Petition Against Road Charges
There has been a lot of talk about the petition against road pricing that is currently available for anyone to sign up to on the No10 website. There are 1,500,000 signed up supporters as I write this. That’s a heck of a lot of people who feel strongly enough to waste a few minutes filling in the form and I hope the government will take due notice of that. It has gone up by 400,000 since monday so whilst it has had a lot of publicity on the news it does show there is a lot of public feeling about this subject.
There is no question that traffic causes polution and it’s hard for anyone to argue that the polution isn’t damaging the climate. It surely must have been obvious 150 years ago when smoke was belching from factory chimneys and people were suffering from the effects of smog and poor air quality yet people chose to ignore it.
Even 30 or 40 years ago when people were campaigning about climate change there was no shortage of people, scientists included, who were very dismissive of the whole idea.
Yet now, fairly suddenly, we have governments & world leaders telling us that urgent action is required. It seems to be another case of the obvious being ignored unless it involves votes which is a sad fact about our democracy where we follow the votes rather than leading the people.
There is no doubt that we need to do what we can to maintain a habitable climate on our planet. Nature doesn’t care a jot and the planet will carry on regardless of what we do. It may be a different planet but if we pass on then other animals will develop to replace us just as the dinosaurs passed on by and we followed on from them.
Perhaps that is an option we should discus? Do we care what happens in the future? If the answer is yes then this is actually quite a new development as governments rarely look beyond the next or subsequent elections. If nothing else then this will be a positive development for society..
So what can we do? Our whole lifestyle has become based around the idea that we can drive to places to get food, for entertainment and for work. If we look back 40 years we can see that people didn’t use to travel anything like as much as we do now. We shopped locally, usually walking distance, we worked locally, maybe a bus ride away, and our entertainment was generally fairly local. Our holidays didn’t usually involve air travel as that was something only the better off could afford. Yet now we do all of these things routinly and without a thought. All of these activities are burning up fossil fuels and damaging our environment.
We clearly need fundamental change but road pricing and making travel too expensive isn’t the answer. That just hits the poor hardest and will still enable the better off to travel as they please.
When our whole society is based around the idea of travel and transport making it expensive will just uipset people. They will still HAVE to travel whether to work or for shopping.
We need to get back to the idea of local. Local shops, services and employment.
People don’t enjoy long and difficullt journeys to work. Shopping doesn’t have to involve a drive out of town to a huge shop in the middle of nowhere. We would all benefit from locally produced food, local shops, local jobs & local entertainment. It’s an alternative way that might be of benefit to us all and would have a huge impact on our climate. I hope the new forward-looking approach of government will include this option.
If you feel you would like to sign the petition against road pricing it’s here…> Petition Against Road Pricing
