A letters to York Council, 31 January 2025

Councillor

The new York Local Plan plans housing for affluent people who live similar lifestyles to existing settlements, where their carbon footprints have been calculated to be very high. These are suburban places near York’s Outer Ring Road with high car ownership. Thanks to the team behing the website carbon.place for doing the calculations. The site estimates that residents in these areas of York have carbon emissions upto five times those in the areas where residents’ emissions are the lowest.

High car ownership is an indicator of affluence, which is an indicator of high carbon emissions. For the affluent residents their emissions from flying are often higher than their emissions from driving their cars. The UK Government is claiming that in the next few decades emissions from aviation will reduce as and increasing amount of “sustainable aviation fuel” is used to power aviation.