Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports and a major hub for Europe, the Middle East and Asia, but it is the only airport its size with only two runways. And in May, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron put the brakes on a planned expansion of Heathrow Airport.

The leader of the U.K.’s coalition government cited environmental concerns and “binge flying” as reasons to wave off the expansion. But who decides what “binge flying” is anyway?

Time’s Bryan Walsh says the term sounds an awful lot like a judgment about class. Is the democratization of the skies what environmentalists are really upset about?

Cameron’s coalition government is supposedly business friendly, so the move that stymies easy business travel was shocking, The New York Times reported. And the trend across the globe is adding to airports, with many examples in cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

Britain is a hub for low cost air travel, but the British government calculated that aviation emissions made up only 6 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2006, according to The Times. That total could grow to 25 percent in 2030, according to the same report.