6 2GN The Sunday Times April 3, 2022NEWS
The chief executive of British Airways,
which was hit by another IT failure last
week, is so desperate to hire new staff that
he texted a government minister about
how to recruit sacked P&O workers.
Sean Doyle sent a message to the trans-
port secretary, Grant Shapps, last month
to ask for help contacting workers who
had been laid off by P&O Ferries. BA also
used its LinkedIn site to advertise jobs in
customer service roles “for those
affected by recent changes at P&O”.
Industry sources suggest BA was over-
eager when it cut about 10,000 jobs,
including many workers on “legacy”Dangerous climate change
will be avoided only if vast
quantities of carbon dioxide
are sucked out of the
atmosphere, a landmark
report due to be published
tomorrow will conclude.
With warming already at
1.1C, even rapid
decarbonisation — such as a
wholesale switch to
renewable energy and
everyone giving up driving
and flying — may now not be
enough to avoid breaching
the 1.5C threshold.
The paper, produced by
the United Nations’
intergovernmental panel on
climate change (IPCC), says
an urgent wholesale shift
from fossil fuels is needed if
there is to be any chance of
limiting global warming to
1.5C above pre-industrial
levels, beyond which
scientists believe significant
harm will be irreversible.
Extracts from a draft
version of the summary
report say: “Carbon dioxide
removal is necessary to
achieve net-zero greenhouse
gas emissions globally and
nationally.” If “negative
emission” technologies fulfil
their potential, the draft says,
they could even enable a
reversal of global warming.
But scientists have a long
way to go. The report,
commissioned and endorsed‘Carbon extractor
fans’ only way to
save the planet
by 195 governments,
acknowledges that the only
“negative emissions” strategy
in mass deployment at
present is tree planting.
Scientists are working on
other techniques. These
include direct air capture,
giant fans extracting carbon
dioxide from the air and
storing it underground or
converting it into jet fuel.
However, the 19 direct air
capture plants in operation
are capturing only 10,
tonnes of CO 2 a year,
compared with the 36 billion
tonnes emitted annually.
Other techniques include
ocean fertilisation, a theor-
etical approach in which
nutrients are added to the sea
to stimulate phytoplankton
that take up CO 2 from the air,
and enhanced weathering, in
which crushed volcanic rock
is spread over farmland to
boost the soil’s ability to
absorb CO 2.
Campaigners believe that a
focus on negative emissions
technology provides a licence
to “burn now, worry later”.
Professor Shaun
Fitzgerald, director of the
Centre for Climate Repair at
Cambridge University, argued
that a reduction in emissions
alone cannot be sufficient to
stay within the 1.5C limit. He
insists we must also remove
greenhouse gases: “There’s
no point in emptying the bath
if you keep topping it up.”Ben Spencer Science EditorNew breed of
non-flatulent cows
are good moos
The company that bred a bull
so prolific it featured in
Playboy has turned its
attention to Britain’s most
flatulent cows.
The next big step in the
UK’s battle against global
warming is a breeding
programme intended to
create a modified herd of
climate-friendly
“envirocows”.
Genus is the genetics
company behind the record-
breaking Holstein bull,
Picston Shottle, whose semen
is said to have produced more
than 100,000 female calves in
20,000 herds in 22 countries.
The animal died, possibly of
exhaustion, in 2015.
The firm will tomorrow
launch a £25 genetic test to
identify female calves with
the least gaseous digestive
systems, enabling farmers to
breed herds of more
environmentally friendly
cows. The dairy industry
contributes 3 per cent to the
UK’s total greenhouse gas
emissions; roughly half is the
methane produced by cud-
chewing dairy herds.
But new techniques of
genetic testing and selective
breeding are promising sharp
reductions in the gas, which
is more than 25 times as bad
as carbon dioxide fortrapping heat in the
atmosphere.
Marco Winters, head of
animal genetics at the
Agriculture and Horticulture
Development Board (ADHB),
said: “The emphasis [in
breeding] has shifted from
production to animal health
and environmental impact, to
look at what kind of cow we
need.” The board has teamed
up with National Milk
Records (NMR), a dairy
farming service provider, and
Genus, which has a stock
market value of £1.85 billion.
The test will allow farmers
to send a genetic sample of
their calves to Genus and
NMR for processing. The
results are then passed to the
ADHB, which uses a genetic
chart named the EnviroCow
Index to grade each cow by its
likely environmental impact.
It will take at least three years
for the benefits to appear, as
successive generations of
calves grow steadily less
flatulent.
Andy Warne, managing
director of NMR, cautioned
that no one should expect an
entirely gas-free cow. The
bovine digestive system of
regurgitating food and
chewing cud makes some
level of leakage inevitable.
“An animal is never going to
be carbon neutral,” he said.
“But taking [emissions] to a
low level is entirely possible.”Jon Yeomans
Deputy Business Editorcontracts, at the height of the Covid-
crisis in 2020 and was then slow to rehire
staff when the industry recovered.
The need for BA to bolster its customer
service was apparent yet again last week.
The timing could not have been worse,
with thousands of families flying abroad
for the Easter holidays. On Wednesday its
IT systems for Heathrow went down for
two hours — the third time in six weeks —
causing hundreds of flights to be delayed
or cancelled over the next few days.
BA said a “network connectivity issue”
meant customers could not be checked in
and that boarding passes on mobile
phones could not be accessed.
Cirium, the aviation analytics com-
pany, said 386 flights were cancelled over
three days to Friday and 713 flights were
delayed for more than 60 minutes.
According to Flight Aware data, more
than 1,000 BA flights were cancelled or
delayed last week, including 54 cancelled
and 278 delayed by 7.30pm yesterday.
BA said these included planned can-
cellations such as flights to Russia and
flights that were delayed by as little as oneShambolic BA wants to hire
fired P&O staff to ease crisis
A two-hour computer
failure at Heathrow last
week has exacerbated
‘over-eager’ job cuts at
the airline, experts sayLouise Eccles, Nicholas Hellen
and Gabriel Pogrundminute. Doyle, 50, has decided to drop
some flights on routes with multiple
flights on the same day until the end of
May to boost “resilience”.
Travellers reported “chaos” at Heath-
row after the IT failure last week, a dearth
of BA staff in the terminals and queues of
up to 80 people waiting to speak to a sin-
gle customer service worker. Simon
Dumore, who owns a record label, had
two scheduled flights from Newcastle to
Heathrow cancelled. “Terminal 5 [was]
in chaos yesterday!” he wrote on Twitter.
“Get your shit together, British Airways.”
Aviation experts say the airline has
underinvested in its IT systems for years.
In 2017, BA suffered an IT power failure
over the May bank holiday weekend that
cost its parent company, IAG, about
£80 million. In 2018 it was fined £20 mil-
lion after the data of almost 400,000 indi-
viduals was hacked during a cyberattack
that was not noticed for two months. In
2019 a problem with its check-in system
caused more than 100 flights from Heath-
row and Gatwick to be cancelled.
BA said: “We’re very sorry that as aresult of the technical issue we experi-
enced on Wednesday and weather dis-
ruption, we had to reduce our schedule at
Heathrow. We took steps to ensure as
many customers as possible travelled as
planned. We have apologised to our cus-
tomers and are offering to refund or
rebook them on to alternative flights, pro-
viding refreshment vouchers and hotel
accommodation where needed.”
Passengers at Manchester airport also
reported flight delays and long queues at
security yesterday. One traveller, Jane
Gilham, said on Twitter that “people will
get hurt” if conditions do not improve.
Bosses have blamed staff shortages.
lWith P&O’s three cross-Channel ferries
berthed at Dover, holidaymakers and
hauliers yesterday reported delays of
more than six hours in travelling to the
Continent. The problems were com-
pounded by the loss of a DFDS ferry,
taken out of service when it was damaged
in strong winds in Dunkirk, and problems
with Eurotunnel check-in systems in
Folkestone. A section of the M20 was shut
and used to park lorries because of queues.Surfers in Tynemouth brave low temperatures on the northeast coast.
More wintry weather is predicted for the week ahead Weather, page 27FREEZE-FRAME
OWEN HUMPHREYS/PA