No Bristol Airport expansion!

Bristol Airport currently has 8.6 million passengers a year. It has made an application to North Somerset Council to expand to 12 million and has a published strategy of expanding to 20 million. By signing this petition you will be registering a formal objection to the expansion plans applied for by the airport in North Somerset Council planning application number 18/P/5118/OUT. We also call on Bristol City Council, as a major stakeholder, to debate this issue and formally oppose the application.
Bristol, North Somerset and other surrounding areas have declared Climate Emergencies so they have agreed that we cannot carry on with business-as-usual. The Committee on Climate Change recently produced a report where they calculated that by 2050 aviation is going to be the largest carbon emitting sector in the UK.
The expansion of Bristol Airport will mean:

- up to 10,000 extra cars entering the Bristol and North Somerset region every day causing massive amounts of extra pollution in the already toxic air;
-more than 623,000 tonnes of carbon entering the atmosphere at high levels where its warming impact on the atmosphere is at least doubled;
-huge new car parks on the beautiful North Somerset Green Belt solely to make lots of money for the airport;
-an enormous increase in night flights during the summer months and the noise and mental health consequences that this causes.

The airport have claimed enormous benefits in jobs and economic growth but a devastating report by the New Economics Foundation has said that their claims have been vastly overstated because of the incorrect methods they have used to calculate their figures. As for jobs; the airport themselves state that there will be only 97 jobs in South Bristol for example and many of these will be low paid zero-hours contract jobs.

This expansion must be stopped; the vast majority of the communities around the airport have formally stated their objections (as have Bath and North East Somerset), 3,600 individuals have objected on the planning website and this petition is intended to boost that number by many more. This campaign is not trying to stop families taking their annual holidays, but 70% of all flights are taken by the most wealthy 15% of the population and we must now have a cultural change around frequent flying. We are in a climate emergency and we must stop this reckless expansion!