Cleaner air wins
Sadiq Khan’s court win a victory for health and for the climate
In late July, London won an important court battle supporting its legal right to expand its Ultra-Low Emissions Zone, a policy that has already had a measurable positive impact on the air quality in London. Given the fact that the poor air quality the ULEZ is fixing has led to very high rates of childhood asthma, especially among low-income children, it is a critical victory for the health of Londoners.
The planet will benefit too–the dirty air so harmful to Londoners is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, particularly for transportation. Which makes the UK Government’s support of the opposition to the ULEZ even more disappointing. Evidently scrambling in their search for an issue to avoid a devastating election loss in the upcoming general election, the governing Conservatives seemed to have settled on protecting the car, not people’s health. This attempt has a tinge of desperation, as did their recent announcement about allowing new fossil fuel exploration in the North Sea.
While this strategy is unlikely to succeed—a series of leadership failures have pushed the Tories polling numbers to a historic low—it does mark a significant retrenchment for a government formerly showing some leadership on climate, certainly with its international investments in city-based climate action through UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office and with its Glasgow COP26 President, Alok Sharma, who travelled the world to keep 1.5º alive. He has recently been critical of his colleagues’ failure to lead on climate.
The British Conservatives aren’t alone. The Canadian Province of Alberta has bizarrely halted clean energy development, despite the excellent low-cost solar and wind already built there, and the potential for much much more. Alberta is now fighting the Canadian Government on its proposed clean electricity standards—and the Government has responded by weakening them: by allowing some natural gas plants to continue. Both are failing to act with the urgency science tells us we must, and using the knowledge we have—for example, that natural fossil gas is as dirty as coal when the pipeline leaks are included in their emissions analysis. Allowing for its continued use is a massive failure by national governments like the UK and Canada, and a significant contrast to the leadership shown by Mayors like London’s Sadiq Khan.
Recommended listening
While I finalize the second season of the Cities 1.5 podcast (also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts), I had the pleasure of talking about urban density and its benefits for people's wellbeing and the climate on the latest Climate One podcast.
I’ve also enjoyed this TED Talk by Al Gore on what the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want us to know. It is well worth its 25-minute duration.
What am I reading?
I am starting to read Blindness by Jose Saramago. Although written in 1995, it resonates incredibly in a post COVID world. A brilliant, but emotionally challenging read.
Errata
After my recent newsletter about the International Energy Agency’s important work on energy efficiency, an economist friend chided me for not considering the risk of the “rebound effect”: if we do build far more energy efficient buildings, will there be countervailing trends to the reduction of energy? For example, if a building is now more efficient/cheaper to heat and cool, will people increase the heating in the winter and cool it more in the summer, effectively cancelling the efficiency gains? It's an interesting question and one I will delve into in a future newsletter.