Not green enough, Boris

Planting trees and flowers will make our parks nicer, but the London mayor must take more urgent action on climate change

Jenny Jones
guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 27 2008 09.30 GMT

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.