Unfinished London is overbuilt for ULEZ expansion.

Charlie Keeble writes for the Havering Daily about the ULEZ. We may be concerned about the expansion of ULEZ’s impact on Havering but is it fair or achievable from a social science and technology perspective? Our science geek and autistic conservative has his own views on London as an eco friendly metropolis.

The expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) is a controversial plan to make London’s air quality cleaner. I am aware of the quality of the air wherever I go on the daily travels. I have an app on my phone that tells me the Air Quality Index (AQI) of my location. The data from this app comes from Breathe London whose air quality sensors are based in London’s public places. On a good day the AQI is reasonably good for me. As I write this the AQI for  Romford is 25, and most of the week it is good – moderate. 

However, it’s an asymptomatic case of London being infected with a problem of itself that shows no signs of the metropolitan elite suffering from a war of socio-economic beings being subjected to social engineering plans. Once again we have a situation of social eugenics being projected onto Londoners by Mayor Sadiq Khan and the green lobby. 

Social eugenics is a term I use in my autism advocacy and conservative objectives. It means:  “an act of manipulation of a social justice crusade, a civil rights cause or political force to further your own personal desire to eliminate someone or something from society, in a style similar to social-ethnic cleansing”. 

In one previous article I wrote about climate activists behaving like eugenicists in their campaign for climate justice. They see the human race as parasites to be exterminated to save the Earth, even though we are interlinked with nature to make it function. There are instrumental and intrinsic values to nature that I know about from my textbooks on environmental science and you don’t have to be a scientist to understand that. But if you use climate agendas and policies like ULEZ to socially cleanse people out of their livelihoods then you are a social eugenicist. 

There is also a town planning conundrum about this ULEZ expansion. It has got many residents in Havering all worried. Mayor Khan is expecting this to serve the health and wellbeing of Londoners. He may be good at serving one agenda for his core group of voters in Central London, but has disdain for the prosperity of ordinary people who live in outer London. Here in Havering there is less development for green technology from City Hall. 

I have seen that there are plenty of EV charging points, but what about a wider variety of fuel supplies. Hydrogen refuelling stations deserve more coverage in Britain. But shockingly I can reveal that there are just five hydrogen fuel stations in London! The closest one to Havering is in Rainham. 

Now hydrogen fuel cars can be filled faster than EVs and they don’t give you range anxiety. Hydrogen is cheaper You can also make the fuel in a way that does not require transporting it to the station by tankers all the time. By diversifying the types of fuels you can reduce the strain on the electricity grid, which isn’t built to the capacity to handle the voltage supply to all the necessary EVs in the country. To meet that demand by 2035 would take tens of gigawatts of additional power to be added to the National Grid to supply to over 600,000 EV charging points. That will only increase carbon emissions and make the problem even worse. 

The expansion of ULEZ means that there will be a combination of two major things. A campaign to make London’s air quality cleaner by political force, and another project to build London up when it’s already an unfinished and overbuilt city. Political activism promotes green issues to make people aware of problems that need to be dealt with, but when it comes to building them there is always technological illiteracy from these people. 

There are some environmental policies that I don’t agree with my fellow Conservative party members on how to deal with fossil fuel emissions. Passing legislation to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030 is a coercive act that is economically damaging and technologically unachievable. The GLA and other government bodies should be awarding financial prizes and incentives to car makers to make their cars greener and more effective rather than subsidising eco-technology that is not efficient enough to save the planet. 

London is a city that is a struggle for town planners to change. This is because it’s made up of chronological layers of buildings, streets, industrial facilities, public spaces and roads that date back centuries. You Tube comedian and geography geek Jaye Foreman has a candid humorous education series on his channel called Unfinished London. I love watching these videos as they are full of delightful narratives on London’s history and engineering marvels.

With reference to this series there is a relevance to the ULEZ expansion. As it stands London has got one large motorway circling around it called the M25, which is now the most congested ringway in the world. It is handling the traffic flows of three ringways that were originally planned in the 1960s. 

These ringways or motorways would have made traffic jams and congestion a thing of the past, but due to a combination of financial difficulties and opposition from nimbyism in the suburbs and home counties they were incomplete. With no alternatives further out or in Londoners have an inadequate supply of roads to relieve congestion. This is where ULEZ and the Congestion Charge have become locked into a dispute whereby the political action to make London greener is constrained by how much space it has left to build it’s grand green metropolitan vision. 

When a political body hires engineers to build new infrastructure to accommodate something like an eco car industry they need to have the technology to be able to provide to full capacity. I am a keen supporter of eco cars but at the moment they are not getting enough support from environmental activists. This I believe is because most of them are campaigning for technological regression rather than supporting engineers or entrepreneurs that can make the world better. Like a death cult they believe that humanity can not progress the world any further. 

My biggest support for eco cars however is not in electric batteries, but hydrogen fuel cells. As you may remember from my Science Saturday series I wrote about the invention of hydrogen fuel cells. They are a space technology that has a lot of benefits for this eco car revolution and it would be foolish to narrow the climate strategy down to one invention just to achieve one climate agenda. Tokyo for example is a thriving metropolis that has a thirst for green innovation. They have the world’s biggest use of eco cars with Japanese car makersToyota and Honda having the largest collection of hydrogen and electric powered cars in their range. 

The GLA and the London Mayor should think about building hydrogen fuel service stations and charging ports to diversify the fuel sources available to different cars. Don’t just focus on electric cars, think of a variety of fuels to keep London going. Instead of building up ULEZ give the boroughs charging points, fit petrol stations with hydrogen refuelling stations and improve public transport with new trains and buses. The green revolution needs engineers, not politicians to further it. That way you can reduce carbon emissions in the city growing the London economy and improve it’s air quality. 

At present the current popular electric cars are too expensive for the common people. If Sadiq Khan keeps pushing climate policies like ULEZ then ordinary people will be unable to keep their jobs or earn enough to pay for their basic needs. This will impact on local businesses and will ruin many ordinary people in Havering. There is already a long row of shops in North Street, Romford which are empty and shuttered. I fear that once ULEZ reaches Havering there will be a massive decrease in business that it will impoverish Romford into a ghost town in the next five or ten years.  

Charlie Keeble.

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