UK Politics
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I don't understand how it's possible to achieve net zero carbon emissions with personal car ownership continuing at the present levels. Cars require a vast amount of energy to produce, before you put anything in the tank or battery. We don't have viable alternatives to our excellent road network and the English have rejected 15min cities.
Our housing stock is hopelessly inefficient and a huge energy sink. Anyone who frequents municipal waste facilities can get a sense of the vast amounts of waste that we create. While it should be fairly obvious to everyone that avoiding an ecological collapse is 'cheaper' (wtf does that even mean?) than blundering into one, it feels fairly inevitable that we will blow past 3C no problem. When people start dying like flies due to floods and famine is around the time we will see any meaningful change.
It's a myth that people dislike 15 minute cities. If you look at election results, all the places that have put LTNs and similar in place have re-elected the politicians who pushed for them.
I'm thinking of the protests in Oxford. Milton Keynes has huge potential as a pedestrian and cyclist friendly city but it has never been fully utilised or inhabited.
Thankfully the pace of climate change has been slow so far because the ability of the English to change is comparable. On the other hand, if the trajectory of the temperature predictions are accurate, we may be in trouble and by we I mean my daughter's generation. I'm still giving it large it in my SUV, what, what.
Funnily enough, I was also thinking of Oxford! Huge noise about it, but what happened? Pro-environment politicians re-elected, anti completely smashed!
That is at least encouraging news. I was in Oxford recently and there was a lot of cars and very little else. Oxford council wisely decided to drop the '15min city' moniker due to the campaign that was waged against it. Compared to Dutch cities, we remain very much locked in to car culture. They were doing 15min before the concept existed. It's rare to travel anywhere in Europe and find a more dominant car culture than the UK, more expensive trains or fewer sustainable travel options. Portugal is comparable, Slovakia not great. France, home of the biggest cycle race on earth, is having to do battle with the automotive lobby in Paris. Northern Europeans quietly but resolutely leading the way, as usual.
Yeah, they did what a lot of the LTNs did elsewhere, which was to rebrand but keep the policies the same. Our car culture remains ridiculous but we're moving against it every day!