Boris’s environmental pledge: plant far fewer trees
Boris has been grabbing the headlines today by pledging to plant 10,000 trees around London over his first four years as Mayor.
But in 2002, the current Mayor launched the Million Trees Campaign, which aims to plant - surprisingly - a million trees around London by 2012. By the end of the 2006/7 planting season, the fifth year of the campaign, a total of 425,000 new trees had been planted in London.
By comparison with this total of nearly 100,000 per year, Boris’s 10,000 trees in four years looks utterly pathetic.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped the media lauding the plan as some kind of eco-revolution. Get serious, please - this is the man who wholeheartedly supports George W. Bush’s policy of boycotting the Kyoto agreement to combat climate change. (The USA under Bush is the only developed country in the world not to sign up to this, in case you thought this might not be a particularly extreme stance to take.)
Everyone knows Boris hasn’t a green bone in his body, and offering to plant a handful of trees over a long period of time goes no way whatsoever towards demonstrating otherwise.
P.S. To pay for the trees, Boris has pledged to scrap the Mayor’s newspaper, The Londoner, which is basically his equivalent of those newsletters/magazines that most local authorities send out from time to time to update their residents on what they’ve been up to - and, of course, to put their own spin on things. You know the sort of thing: the local media are up in arms about library closures, then you receive the Borough News which tells you how the council are consolidating some of their library resources into one much better library which will save you Council Tax, and so forth.
So The Londoner is biased, of course. But goodness me, to read some of the things Boris has been saying about it, you would think it was literally nothing but outright lies from the front cover to the back. In a city where the only city-wide paid-for newspaper and two out of the three freesheets are produced by the Daily Mail group, between whom and the Mayor there is little love lost, it’s not surprising he might want to point out a few falling crime figures or other things the Standard and its offshoots may ‘overlook’.
And of course, Mayor Boris wouldn’t need the Londoner anyway. Why invest time and money putting together a newspaper that looks like the Evening Standard but talks up your achievements instead of knocking them, when you can just let the Evening Standard do the work for you?
March 27th, 2008 at 15.32
“Get serious, please - this is the man who wholeheartedly supports George W. Bush’s policy of boycotting the Kyoto agreement to combat climate change.”
Bush did not “boycott” G8, a word that imples some kind of kind of storming-out protest. He declined to ratify it. His reasons were a) He believed it would be ineffective unless China and India signed up, and b) It would wreck America’s economy. I do not see anything shameful about that, particularly as global warming hysteria is turning out to be just that - hysteria - as the latest high-level research concludes we are about to enter a period of global cooling.
The reckless “corrective” measures demanded by Kyoto and bolstered by the EU (as if nature on this scale could ever be corrected) threaten to cripple not just the American economy but the world economy - apart from China and India, two of the potentially most serious polluters, who carry on regardless.
So anyone who questions a misconceived, deeply flawed, dangerous and astronomically expensive policy is a monster, right?
One other point. Your hero Ken is not planting a million trees - it’s an independent charity called Trees for Cities (although, in fairness, the GLA is supporting it as are a number of London boroughs individually).
March 27th, 2008 at 18.01
Didn’t know about the Million Trees campaign (although considering the state of our media that is, of course, not surprising) Certainly puts Boris’s mild ‘n modest little suggestion of 10,000 into perspective!
One thing you missed out: Boris DOES have his own version of ‘The Londoner’ (called ‘The Greater Londoner’ LOL) And yet he cries crocodile tears for the environment concerning Ken’s paper and accuses it of being ‘Pyongyang-style’…oh the hypocrisy of that man!
Don’t take my partisan word for it: follow this link to see a lovely big picture of it (if you haven’t yet been subjected to the real thing)
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/people,778,boris-starts-his-own-fanzine-in-pr-war,21719
March 27th, 2008 at 18.06
Oh dear, I might have known you’d be a climate change denier. Fortunately most people aren’t these days - bad luck.
It’s funny how climate change deniers always come out with “latest” research findings, which always seem to be so recent that there isn’t any peer-reviewed evidence of their results available to back up their proponents’ wild ideas.
Clearly you would rather cripple the world itself than the economy. The fact remains that every developed nation in the entire world has signed up to Kyoto apart from the USA. It’s pretty hard to believe that every developed nation on earth bar one would sign up to anything as bad as you suggest it is. How would you propose to get China and India to start cutting their pollution? If no-one else has done anything, they’re obviously not going to take the lead, so we’ve far more chance of persuading them now that nearly everyone else has taken the crucial first step with the Kyoto protocol.
As for the million trees, your point is superfluous - I linked directly to the campaign’s web site and said only that the Mayor launched it, so I didn’t exactly go out of my way to conceal their independence. As you say, they are supported by the GLA (and others), but the real point is that compared with the 400,000 trees that campaign will be planting in each four-year period, 10,000 trees is a pretty pathetic pledge - from a man who could far more accurately be described as your hero (based on the nauseating praise you’ve heaped on him in previous comments) than Ken could mine!
March 27th, 2008 at 18.08
Oh, Jason’s response appeared while I was composing mine. Needless to say my reply was to Mr. Dawes.
Thanks for the link, Jason, and for pointing out a bit of hypocrisy I’d somehow overlooked! The Greater Londoner did hit my doormat a few weeks ago. It used quite a heavy weight of paper, and was treated with glossy chemicals, too. Hardly an ambassador for a greener approach to communications.
March 27th, 2008 at 19.49
The Greater Londoner: There’s quite a difference between a one-off electioneering sheet, paid for by donors, and a constant outpouring of propaganda funded by the taxpayer, don’t you think?
Climate change denier: I love that expression. It’s like “holocaust denier”, with its instant overtones of evil. I have followed the subject closely over several years and formed conclusions which do not seem to be mine alone.
Have you not heard of the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, signed earlier this month by 500 scientists and policymakers calling for an end to global warming hysteria?
http://www.warmwell.com/manhatt.html
Have you not heard the Space and Science Research Center and NASA prophesy a long period of global cooling due to reduced solar activity, or that Mars has been warming at a similar rate to Earth (all those Martian SUVs, no doubt)?
http://redicecreations.com/article.php?id=2659
Have you not twigged that global warming - such as can be measured - stopped about six years ago? You’re now going to tell me that the bitter late winter we’ve just experienced, and the coldest winter anyone can remember in the Himalayas, is blip in an underlying trend. How many more of these do we need before you start to have doubts?
“Clearly you would rather cripple the world itself than the economy.” Not at all. Who said I want to cripple the world? Rather the opposite actually. I want the poorest nations to benefit from the technology we are now trying to deny them.
“The fact remains that every developed nation in the entire world has signed up to Kyoto apart from the USA. It’s pretty hard to believe that every developed nation on earth bar one would sign up to anything as bad as you suggest it is.”
Bar one - the USA. Not exactly insignificant. The others signed up only after being steamrollered into it by the IPCC who are, by and large, a self-interested group of fanatical politico-scientists whose livelihoods hang on perpetuating the myth, as now do millions of others around the world, and who have a nasty habit of demonising anyone who dares to disagree with them. Their greatest ally has been the snake-oil salesman Al Gore, whose work has already been condemned on several counts in a court of law.
Having seen the gross distortions and downright lies about secondhand smoke peddled by the World Health Organisation - another of those self-regulating supra-quangos - and the glee with which power-mad governments pick up on their pronouncements as a way of stamping out personal freedoms, I have little faith in any of these organisations.
I remain not a denier but a sceptic. Given time, you too will wonder why we lost our senses over the weather.
March 27th, 2008 at 22.06
This argument is really quite tedious. You’re not convincing me with your extremist nonsense.
Of course I hadn’t heard of a meaningless declaration signed by a handful of climate change sceptics.
Only a tiny minority of right-wing commentators hell-bent on imposing their personal freedoms on those unable to speak up for their own personal freedoms which are infringed by these libertarians’ ‘right’ to pollute are still claiming climate change is not a threat. Evidently you are among them.
The USA is only significant in that it is large and powerful. That doesn’t make it right. Their leader is the laughing stock of the world. Parallels with ‘George W. Boris’ are many, actually - Boris would be elected as an affable buffoon, but would actually be a dangerous mistake that would damage the reputation of the place he would govern.
As for everyone else being bullied into signing Kyoto, that hardly seems likely. Quite how you can paint the broad and diverse IPCC in such terms is ridiculous, and the latest signatory to Kyoto, Australia, signed up after their new government was elected with a manifesto pledge to do so! Doesn’t sound much like steamrollering to me.
Given time, the world will face catastrophic climate change, if people like you win the debate. In the extremely unlikely event that the vast, overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is proved wrong, if we have curbed our emissions and use of resources, that just makes our way of life more sustainable and the planet more able to support everyone on it to a comfortable level. The other way round - if we do nothing because of people like you and the science turns out to be correct - it would be an absolute disaster. So why take the chance? Why not act to make the planet at worst more sustainable, at best not be completely ruined?
I won’t be continuing this debate as it’s obviously going nowhere. Comments from others, who are not on the extreme fringes of opinion, are still welcome, of course!
March 27th, 2008 at 22.28
“Of course I hadn’t heard of a meaningless declaration signed by a handful of climate change sceptics.”
May I suggest that you research the subject more thoroughly before abusively dismissing research by people every bit as qualified as the IPCC, if only a quarter in number, then I might give more weight to your opinions.
“You’re not convincing me with your extremist nonsense.”
Mr Stop, nothing will convince you, be it nonsense or commonsense. I have the same trouble with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Let me close by asking you to consider more deeply the difference between climate change, global warming, recycling, pollution, exhaustion of fossil fuels, exhaustion of rare minerals, and the weather.