The fight against pollution… and social media dirty tricks

Enrique Dans

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Enrique Dans

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3 min read

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Sep 20

IMAGE: CityTransportInfo — Public Domain

London’s fight against pollution, with the spread of Ultra Low Emissions Zones (ULEZ) throughout the capital, is being met, as in other cities, with strong opposition with a tendency to not play fair.

On August 29 this year, London’s Mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, expanded the ULEZ to all 32 London boroughs, putting some five million more people within it.

This now makes London’s policies the most radical in the world, as befitted the importance of the public health problem facing the city: government data show that air pollution causes between 28,000 and 36,000 premature deaths across the country each year, with around 4,000 of these in London. A growing number of studies show that living in polluted areas reduces lifespan even more than smoking, and that pollution affects everybody, including those without cars, which in London is almost half the population.

What does the scheme consist of? Essentially, preventing the most polluting vehicles (motorcycles that do not meet the Euro 3 standard, petrol cars and vans that do not meet the Euro 4 standard, and diesel cars and vans that do not meet the Euro 6 standard, i.e. vehicles generally pre-dating 2007, 2006 or 2015 respectively) from entering ULE zones unless they pay a toll of £12.50 per day, which is in addition to the £15 London Congestion Charge in the center of the city.

The response to these kinds of measures, mainly from right wing parties (as it happened in Spain with Madrid City Hall), has been to define them as a supposed “war on the car”, despite the significant incentives of up to £9,500 offered by the authorities in London so that residents could change their vehicles for others authorized in the area. Opponents have spent huge sums of money on thousands of fake accounts on social networks to spread their message.

These are the same type of sophisticated campaigns we have seen employed to interfere with elections by creating generic accounts, with a high proportion of fake followers; the kind of accounts I am used to fighting every day, which automatically reply to all my posts with spam. I have only recently managed to get rid of them thanks to the trick of restricting replies to my posts to people I follow or mention, to change them to “for everyone” a few minutes later (if you find that you cannot reply to one of my updates on X because I do not allow it, it’s not because I intend to restrict the conversation: all you have to do is wait a few minutes and reply as usual…. it’s the price we pay for not feeding spammers’ networks).

It should come as no surprise that these kinds of dirty tactics are now being used in the fight to reduce the number of petrol and diesel vehicles, whose emissions we know are extremely harmful, in high-density areas. We cannot, no matter how much some are apparently willing to pay the price, continue to live in cities that poison people. It simply does not make sense.

(En español, aquí)