‘Climate change: *Our* green paper’ sneered The Independent’s front-page headline yesterday in its familiar supercilious greener-than-thou style. It offered ‘a more radical’ alternative to what’s expected to be Tony Blair’s ‘toothless’ upcoming climate change legislation.

‘Set annual targets for emission reductions’, ‘Curb road pollution’, ‘Step up the drive for renewable energy’, and ‘Reduce industrial emissions’ were just some of the laudable targets set by the newspaper. But what’s this? ‘Rethink aviation policy’?

‘Unless action is taken to curb the rise in the number of flights,’ it fretted not unreasonably, ‘all other national efforts to reduce emissions will be cancelled out by 2050′.

The thing is, just two clicks of the mouse away from the front page of The Independent’s website, are offers for cheap holidays (flights included) to Naples, Seville, Prague, Barcelona, Budapest, Nice, Monte Carlo, Venice or Rome.

Not as crass, we’ll admit, as the time the Independent’s front page screamed of a possible three degree rise in global temperatures putting ‘100 million at risk’ while offering the chance to win air tickets to New York (have a look) but showing, nonetheless, the same kind of joined up thinking that says you can liberate countries with cluster bombs and depleted uranium.

(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)