When Science and Woke Politics Meet, Guess Who Loses

By John Fund

Monday, September 04, 2023

 

If you want to see how serious a revolt could happen in the U.S. when Green New Deal fanatics start inflicting real pain on the middle class, you need look no further than what’s happening in London right now.

 

Last month, London mayor Sadiq Khan expanded his city’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) from eight neighborhoods to all 32 of them, covering all 9 million of its people. Owners of older gas and diesel cars must now pay $15 a day to drive in the ULEZ or risk a hefty fine.

 

Everyone from immigrant commuters to delivery-van drivers is up in arms. The ULEZ tax was the key issue that handed the Conservative Party a surprise victory in a July by-election to fill the seat vacated by Conservative former prime minister Boris Johnson. The Labour Party loss prompted party leader Keir Starmer to bluntly admit that it must be doing something “very wrong” relating to ULEZ to have lost the seat.

 

The backlash has continued. A quarter of all new ULEZ-enforcement cameras in the expanded London ULEZ have already been damaged or are missing, the result of sabotage.

 

Things have gotten so out of hand that Iain Duncan Smith, a former cabinet minister and leader of the Conservative Party, said he would be “happy” if people would “cement up the cameras or put plastic bags over them.” He said their actions would be justified because they have been “lied to” by Khan and ULEZ-backers. He later backed down by saying that he “does not condone law breaking of any kind.”

 

Despite Smith’s retreat, there is real evidence that voters have been deceived about ULEZ.

 

A scientific study this year found that Khan’s plan would do very little to curb air pollution. But middle- and lower-income drivers who commute to work would be badly squeezed.

 

The Daily Telegraph has found an email trail showing that Mayor Khan’s office quickly tried to discredit and silence the Imperial College scientists who were reporting the bad news. Shirley Rodrigues, the mayor’s deputy for environment and energy, told Frank Kelly, a director of Imperial College’s Environmental Research Group, that she was “deeply concerned” about the damage the study had done to ULEZ.

 

Kelly, whose environmental group has been paid $1 million by Khan’s office since 2021, responded that he was “totally dismayed” and promptly agreed to issue a statement — partly written by Rodrigues — boasting that ULEZ had helped to “dramatically reduce air pollution.” Kelly wrote that “as always, I’m happy to fight back,” and then even asked the mayor’s office to provide him with “a form of words” with which he could defend the ULEZ policy.

 

Peter Fortune, who represents two of the neighborhoods challenging the ULEZ expansion, said: “Sadiq Khan has claimed he is just following the science, yet he has been using scientific advisors to protect his own interests. Science relies on open, transparent debate.”

 

That won’t be happening at Imperial College anytime soon. The authors of the original ULEZ study stand by their research “100 per cent,” but the chilling effect of Khan’s actions mean they are no longer willing to publish any further work on the subject.

 

The reason that climate-change extremists want to hide any facts that will reduce public support for their schemes is simple. They know that voters love to give feel-good responses to pollsters about how they support regulations to reduce carbon emissions.

 

But voters’ views shift when they are asked how much they are willing to pay for it. In Britain, an August Ipsos UK poll found that a majority of voters feel they cannot afford to pay more to help with the environment.

 

In the U.S., the results are even more striking. An Associated Press-NORC poll last April found that just 38 percent of Americans say they would be willing to pay a monthly carbon fee of $1, down from 52 percent in 2021. In 2019, the number was 57 percent. Voter support for the fee also decreases as the impact on their energy bills grows.

 

Although people say they fret about climate change, most are clearly not worried enough to spend their own money to address it. It doesn’t seem to matter how much pleading and propaganda is thrown their way. They are reluctant to lower their standard of living for the cause of combating global warming. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, beware.