Eco-towns: creating a carbon elite won’t help everyone else
Fifty per cent of all households in eco-towns will have to live without cars and those that do have cars will not be able to drive them any faster than 15mph, according to standards for the wave of new towns made public yesterday. Large areas of eco-towns consisting of up to 20,000 homes in each section, will be car-free. Homes will be built no more than 400 metres from a bus or tram stop, and car-sharing schemes will replace car ownership.
There can be no doubt that a move away from making frequent car journeys is not only necessary to help combat rising CO2 emissions, but the money going into the development of the first 10 eco-towns would surely be better spent on improving national public transport services? That way we would all be able to do at least a bit more, instead of a relatively small segment of the UK population being given a hefty culture shock.
tags: carbon-neutral, cars, conservation, eco-towns, energy efficiency, environment, fossil fuels, global warming, public transport, zero carbonEco-towns: right idea, wrong strategies in plans and protests
The debate surrounding government plans to build eco-towns is a complex one, in part due to the traditional complaints of anyone already living near an area designated for a development of any kind–”anywhere else but here, thank you” and “it will take away my scenic views”–and also because we know that one person’s idea of what makes for an ecologically-sound proposal may not be what our politicians have in mind.
Still, while I believe this government has proven itself fork-tongued on the environment—talking up the rejection of plastic bags in favour of reusable ones one day, embracing a new runway at Heathrow the next—I also think the North Yorkshire residents who took to the streets in protest this weekend are rather missing the point. They need to question, certainly, but they should be fighting to have a say in the plans, not to reject them entirely. Doing so makes it easy to paint them as 21st Century Luddites.
tags: conservation, eco-towns, energy efficiency, environment, fossil fuels, global warming, protest
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