News from Elsewhere

News from Elsewhere

The moral case for destroying fossil fuel infrastructure | Andreas Malm | The Guardian

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The climate struggle has entered a new phase. It is marked by a search for different tactics: something that cannot be so easily ignored, a mode of action that disrupts business-as-usual for real, some way to pull the emergency brake. This search has only just begun, but the signs are there.

In Berlin, half a dozen young climate activists calling themselves ‘The Last Generation’ recently went on a hunger strike, eventually refusing liquids and becoming quite frail before calling the action off. But there are other things than our own bodies that can be shut down. In conjunction with this summer’s Ende Gelände camp against fossil gas, a group calling itself ‘Fridays for sabotage’ claimed responsibility for rupturing a piece of gas infrastructure and urged the movement to embrace this tactic: ‘There are many places of destruction, but just as many places of possible resistance.’ This followed the development of a veritable archipelago of forest occupations in Germany, some of which have damaged equipment for coal extraction.

News from Elsewhere

Please take the Bloomsbury2030 SuperBlock survey – London’s first pedestrian priority SuperBlock? — London Car Free Day

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We were thrilled to start 2021 by collaborating with the Great Ormond Street Hospital and Bloomsbury Air on a new project to reimagine the future of Bloomsbury as London’s first pedestrian-priority neighbourhood that places young people, environmental and social resilience, and active mobility at the heart of urban design. The project brings together young patients at GOSH, artists, architects, planners and other community stakeholders to re-imagine what Bloomsbury could look like if pedestrians, shared public realm & an ambitious landscaping strategy were prioritised this year.
On 29 April 2021 we ran an online roundtable to discuss how Bloomsbury could build on international examples including Barcelona’s SuperBlock concept, Milan’s conversion of road space into public plazas, and the traffic-free city centre ambitions of Paris, Oslo, and Edinburgh. What would it take to turn Bloomsbury into London’s first pedestrian-priority, landscaped neighbourhood? 
Please take the Bloomsbury2030 SuperBlock survey below. We will launch the survey results and an update on the project at this year’s World Car Free Day Summit SuperBlock session on 21 September. In the meantime, please stay tuned for more updates and do share your ideas with us on social media #Bloomsbury2030.

News from Elsewhere

After the failure of Cop26, there’s only one last hope for our survival | George Monbiot | The Guardian

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Our “clean, green” transport revolution is being built with the help of blood cobalt, blood lithium and blood copper. Though the emissions of both carbon dioxide and local pollutants will undoubtedly fall, we are still left with a stupid, dysfunctional transport system that clogs the streets with one-tonne metal boxes in which single people travel. New roads will still carve up rainforests and other threatened places, catalysing new waves of destruction.
A genuinely green transport system would involve system change of a different kind. It would start by reducing the need to travel – as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is doing with her 15-minute city policy, which seeks to ensure that people’s needs can be met within a 15-minute walk from homes.

It would encourage walking and cycling by all who are able to do so, helping to address our health crisis as well as our environmental crisis. For longer journeys, it would prioritise public transport. Private electric vehicles would be used to address only the residue of the problem: providing transport for those who could not travel by other means. But simply flipping the system from fossil to electric cars preserves everything that’s wrong with the way we now travel, except the power source.
It is not hard to envisage a low-carbon economy in which everything else falls apart. The end of fossil fuels will not, by itself, prevent the extinction crisis, the deforestation crisis, the soils crisis, the freshwater crisis, the consumption crisis, the waste crisis; the crisis of smashing and grabbing, accumulating and discarding that will destroy our prospects and much of the rest of life on Earth. So we also need to use the properties of complex systems to trigger another shift: political change.

News from Elsewhere

Pedalling back to childhood dreams | Cycling | The Guardian

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Seeing Grayson Perry sitting astride his motorbike (Grayson Perry on art, cats – and the meaning of life, 9 November), I was immediately reminded of the Triumph Pink Witch bicycle of my youth as it also was pink and turquoise. How I longed for one! I was lucky enough to be given a new bicycle for my 11th birthday. There was not a lot of money around, and I was thrilled to have it, but I always coveted the Pink Witch!

Jill Hughes Cranbrook, Kent

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We Can’t Stop Climate Change Without a Transport Revolution – Tribune

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06.11.2021

To combat climate change, we need to decarbonise all sectors of society as quickly as possible. At 27%, transport is the UK’s largest emitter of CO2, compared with 16% globally. It is also the sector that is decarbonising the slowest, at just -5% since 1990

The bulk of the emissions come from our dominant mode of transport: cars. The dominance is so complete that many of us reflexively get into our cars, without considering alternatives, even when more than half the time we drive alone, and as 60% of our trips are shorter than four miles.
The dominance of cars is in part the result of an ideology that pushes aside social and environmental consequences. Motor manufacturing became the most important industry of the 1950s and 60s, largely because its significant exports helped to stabilise the post-war economy, and it grew domestic consumption.
New advertising techniques created attachments to cars, driving so-called consumer demand. Car ownership became, for a time, a marker of affluence. By 1970, the motor industry and road haulage association, together with the AA and RAC, had become the most influential lobbying block in parliament. They still have significant influence today.

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Mile-long rural bypass is first casualty of Welsh roads review – transportxtra

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Rhodri Clark 17 November 2021
A mile-long bypass in rural Gwynedd has become the first casualty of Wales’ review of road schemes. The rationale for abandoning the scheme signifies a major shift in how road proposals will be assessed and developed in the future, with greater prominence for land-use planning and carbon.
The Welsh Government announced in June (LTT 28 June) that it would subject all road schemes where construction work had not commenced to a review. Deputy climate change minister Lee Waters told LTT the review’s main significance was not for current proposals but all future ones, and said that Wales might build no more bypasses.

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