Somehow I get the feeling that this guy's not a huge Al Gore fan

Recession will be just the ticket, says Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary - Times Online

He is not concerned that by increasing air travel he is shortening the life-cycle of polar bears and shrinking the ice-cap. “The green lobby are like those old guys in the medieval market-place, shouting about the end of the world. Climate change is not the biggest threat to mankind. If it is, why is the summer so crappy?”

Mr O’Leary seems determined to reverse the “green madness”. “Bugger bicycles – I drive a car and a tractor, I have a herd of 600 cows on my farm in Ireland who probably make a more damaging impact on the environment than my airplanes do.” He uses low-energy bulbs but only because “it’s cheaper”. The one thing he recycles is cow pats, which he uses as fertiliser. Environmental campaigners would be queueing for the dole if they were not “prattling on” about climate change.

“This global warming nonsense is no different to some of the more lunatic movements you’ve had throughout history. They were excommunicating Galileo 500 years ago for suggesting the Earth might go round the Sun. Now the nutbag ecologists say we’re boiling the planet to extinction. This is just the crazy idea for the first decade of the 21st century.”

The economic downturn will end the eco-fad. “All this climate change stuff is an inevitable byproduct of a ten-year period of economic growth and low unemployment. Now we have a recession you’ll hear an awful lot less about the bloody environment.” And politicians are manipulating people’s fears to make them pay more tax. “They call them eco-taxes but that’s just spin – it’s just taking more money off us.”

Airport taxes are “highway robbery” even though “air transport accounts for less than 2 per cent of CO2 emissions”, he says. “Marine transport accounts for 5 per cent, double the aviation industry, but you don’t hear these nutbags saying let’s tax the crap out of the ferries do you?”