Halt new roads and developments adding to emissions, advisers to tell UK government

15 comments
  1. It is quite vague, what do they class as a “new development” in their context. Is this literally building **anything** across the country?

  2. This makes perfect sense, I’m glad the Guardian are at least attempting to keep the government in check with their top-notch reporting as always. The advisers are going to keep those Tories inline with the SDG and Agenda 21.

    If we keep increasing immigration then naturally new roads and developments will need to be built as the population grows. That is unless we change our society and make private vehicle ownership unaffordable to the masses, we can also change the way we organise our cities to make it so people don’t even need to leave them in the 1st place. Fortunately, mass-immigration will both suppress wages and also make homes more expensive; naturally people will then be unable to afford cars and will rent flats inside of the well-organised cities instead of buying houses in environmentally troublesome small towns in the countryside.

    Mass-migration simultaneously gives us a more diverse society, all the additional food is sure to be a delight, and also a less pollutant society. Immigrants literally cause the climate to get better!

  3. And there is the rub.

    We need more houses so people can afford them.

    But we can’t build more houses if we want to meet our climate change goals.

    Yes there are likely solutions but I doubt they are cheap or will make properties more affordable.

  4. Given that new roads causes induced demand for car use, which are a high carbon method of travel, and themselves in their construction emit a lot of emissions, this is fairly apparent.

    Where congestion is occurring we have to decrease the amount of traffic, by moving people to alternatives like public transport and active travel. That might require building infrastructure for that. However bus lanes are pretty low carbon to make, they’re just paint.

    Efforts like HS2 are also essential in some cases because they enable a shift to lower carbon methods of travel, and should reduce carbon overall despite their large upfront emissions.

  5. Why bother with emissions when all our collective efforts don’t even touch the increase year on year from Asia lol

  6. Or we could mandate all new houses to be built with solar panels, and require new estates to come with essential amenities within walking distance, including public transport links. Too expensive, I suppose, since everything in this country nowadays seems to be done to the absolute minimum affordable standard.

  7. Technically, that would help. You cannot do that while the population grows and demand on services increases though. Either we need to use what we have more efficiently, such as getting millions of cars off the road through improved public transport or cycling infrastructure, or it means making new developments as green as possible. It would also mean doing a lot more to rewild the UK, as plants are the best method of carbon capture and storage we have. None of those are good for profits though, so we know the government will ignore those routes as much as possible. People do not care enough about doing something to stop climate change getting worse yet, they will not until water and food are declared scarce resources.

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