding Heathrow Airport. Well, let me try to dissect what is going on.

Aviation, depending on how you want to count it, is responsible for roughly 3% of global carbon emissions worldwide.

And that proportion is set to grow as aviation grows or at least

resumes its upward trajectory which has characterised it for decades until the coronavirus pandemic.

In the context of now we make aviation greener though, well it's quite tricky.

There's talk about hydrogen powered aircraft, but they seem to be quite a long way away.

Electric aircraft is what lots of people, including EasyJet, are saying they want to do.

Now, certainly I can see scope for electric powered aircraft doing very

short hops on short, small planes. And there's certainly a market for that. If you look at the

domestic aviation within Scotland's Highlands and Islands, that's many, many short hops,

including one which is the shortest

scheduled flight in the world, just two minutes from Westray to Papa Westray in the beautiful

Auckland Islands. Now, what is going to be happening in terms of bigger planes? Well,

EasyJet says they're hoping to have aviation electric planes

for 2030 and shuttling 150 people between London and Amsterdam, for instance. Personally, I cannot

see that happening. And I have to say that what Michael O'Leary, the

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