Most European countries also subsidize the industry by building roads and rail lines to airports. Duty-free shopping is an added benefit. People living near Europe's airports are more prone to asthma, cancer and heart and vascular diseases, while the risk of a plane crash near airports is approximately 400 times greater than an accident at a chemical plant. No country in the world has set realistic environmental limits for air traffic. Safety criteria that apply to airports are often much less strict than those applied to other polluters.
European countries tend to ignore aircraft pollution, because air traffic is a transborder problem.
In the international arena, the rapid expansion of air traffic is only now coming to be seen as a serious environmental problem. European activists have been fighting aircraft and airport growth for years. Recently, activists were able to prevent Flueghafen Duesseldorf, Germany's second largest airport, from using its new, second runway. In Manchester, activists slowed construction of a new runway by digging a network of tunnels beneath the runway site. France's Green Party lobbied against the construction of a new airport near Paris and did well enough in recent elections to supply Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government with a new Minister of Environment.