Now we've had a week to consider the government's decision to go ahead with the third runway at Heathrow. Does it look any better from here? Can we console ourselves by saying actually it's not too bad, it'll just be a tiny runway and they'll only use it when it's proper gridlock on the other runways? They'll be very considerate about building it, and we'll hardly notice it all? And actually they're right about the carbon emissions, it's all the cars and nothing to do with those lovely planes?

Firstly local resident Geraldine Nicholson has pointed out out that this won't just be a football pitch-sized piece of  land, but an entire airport's worth. The new runway will occupy land the size of Gatwick, essentially. And it won't just be 700 houses that are levelled, there will be a further 3300 rendered uninhabitable, alongside schools, churches, a cemetery (they're planning to put a road through the cemetery. nice). The whole process of constructing this monster alone will churn out mountains of emissions: cement is one of the most carbon-intensive materials on the planet.

Secondly the process of getting this thing built is going to be ugly. Really really ugly. Boris Johnson is just one of several people planning to take legal action to stop it and there is also talk of pursuing a judicial inquiry. Both these things are very very expensive. On top of this the anti-heathrow protestors are promising to get nasty: more money will have to go on policing and preventing all that. The aim of the protestors is, of course, to make it as expensive as possible - just to give you an idea of how that works, the bill for private security guards during the hugely contested construction of Newbury Bypass came to about £26million.

But thirdly, this decision gives us the final answer about the government's priorities. Look, we're not stupid. We realised a long time ago (back when we were still pleading for attention while the head of Tesco and the Daily Mail were both Gordon Brown's new best friends) that greenies were not who this government listened to. And we can kind of see their logic: the government needs jobs, more jobs, as many as possible, and this will deliver up jobs.
But so would investing in our green technology industry, and that's not happening (the government has actually put one green grant scheme on hold unbelievably). So would building green schools - and that too is on hold. Would investing in those things really cost more than the £9bn cost which is being bandied about for R3? (And that's at the beginning. We've all watched Property Ladder, we know these things always double).

The problem, really, is that Gordon Brown either doesn't believe in climate change, or doesn't really care about it. Which means that we'd better get out and lie on some runways. Maybe, if we try hard enough, we can force him to care? Does it work like that?

Words: Bibi van der Zee.