Not green enough, Boris

The mayor of London has promised to make London "the world’s leading city in delivering carbon reductions". In a speech
to the London Environment Agency this week, Mayor Johnson called for a
"green new deal" for London and officially launched the "Help a London Park" scheme, which will see 10
of London’s open spaces receive grants of up to £400,000. The programme
will encourage the creation of allotments, wildlife habitats and flower
gardens to make our parks cleaner, safer and greener. While I can
happily agree that planting a few trees and flowers will make our parks
nicer, it is pathetically not enough to tackle climate change,
especially when a number of London’s existing environmental programmes
are being reviewed or cancelled.

For example, in July, the mayor abandoned
the £25 congestion charge on gas guzzling vehicles. It can be argued
that this year’s rapid rise in oil prices and continuing volatility
makes it unlikely that gas guzzlers will be anyone’s favourite car.
However, there are still dimwitted people out there and the £25 charge
would have taken the shine off these polluting vehicles once and for
all in London.

Then, in August, Boris Johnson cancelled one of the biggest hydrogen vehicle purchases in Europe despite admitting that "Hydrogen is an
exciting fuel of the future" which "can help find solutions to the
challenges we face today". He has expanded the existing scheme to
promote electric vehicle charging points, but there is no sense of
Boris Johnson trying to achieve Ken Livingstone’s 15% target of vehicle
purchases being zero carbon by 2015.

And this week, funding for the London Cycle Network was halved
from £20m to £10m. What I found most disturbing was that Boris not only
reduced spending on the main cycling infrastructure project in London,
he then gave that money to boroughs for traffic light modernisation.
The Mayor has effectively switched funds from cycling to enable cars to
get through red lights quicker.

Now Boris is proposing to cut the GLA’s environment budget by 13%, a move which could threaten the speedy arrival of projects such as the East London Green Grid,
which seeks to protect all the green areas in the Thames Gateway for
food growing space, leisure space and flood defences. The Green Grid
will cover an area 29 times the size of Hyde Park and will be at least
three times more effective than the ‘Help a London Park’ scheme.

On top of all this, the mayor is currently promoting plans for a Thames Estuary airport, a mad idea that would destroy the protected habitat of 300,000 birds and increase carbon emissions immensely.

I am glad that Mayor Johnson no longer views fears of global warming as a "stone age religion",
but if he is to become an "eco-warrior", he has to get a better grip on
the urgent measures needed to protect the capital from the growing
threat of climate change.