London mayor Sadiq Khan is waging war on diesel. His latest move is an exclusion of certain diesel cars from London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ). From April 2019, drivers of diesel cars built before September 2015 must pay an additional charge to use the roads...
How the pollution panic hurts the poor
London's air isn't shortening people's lives – poverty is. This month, cold, windless weather helped trap vehicle exhaust within London’s narrow streets, and story after story appeared in the media, declaring the city’s air to be worse than Beijing’s. Read more at...
London is not bound in toxic smog
The scaremongering about air pollution is blighting innovation in the capital. Earlier this month, a spate of news stories suggested that London was experiencing an air-pollution crisis. Just one week into 2017, for instance, the Guardian reported that ‘Brixton Road...
Paris talks: agreeing to dodge democracy
Climate advocacy has become a refuge for political no-hopers. Last week in Paris, a long-sought-after agreement to limit climate change was finally arrived at. A successor to the previous agreement – the Kyoto Protocol – had been hard to find. Bitter and farcical...
The world needs more energy, not green BS
Western governments and agencies are now standing in the way of development. Earlier this month, a report from the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health announced that ‘fecal sludge’ might be one answer to several of the world’s...
Science can’t tell us how to live the Good Life
According to new research from the University of Cambridge, the world’s growing and increasingly wealthy population must change its diet if environmental harm and catastrophic climate change are to be avoided. Lead researcher Bojana Bajzelj and her colleagues used...
There is no ‘dash for gas’
Contrary to green-hued reports, the UK is not about to be turned into a giant shale-gas drilling pad. This week, the UK Government announced a new round of licensing for onshore oil and gas exploration. Companies will make bids for a licence to drill for oil or gas in...
Don’t blame Russia for the anti-fracking panic
It isn’t Moscow's money that fuels fracking protests – it’s Europe’s own turn against development. According to the Financial Times, NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen told an audience at Chatham House in London that the Russian government has been working...
Using NASA to scare the masses into action
An apocalyptic report touted by doom-monger Nafeez Ahmed says more about its promoters than it does about civilisation's future. A recent Guardian article stated that a ‘NASA-funded study’ had predicted that ‘industrial civilisation’ is ‘headed for irreversible...
The global warming pause: the dangers of politicising science
A mainstay of environmentalists’ arguments for climate policies is that science can explain the past and present temperature of the planet, and, using computer models, project its likely future temperature. But, since the late 1990s, observations of temperature have...