> What do you want people to do, fly only battery-powered passenger airlines?

There is a logical fallacy to what you are trying to say there. My advice - stay away from logical fallacies.

I am no fan of XR and their tactics. I recommend to anyone that they investigate XR a bit more to see what is going on with them. However, on this occasion they get a free pass from me, even if they are going to waste a lot of police resources with their publicity seeking.

The reason why I give them a free pass is because something has to be said about excessive flying. Rather than the facile black and white 'battery powered planes' nonsense, what it comes down to is this - excessive flying, by business primarily and also for tourism.

I know someone who flies every week from Scotland to London to sit at a desk doing green energy projects. This is absurd as it gets. He is not alone.

If your grandfather in Australia has died and the funeral is next week then I am not going to be berating you for your carbon footprint - you have got to go.

But, if you are hopping on a plane to go to an afternoon meeting in Europe from Heathrow and you are in the habit of flying on a weekly basis then you are probably overdoing it.

Many companies have merged to end up with curious company structures, so a team can be dotted out over several continents with several micro-managers having to jet around the world to have one to one meetings with their hires. It is all rather expensive but there is a whole class of people who just go around from one allegedly important meeting to another. They aren't the people doing the real work, they have people who don't fly for doing that. The people who aren't flying do all their communication over email, Slack and ye-olde-telephone.

We have all seen how these meetings go. There is a name for the culture that goes with this - 'jollies'. I mean, who wouldn't want a nice hotel for a couple of nights, the feeling of being someone that comes with being in a business class seat and everything expenses paid? It is all work and you can grumble about how gruelling the flight is and what a hardship it is to be away from the family.

I heard a manager once say how he had spent eighty hours flying that month. This was to deliver oral presentations for sales purposes. I appreciate sales have got to do what they have to do but this manager was doing old school travelling salesman stuff. The game really has moved on. Customer service on the web and the sales channels there is where the real magic happens, not with some guy shuttling around the world on a plane. If this manager had got his presentation out of PowerPoint and onto the web then he could have saved himself at least half his flying time. But no, some people are stuck in the past. Doing HTML is hard work and needs skill, going on jollies to present Powerpoint presentations is de-rigeur.

It is very hard to challenge the culture of excess flying in the UK. The people doing it have huge carbon footprints in the rest of their lives, with their homes, their cars and everything they consume. I know a weekend isn't peak time for business travel but activism often has to be at weekends because activists have jobs too. But, if XR do disrupt flying and that results in one sales person doing stupid flights thinking 'maybe I will put my powerpoint slides online and put together a really useful enquiry form' then that is a win.