At last weeks plenary l put a motion up about the toxic environmental legacy the present Mayor is leaving the next Mayor of London.
We have heard plenty of charm, bluster & hot air from the Mayor on his environmental policies for the past 6 years. This when many of the biggest challenges facing London as a city relate to environmental concerns like poor air quality in Central London; scandal of cold homes; aircraft noise spreading across London and reducing our climate change impact. This while the Mayor's green credentials are in tatters as he keeps an "open mind" on whether climate change exists or not.
With air pollution, it is a case of too little too law as he has killed the issue into the the long grass. Time is running out on this silent killer for the Mayor to act for those 4,300 Londoners who die prematurely every year due to toxic air. When the Mayor leaves office his legacy is likely to be £300 m a year fine from the European Commission which could easily pass from Whitehall to the GLA. The Mayor himself has hinted that he has been too slow to tackle London's air pollution crisis. The Mayor should have taken his own advice and have tackled this problem when he was first elected. As for his ULEZ proposal, he can't be trusted to deliver on it if his track record with delivering London as "electric car capital of Europe" is anything to go which he promised in Copenhagen in 2009.
The scandal of cold homes is clear to all as 68 per cent of Londoners cut back on heating their homes as energy bills soar yet the Mayor continues to do little on this cold front. The Mayor should have backed the 20 month energy price freeze which would have saved the average London family £120 annually, as many energy companies themselves like SSE have backed as well.
When is comes to cutting carbon, the Assembly's Environment Committee only gave him a 4/10 rating with scope to do a lot better on this critical energy security and black-out issue.
This while he has failed to back renewables whilst supporting tracking. Only recently at the last MQT, we had the Mayor re-instating his backing for fracking to find shale bass when egged on by Tony "JR Ewing" Arbour AM for South-West London, who wants to turn the GLA into Dallas. This when we know all too well that Shale Gass doesn't exist in Greater London, making it a fracking free zone.
Only last week, the UN IPCC suggested we needed to kick the fossil fuel habit by the end of the century. Replacing petrol with shale gas isn't going to do this at all!
We need to rely more on renewables like solar & wind; decentralised energy and replacing demand for energy consumption in the first place with home and work energy efficiency programmes.
If the Mayor doesn't deal with these issues in his remaining time at the GLA, he will levee a toxic environmental legacy for the next Mayor.