The office of the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, is to progress moves towards a Greater London National Park.

Daniel Raven-Ellison, who developed the concept and is now campaigning for its fruition, expressed himself “delighted” with the development.

“The Mayor’s office has offered to ‘allocate some officer time’ to support our ‘endeavours’ in developing a proposal for a Greater London National Park”, he announced today. “This is great news and moves our campaign into a new phase.”

Last October Johnson described the concept as “an engaging way of sparking debate” but argued that he did not have the power to create a new class of urban park, so today’s move indicates an important change in thinking – and may indicate his desire to secure a long-term ‘green’ legacy for London.

Green London

Al though London is well known as once of the world’s great cities, it has another side. Of the proposed London Park’s 1,500 square kilometres, home to over 8 million people, 60% of the area consists of green, blue and open spaces.

Over 1,300 Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation cover 19% of the proposed Park area, which is home to more than 1,500 species of flowering plant and 300 species of bird, with four UNESCO World Heritage Sites, one of Britain’s National Trails, and 170 museums.

But the main beneficiaries of the Park’s designation would be London’s people, Raven-Ellison told The Ecologist, by encouraging more people to enjoy and explore London’s wild spaces, and make use of natural corridors for walking, running and enjoyment.

“We have the new wetlands in Walthamstow, or the Colne Valley and Sydenham Woods. But if you were new to London you wouldn’t necessarily visit these places because you’d be unaware of them. National Park City status could change that.”

He emphasises that the initiative would not add significantly to local taxes: “It wouldn’t have to cost a huge amount of money because there are already tens of thousands of people already delivering environmental services. We just need a great team to pull it all together, create new opportunities and unlock London’s potential.”

A hot topic for the 2016 election?

Although the UK has its general election in 2015, London’s next mayoral elections are in 2016, giving plenty more time to build up steam behind the campaign.

Boris is expected to stand down as Mayor in 2016 to give his full-time attention to national politics as an MP, having already been selected as the Tory candidate for the Uxbridge & South Ruislip constituency, a safe Conservative seat.

With the Greater London National Park looking like a strong vote winner, most 2016 Mayoral candidates are likely to back the plan – with the exception of UKIP with its dyed-in-the-wool anti-environment tendencies.

“Those standing for mayor need to recognise that the city could be at the forefront of a green revolution”, says Raven Ellison, who is already canvassing prospective candidates.

“It is a no brainer. The issues are too pressing to ignore. And this is a big vision we can all get behind.”

Action: Help make it happen!

Petition: Become a Founder of the Greater London National Park.

Collapsing oil prices should give everyone in the ‘green movement’ cause for reflection.

With lower prices forecast to last for the next couple of years, two lines of argument for sustainable energy – economic and peak oil – are now looking rather weaker. Equally, the case for reconsidering the arguments and the tactics of political environmentalism has strengthened.

Peak oil as an argument for environmental change was always flawed, as recent events have illustrated. Some writers and environmental organisations mention peak oil alongside wider environmental arguments for a transition to sustainable energy use (see this review for example).

Peak oil supporters predict that the price of oil will inevitably rise as ultimate exhaustion approaches. Rising prices, not lack of availability, will make oil-based products unviable.

Making sure the oil is left in the ground

If everything is left to the free market that scenario would undoubtedly occur at some point in the future. But what if the green movement achieves its aims of lower consumption, and switching to renewable energy sources while there’s still plenty of oil in the ground?

Remember the comment made 15 years ago by Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi Oil Minister: “The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones.”

His suggestion was that lots of oil might remain unused, as the world switched to superior alternative energy sources – much as our ancestors stopped using stone for tools and weapons because other materials were more effective, notably bronze, iron and steel.

But the analogy with the Stone Age is misleading. Sustainable energy does not have obvious advantages for industry or consumers, never mind its wider benefits.

And even with very cheap solar power and large, efficient industries dedicated to converting it into fuels for aviation and other transport uses, it’s unlikely to compete on price with Saudi Arabian oil, whose production cost is around $5 per barrel. 

But if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, most of the world’s fossil fuels will have to remain in the ground, according to the IPCC. So the success of any transition strategy will depend on artifically increasing the price of oil (and other fossil fuels), and / or applying regulations that discriminate against their use.

Being economical with our arguments

Peak oil is one of several ways conventional economics have been used to promote sustainable aims. As economic growth has faltered and governments have become obsessed with ‘the economy’, campaigners, professionals and academics have felt compelled to express their arguments in economic terms.

This has produced what later, saner generations may regard as ludicrous extremes. Several reports have attempted, for example, to justify the benefits of walking and cycling or the disbenefits of pollution on economic grounds – as though longer healthier lives were not sufficient justification in their own right.

This approach has proved no more effective than other ways of influencing politicians and business leaders. Cost-benefit analyses of transport projects typically show that small-scale pedestrian and cycling projects generate the highest rates of return.

So why do politicians who say they believe in the conventional economics behind cost-benefit analysis pour vastly more money into road-building and high speed rail, than into far cheaper, more effective and sustainable options?

I have been to many conferences where the presenters seem to implore: “if only we can show them the right economic evidence they’ll change their minds.”

This wishful thinking misunderstands the role of evidence and economics in political decision-making.

Building roads, and ignoring the evidence

In the mid-1990s the Conservative Government of John Major abandoned the ideology and the practice of big road-building, prompting a lively academic debate about the real reasons for these changes.

Some writers pointed to an influential report by SACTRA, a parliamentary committee, which amassed a convincing body of evidence that road-building is self-defeating because it “induces” more traffic.

Two other influences on the Major Government were pressure from the Treasury to cut public spending and the anti-roads protests which delayed road schemes and increased their cost.

No convincing evidence has emerged to challenge SACTRA’s findings since then, and yet those lessons have been comprehensively un-learned. The Coalition Government’s Command Paper Investing in the Future does not even pretend to offer any evidence for its claims about the economic necessity of road-building.

The CBI’s roads report Bold Thinking states that “the long-term benefits of road investment are well-known”, which is all the evidence they need. A senior civil servant from another country with a neoliberal political culture recently visited our research centre on a fact finding mission.

He reported similar views in his own country adding that “there’s a lot of scepticism about the health benefits of walking and cycling” as they appear in cost-benefit analyses. The evidence on road building and the economy is no stronger but these claims fit more easily with the values of political and business elites.

Faced with that reality, the argument that we must act sustainably for the sake of the economy was never going to persuade many decision-makers. In a context of low oil prices it will convince no-one.

Protecting the enviroment for its own sake (and ours)

When that argument becomes a common message people hear from the green movement, it weakens the values most readers of The Ecologist would share – that we must protect the environment for its own sake and for future generations (for a psychological analysis of the reasons for this, see the WWF report Common Cause).

If we are ever to change the values and practices of elites and the general public we must remain consistent, even when our arguments seem to be falling on deaf ears.

Comparing today’s situation with the mid-1990s, the evidence on road building hasn’t changed. The pressures on public spending are even greater. And yet the government is committed to spending £15 billion on building and ‘improving’ roads.

The fact that the bulk of the expenditure is being targetted at Tory and LibDem marginal constituencies tells us something important about how govenments really reach their decisions.

Make it political!

But that’s not all. One important element we are lacking today is the mass campaign of civil disobedience that rose up against Mrs Thatcher’s ‘biggest roads programme since the Romans’. We can only conclude that it must have been considerably more influential than most of us realised at the time.

It also tells us that to persuade government to force the transition away from fossil fuels, making economic arguments – however sound and well founded on irrefutable evidence – is never going to cut the mustard.

We have to make the transition to sustainable energy a political decision in the run-up to the 2015 election – and do what it takes to make the issue one that politicians cannot afford to ignore.

Dr Steve Melia is a Senior Lecture in Transport and Planning at the University of the West of England. His new book, ‘Urban Transport Without the Hot Air’, will be published by UIT Cambridge in May.

In a new paper published today in the Royal Society’s journal Interface, researchers from the University of Glasgow describe how mussels’ shells become more brittle when they are formed in more acidic water.

The world’s oceans are becoming increasingly acidic as they absorb some of the atmospheric carbon dioxide which contributes to climate change.

The water reacts with the carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid, which is gradually lowering the pH of the oceans (indicating an increase in acidity). Scientists expect the pH of the world’s oceans to have dropped from 8 today to 7.7 by the end of the 21st century.

“What we’ve found in the lab is that increased levels of acidification in their habitats have a negative impact on mussels’ ability to create their shells”, said research team leader Susan Fitzer of the University’s School of Geographical and Earth Sciences.