Climate change plan for London

The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has held a major launch for his London Climate Change Action Plan to cut the amount of green house gases London contributes to the atmosphere. He’s set himself the ambitious target of getting London’s emissions to 60% below the 1990 levels and to do this he’s divided his plan into four programmes.

The Green Homes Programme where he says homes are responsible for 38% of emissions and he wants to slash that, the Green Organisations Programme which wants companies to make changes to work places to save energy. With the Green Energy Programme the Mayor wants 25% of London’s energy to come from local sources and the Green Transport Programme where he says traffic CO2 emissions could be cut by 30% of people bought more fuel efficient cars.

He’s got the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpaece all stepping up behind him and says ‘Londoners don’t have to reduce their quality of life to tackle climate change’, but I can see another round of stealth and punitive taxes being brought in to force people to meet these targets. They’re going to do it with household rubbish already, you pay Council Tax every month (which by the way has risen 90% since Labour took power in 1997) for among other things your garbage to be collected. Now they want to weigh what each house throws out and charge a second time. To meet the Mayor’s targets I can see them resorting to the same tactics, putting another tax on how much energy you use at home.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to cut emissions but some of these green zealots have only one idea of how to do it, keep hitting the public in the pocket.