If you wanted a persuasive advert for 'Slow Travel', you could do worse than compile a clip of outraged interviewees in the queues at Terminal Five.

My personal favourite was the woman en route to Glasgow, who’d been waiting for 24 hours for her flight. In that time, she could have made the journey by train at least five times – and without having to haul herself to and from the cities’ outskirts in the process.
 
Fortuitously, news of the T5 chaos broke on the morning of a debate I was chairing at the RSA. The topic: whether, in this carbon-constrained world, Slow Travel was morally the only way to go.

It’s certainly impressive how quickly the phrase has caught on. If you said ‘Slow Travel’ to someone a year or so ago, they’d have assumed you were describing a particularly gruesome crawl into Paddington.

Now the Sunday supplements, which were full of frenetic features on how to get the most out of 48 hours in Cairo or Cuba, are falling over themselves to extol the joys of the Slow Train to Provence.

Like its Slow Food cousin, Slow Travel comes imbued with a sense of quality, of luxury even. It’s an alluring concept, neatly equating a more sustainable life with a more leisured, pleasurable one.

None of which has escaped the attention of the upmarket tour companies, who’ve fast cottoned on to the fact that they can charge a lot more for a slow week in France than a fast fortnight in Bali.

It’s partly down to demographics, of course. Slow often goes with cultural, restful, retreat-ish holidays – very much the preference of the more ‘mature’ traveller, whose wallet can expand to fit.

Small wonder, perhaps, that everyone’s tripping over themselves in a race to go slow.

And not before time. There are no hydrogen-powered, zero-carbon planes taxi-ing down the crowded runways, nor are there likely to be in the foreseeable future. Sooner or later, we may simply not have the luxury of choice. It’ll be go slow, or don’t go at all.

For a society accustomed to dirt-cheap getaways, that will mean quite a shift in culture.
That’s why Forum for the Future has launched its Overland Heaven project – exploring ways of making low-carbon travel both more effective and more desirable.

But even if it were possible to have carbon-free speed, is it speed itself that’s the essence of the problem?

Maybe in rediscovering the ‘essential slowness’ of travel, we can also have a chance to reacquaint ourselves with the lost virtues of contemplation and reflection. A chance to appreciate the subtle differences in geography, of culture, which can come into focus through the windows of a train, say, rather than passing in a blur between depature lounge and carousel.

Is this really about taking the slow route to the soul?

Or is it actually a bit of a middle-class fad? Another excuse to look down our noses at the hoi-polloi, jetting off on their Ryanair stag breaks to Reykjavík, while we enlightened few feel all smug and insulated on that Slow Train to Provence…

The answer, I suspect, is all of the above. It won’t be the first time that an element of aspiration, if not downright snobbery, has helped drive behaviour change in a more sustainable direction: it happened with organic food, it happened with fair trade, and it could well happen with green energy, too.

If Slow really is, as someone memorably described it, the new Merc, that can only add to its appeal. That, and a few days’ cringe-making chaos at Terminal Five.

Meanwhile, a couple of impromptu audience surveys at the RSA suggested that it’s going to be a long journey to real slowness.

First, I asked all those who’d be prepared to give up all long-haul holiday flights to show their hands. A scattering of palms were raised – maybe 1 in 10, at most. And that, remember, was flying for pleasure alone – not work. Second, how many people would find it easier to give up their car than give up flying. The room was a sea of raised hands…

A podcast of the RSA debate, featuring Martin Wright, Ed Gillespie and John Adams, will shortly be available at www.rsa.org.uk/audio

The scooter lay on its side in the dust when I got there, its front wheel still spinning. The mother was scrambling to her feet, shouting at her son as he careered down the roadside chasing after the chicken. The father struggled to set the machine upright, while his little girl sat on the ground, bawling her eyes out, but apparently unscathed.

You can’t travel for long on India’s crowded roads without stumbling – in my case, almost literally – on a crash of some sort.

This Lucknow family just lost a chicken. Around 90,000 Indians lose their lives on the roads every year – and only 5% of them are in cars.

Hence the appeal of the Tata Nano. At around £1,200, it promises relatively safe motoring for tens of millions of Indian families, not to mention their chickens.

It also brings the prospect of a surge in vehicle pollution, catapulting India into the premier league of carbon emitters.

So are environmentalists howling with outrage? If you scan a few Indian bulletin boards, you’d think that was the case. Since Tata announced the Nano, they’ve been bursting with comments lambasting ‘cosseted Westerners’ for daring to suggest this was anything other than excellent news for India’s poor. How can the rich world presume to deny Indians the right to travel safely? How dare they heap praise on Toyota’s Prius (average mpg 46) while denigrating the Nano (average mpg 54)? And so on, and so on...

In actual fact, few Western environmentalists have dared to put their heads over the parapet on this one. Most of the meaningful criticism has come from Indian activists such as Sunita Narain and Malini Mehra.

But all this does serve to flag up one classic dilemma of sustainable development: namely, what happens when an initiative aimed at meeting people’s aspirations and improving their quality of life runs slap bang into environmental limits? When the social and economic pillars of sustainability, in other words, come crashing down onto the environmental one?

Because there’s no doubting the fact that the Nano’s doing exactly that. Once you start to factor in the climate cost, there’s no such thing as a cheap car. Some of the very same people who’ll benefit from Tata’s new baby will also lose out, potentially devastatingly, as climate change wreaks havoc on India’s agriculture.

The Nano’s apparent affordability looks all the more illusory when you factor in the subsidies which keep petrol so cheap at the pump. According to the Asian Development Bank, Indian fuel subsidies account for a hefty US$17.5 billion a year – and rising, as the government, wary of political fallout, battles to avoid passing on to the electorate the recent surge in crude oil prices. (If you factored in a carbon cost as well, the Nano would begin to look distinctly dear.)

So does safer, smoother travel for middle-income Indian families have to come at the price of the planet?

Not necessarily. First, the Nano might actually speed the arrival of a global carbon market. If it helps pump millions more tonnes of carbon into India’s air (and make no mistake, where Tata leads, others will surely follow), it will make it increasingly hard for the Indian government to maintain that it’s a mere victim of climate change, rather than an increasingly powerful driver of it.

India as a whole – even including its Nano drivers – would for a time at least profit from worldwide carbon trading, as per capita emissions are way below those of the West. So if its government could just grasp this particular nettle, it might find the process less painful than it feared.

Second, with a bit of imagination, the arrival of the Nano could actually spur India to develop a more sustainable transport policy. There’s nothing like sitting gridlocked for hours in the Delhi sprawl to convince even the most sceptical minister that there has to be an alternative.

If a swarm of Nanos slows the pace of the capital’s traffic from sluggish to stationary, then our jam-packed minister may decide it really is time for some brave moves– like congestion charges or subsidy reductions, with the revenue hypothecated for improved bus and metro links, maybe.

And it doesn’t have to stop there. If anywhere is crying out for the sort of ‘car clubs’ springing up in European cities [see our recent article ‘Zip through London’], it’s India. So what about a state-sponsored Tata Car Club – run on specially adapted electrically powered, zero-emission Nanos?

Good PR for India, good PR for Tata, and a small step towards squaring the circle of sustainable development.

There’s an elephant in the living room of climate change, and it’s got a trunk the size of a tropical tree.

It’s called rainforest destruction.

While everyone works themselves into agonies of guilt (matched only by almost complete inaction) over the odd plane flight, the pace and scale of deforestation continues to soar.

It’s already the largest single source of greenhouse emissions after energy (contributing, according to some estimates, up to ten times as much as aviation), and, barring the odd bit of good news from Brazil, the tide seems unstoppable.

Burning forests provide a particularly nasty double whammy of warming. As they burn, they send vast wodges of carbon into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars and power plants.

The Stern Report, no less, warned that rainforest destruction would, in the next four years, release more carbon into the atmosphere than every flight from the dawn of aviation until 2025.

Politically and economically, it would be a damn sight easier to make massive reductions in deforestation than to achieve similar cuts in air travel – and in terms of curbing climate change, massively more effective, too.

As forest scientists at the Global Canopy Programme point out, you don’t need complex technical fixes to do so, either. You just have to make trees worth more standing than felled. And with the fate of civilisation cradled in their canopy, they should carry quite a price tag.

It’s still easier said than done, of course. And tough to enforce in remote regions of Africa, Indonesia and Brazil - hardly havens of good governance. But there are no shortages of ideas – and pilots – for doing so [see ‘How much do you want for this forest – in millions?’].

If we spent half as much time pushing for action on this as we do flagellating each other over the odd flight, then maybe we’d achieve something…

Is it all kicking off?

Is this when the phoney war stops, and the panic begins?

Those were the questions that jumped out at me on Monday, triggered by three separate headlines.

First, a report from the respected German Energy Watch Group, concluding that world oil production had peaked in 2006, and was now on an inexorable slide downwards.

Second, the oil price hitting $100 a barrel, on the same day that share prices on both slides of the Atlantic went into freefall.

And third – less prominently, but no less worryingly – the discovery that absorption of atmospheric CO2 by the North Atlantic ocean had plunged by half in the last ten years. In other words, one of the world’s main carbon sinks was, for a reason that scientists could not explain, breaking down.

Now of course, none of the media presented these stories as a triptych. Share prices respond to all manner of factors; while the surge in oil prices was undoubtedly one of them, the market slide seemed mainly due to continued fallout from the latest credit squeeze. And both the oil price and the markets routinely ignore climate warnings.

And by the next day, shares had rebounded, the oil price slipped back in the face of reassuring blandishments about increased production from OPEC, and the carbon story was yesterday’s news.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Jeremy Leggett's, Britain’s Cassandra of Peak Oil, warning that “the day the markets get” the fact that the sun is setting on the oil era, and respond accordingly, would be the day to start panicking.

And I don’t think I’ve ever felt that the old mantra about ‘enough talk – time for action’ was more relevant...

Ever wondered how we can know so much about climate change, but be so rubbish at tackling it?

Try speaking at an event on the subject.

The scene: a conference suite in Bournemouth, during the last days of the Ming dynasty. The subject? What to do about global warming…

My precise position on the panel was ample evidence of the stark realities of climate change, as so often experienced by those of us in the, er, front line.

In other words, I was simultaneously chilled down the back of my neck by the breeze from the air conditioning while the side of my face was grilled by the hot air outlet from the projector – whose sole purpose was to display the sponsor’s logo throughout. (No power, no point…).

Meanwhile, my eyes were dazzled by the glare of a hundred halogen spots. It would, of course, have been the cheapest of cheap shots to make ironic capital out of that.

So I did.

No doubt the hotel chain in question has all manner of carefully positioned motion sensitive lighting controls, dimmer switches and associated gizmos. But if our default reaction to a wall full of switches and knobs is to whack everything on to the max and leave it there, then it’s all a bit power-pointless.

So we can relax. Al Gore’s not going to ruin it all and run.

His revelation brings an end to months of speculation that he was poised to rain on Hillary Clinton’s triumphal parade to the White House by announcing An Inconvenient Bid for the presidency himself.

It’s a wise move. Power inevitably means compromise, and the first time President Gore balked at calls for a punitive tax hike on gasoline or some similar act of political suicide, his hard-won climate credibility would sink like a soggy polar bear.

Assuming that he (sooner or later) endorses Hillary, he’ll have much more influence as a trusted but robustly independent advocate/adviser, with a (literally) unimpeachable reputation.

And that’s more likely to remain intact now that it’s clear he wasn’t seeking to float into the White House on the back of all those calving icebergs. It’s perhaps only a pity that, like Gordon Brown, he didn’t say ‘No’ sooner…